Chronicles of Taldun: The Remainder News

Join Ze, the lead writer and half of Square Weasel Studio during the Story Teller's Festival on March 27th, where he will hang out with COTTR fan and game design guru Nich @Furidashipod, showing the game, and talking about the story, characters, and other insights about the process of creating The Remainder.

We are happy to announce our next project Chronicles of Tal’Dun: The Longing!
It is a kinetic visual novel. The story takes place several millennia before The Remainder, in the time of Lura.

The world of Tal'Dun is shaped by mysterious forces of the Seas, a power that gives and takes life. Touching its Waters brings death to most people, but in rare cases some survive it and become magi. Evin and Near come from very different circumstances, one grew up in a tiny village and stumbled upon magick by accident, and the other was born with it and spent their life locked away in a temple. Despite this, as if pulled together by the currents of the Seas, their paths cross, and now a storm is brewing.

The story features things you already know and love about CoTTR:
-Deep and Expansive World Building
-Gorgeous Hand Drawn Art
-Mature, Emotional Story
-Complex Characters
-Tangible Mood and Atmosphere

We are currently releasing one free chapter every other Sunday on itch.io - you can find it here.
Once the game is complete, a paid version will be published on Steam as well.
For those who want the story early and to support our development effort, we are publishing one chapter every Sunday for supporters who pledge $5 and above on our ko-fi and patreon
You will of course also receive all the other benefits of being a supporter, so go ahead and check out our patreon or ko-fi if you haven't.

Happy Holidays weary traveler! We've fixed a few more bugs for your narrative pleasure.

List of fixes:

-Overlapping sprites that suggest Ilar to be even more mysterious and non-rule-abiding than they're supposed to be.
-An error introduced in a previous patch that caused the world(Theirs, not ours) to abruptly come to an end. This is unintentional.

Thanks to everyone who left lovely reviews and comments, we appreciate each and every one! We almost have enough reviews to be featured on Steam's Hidden Gem 200 List, so if you played and enjoyed the game, please consider leaving a review, however long or short it might be.

Take care!

Greetings weary traveler, CoTTR is receiving a minor update with some new content and fixes.

List of changes:

-One new artwork
-Two new endings
-Rewrote Ilar’s journey to the black mountain
-Made some changes around the part where they talk about being two fish in a pot
-Added a message after the first two deaths to make it more clear you are supposed to keep playing.
-Increased the number of save slots to 30
-Fixed an instance of two sprites overlapping
-Fixed a few small typos
-Made a change with the black mountain death so it can be accessed after being sublimated
-You can now choose to see the shiny memory whenever you trade for the two smaller shards
-Added explanations of a few keyboard controls in the options menu, for those who are not familiar with ren'py control schemes

We hope we didn't break anything accidentally, if you catch any errors or mistakes please let us know.

Thanks to everyone who left lovely reviews and comments, we appreciate each and every one! We almost have enough reviews to be featured on Steam's Hidden Gem 200 List, so if you played and enjoyed the game, please consider leaving a review, however long or short it might be.

Take care!

Dear weary traveler, in case you were stuck in the Near Shallows for the last few months, CoT2 had been in development for the last few months!

[h2]Art[/h2]
The artstyle will be a Retro-inspired side-scrolling pixel RPG look. That's a real mouthful, take a look at the screenshot:


We've developed and tested some art styles and code for the exploration mode of the game, including:
-an environment design
-sprites for characters with animation
-rendering and lighting systems

One thing I always found wanting in a retro pixel game is the lack of detail on the portraits, which is why we're going with highly detailed portraits during dialogue, like this:



[h2]Characters[/h2]
There will be 6 main characters in total, and potentially more minor characters to come later. While the player will take control of Lura, every characters will be a Dyed magus who plays an indispensable role in the story. There are no pure comic-relief and side-kicks, no jar-jar binks here, even if some magi could act like clowns from time to time. After all, they are made out of meat.

[h2]Gameplay[/h2]
So far we have started prototyping the following:
-player movement
-dialogue system based on ink, which is used in many massively branching narrative games.

[h2]Story[/h2]
The game will still be all about stories that will try to devour your heart, but make you whole again, and to do that we need characters who live and breath and exude humanity, so we began to write back-stories for each of the characters.
Lura, who is a sort of magus detective specializing in magick anomalies, will be traveling to a Temple of the Deep where the Order conducts advanced research into magick. An accident had occurred there and one of the magus had disappeared without a trace. Lura will be tasked with solving this mystery while trying to come to terms with the whispers and shadows that had haunted Their own heart since They were separated from Their parents as a child. It doesn't help that in the depth of the Seas, the whispers worsened, threatening to push Lura over the edge of sanity.

We planned to write a