Light and Shade

"Our blood was red... but theirs was golden."

Welcome to an art-centric update on Travelling At Night. I really want to get the UI right for Travelling. Here's the new version we're currently working with in Unity, featuring the all-important dialogue system:



The design takes inspiration from 1940s maps and identity documents while also bearing modern UX in mind. Please note it's not final, and may change significantly! For example, the space on the left beneath Aubière's portrait will probably be filled with AK's 'Aspect Pool' system, which lets you strategically decide which failures to rescue by 'forcing' to success based on your character's Signs and Passions. But I'll let him talk about that design later down the line - and share how that will actually look in UI terms once we've implemented in-game.

There is a hitch to this UI, though. In Cultist, with the exception of the Mansus, even though huge numbers of different things happen in-game, all screenshots look roughly the same. This made marketing difficult, because you're supposed to be able to offer people a menu of different screenshots showing the breadth and variety of your game to excite them. Showing people multiple Cultist screenshots was a bit like being Ms Bread at the Bread Shop on Let Me Tell You About Bread Day. Beautiful though I still think the game is, it all having the same environment was a bit of a drag!

Travelling is going to have lots of different, visually distinctive areas: a sun-drenched French sanitarium; a dusk-lit circus encampment; cabins on 1940s diesel-electric trains; a snow-girt Alpine fortress... This is great news for me as a marketer, a little daunting for me as an artist, and downright devious for me as a UI designer. We have to make a UI that gels with all these places and colour schemes, whether it's overlaid on a touching scene between lovers in a garden at night or a climactic crowd-scene by the sea.* This, I think, is why games like Disco choose a dark grey strip for their dialogue window: black goes with everything. Except... I don't actually think that it does. Certainly not in Travelling. For example, see the two screenshots below when overlaid on our night environment.



Some CRPGs - Gamedec springs to mind - designed different UI for different environments to manage this problem, but I'd rather avoid doing that if we can. I think there is one consistent solution we can come up with - we just need to find it.

Moving on, I think it's high time you met monsieur le docteur. This is Dr Aubière, the insouciant psychiatrist in charge of the Sanitarium Aujourd'hui where Spencer starts the game. There's a lot of cool inspiration going into the sanitarium - visual cues like art deco houses to open-air tuberculosis hospitals in the Alps - but the key thing to remember is it's totally normal and everything is entirely above board. Which is why you don't need to worry if Aubière is working for the Incorporates, influenced by external forces, or has your real best interests at heart. Phew.

"Bonjour. C'est moi. Le plus beau médecin de France. Faites-moi confiance."

While drawing him I was thinking of a line from The Big Sleep: "The white made the ivory look dirty and the ivory made the white look bled out." Is he a Chandler fan? Is the art trying to tell you something? Does his coat just need a wash? Well, you'll just have to gosh darn play Travelling to find out.

Finally, I thought you might appreciate some experimentation I've been doing with Spencer's facial expressions. We don't know at this stage how much reactivity there'll be in-game, but all the characters I'm sharing will be animated to some degree. We might want to show moment-to-moment facial expressions in dialogue, or perhaps different visual representations of Spencer that are affected by the choices you make in-game. TBD. One significant visual effect will be outfits, which, in their current pre-alpha condition, look like the unholy lovechild of BOOK OF HOURS' crafting system with Alicia Silverstone's virtual closet from Clueless. This will probably change. Probably. Regardless, Spencer is likely to have Big Feels about a number of things in-game and I'd like him to be able to express them somehow, so here's me playing with Emotion. I find Whimsy!Spencer's happy lil' face an effective tonic if you're having a bad day.

Click for a larger version.

More news soon on outfits, environments, Skills and more. Next time we'll either introduce you to an upsettingly handsome Sanitarium orderly or Fraser Strathcoyne's simply upsetting new 'pal' Annabelle. Stay tuned!

*Please note - so AK doesn't think I am mismanaging your expectations - that neither of these situations are canonical or likely to actually exist in Travelling. Though there is one particular romantic subplot in-game that many of you will like... [AK: as long as you like things that MIGHT END MISERABLY. ]