Sub-Verge News

Sometimes, you get picked for the team you really wanted to be on.

That wasn’t most of my childhood. I wasn’t one for sports—especially not team sports. Things that transported me to different worlds were always more alluring: like reading and video games. When I was a kid, game guides and issues of Nintendo Power were the few places those things overlapped. But when I finally returned to video games in adulthood, on the lookout for something more literary, I quickly stumbled across LudoNarraCon—a wonderful festival of narrative games and experiments. After following the fest closely for so many years, it’s surreal and thrilling to have Sub-Verge chosen as an official selection.

The full line-up is amazing: ludonarracon.com. I almost can’t believe we made the cut. What’s everyone doing after the game? I brought Capri Suns.

Actually, what I’m bringing is something a bit different. The story-world of Sub-Verge goes deep. So, speaking of the reading/gaming overlap—another announcement: there’s a prequel.



Subtle Mind is an origin-story novella set before the events of Sub-Verge. It features more incredible art from Tiia Reijonen and tells the story of The Mind, the enigmatic leader of a fractured band of renegade divers. One day, out fishing, he commits a singular impulsive act that brings the Surface City's lies crashing down, revealing a hidden world beneath its eternal waterfall. With a small pet krake, he flees both his past and his pursuers, launching a rebellion that sets the scene for the game.

We want to tell you more. Like, right away. Pantaloon has just made an excerpt of Subtle Mind available via the newsletter! Sign up, and the first two chapters of the novella will arrive in your inbox.

In the meantime, check out the LudoNarraCon line-up (we’ll have some streams during the fest!) and add Sub-Verge to your wishlist. More updates to follow—just as soon as we’re done basking in the glow of having been chosen for the team.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3487020/SubVerge/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3659760/Subtle_Mind__A_SubVerge_prequel

"We aren’t rebels, that’s something they don’t understand. We didn’t start the fight.

We’re just ourselves. Sea people, fishermen and fisherwomen, humans drawn to the coast, as we’ve always been. To separate us from the waters, the primordial source of all life, is unnatural, wrong, an abomination. The sea isn’t some political cause. It is something we are bonded to, deep in our souls.



The sea is where we live now. We can’t tell you exactly where; we can’t tell you exactly how. We have to guard our secrets carefully. The worry that they will come for us never lessens. That they will find us, and try to destroy us. Like they hunted our leader, The Mind. If he hadn’t been clever enough, none of us would have escaped.

And now escape is our business. It’s almost routine. Someone comes to the coastal caves. We shelter them, care for them, and prepare them to enter the depths, to adapt to their new home. Some are seeking the soothing depths of the waters, tranquil and serenely beautiful. Some just need a dark place to hide from the city and the oppression of the Surfacers. We don’t ask why they’ve come.



Most arrive through the underground river, beneath the Surface and the city it surrounds. We have connections on the inside. We are smugglers and pirates. At least until we are free. Then the sea provides all we need to sustain ourselves. Then we are simple sea-kelp farmers. The price of vigilance is high. We are forever on the lookout, delicate seahorses, ready to disappear into a crevice at the slightest flicker of steel. Everyone understands what happens if the Surfacers catch you.



Brunt is the bravest. If it weren’t for his help, even The Mind wouldn’t be here. He’s too old for this work; he really should be in the base. We should be looking after him at this point. But he insists, and who could ever refuse him, after all he has sacrificed? He was once Landed, like The Mind. Now his only land is a subterranean cave, with a great sink onto the surface of the sea. He keeps the cavern, receives the refugees, lowers the hand-winch to plunge SubVee after SubVee into our waters. The final path home.

It’s Maraea who is the lookout and his guardian. Her connection to the sea traces back through her long line of ancestors, each of whom she can name. They arrived by sea, they live by the sea, and there has never been a question or a compromise in her heart. Not once.

There is safety in numbers. But growing our numbers is a risky business. We thought we had it figured out. Until you showed up, silently pointing at an empty SubVee.

--

The first stages of Sub-Verge’s development felt familiar. The story and world of Sub-Verge was incredibly fun to write. I worked out characters, gave them personality tests, had them talk to each other, and people and a plot emerged. I listened to the song "Bathysphere" by Smog, and tried to capture the ominous dread of murky underwater feelings.



But the whole idea had emerged from the ‘garage band jam’ with Darren, and I knew this was meant to be a game. He’d gone, and I was on my own to figure out game mechanics. That was a world deeply unfamiliar to me.

My model, in the end, was Twelve Angry Men. Characters in a predicament where, unless everyone agrees, the situation won’t change. And the situation, in the case of Sub-Verge, is: you. You’ve shown up, in a sealed submersible, a bathysphere, a SubVee. The divers who find you are part of a rebellion, hiding from the controlling Surfacers above them. Your appearance throws them into crisis, because they don’t know who you are or why you’ve appeared. Are you a refugee, like they are, in need of shelter and safety? Are you a threat, a spy, a scout for the Surfacers, or a suicide bomber? Only you know, because your first move of the game is: picking a side. Before you even know what the sides are.

We can’t choose the circumstances of our birth – what community or country we are born into, who our parents are, what their political affiliations might be. Yet it’s this fact: when and where you are born, and to what family, that determines so much about our lives. And when you’ve found your community, and your people, whether they are your actual family or they are found family, it’s incredibly grounding. But what to do about a stranger, an outsider? Should a group be open? Or is safety paramount? These are some of the thoughts that were on my mind as I moved across the world, and worked on the story of Sub-Verge.

When it came to the mechanic, I knew I needed help. Before Darren left, he introduced me to Chris Garnier, who was working with him at Wētā as a level designer. Chris and I started hanging out, we went fly fishing (which is amazing in New Zealand) but didn’t catch anything. Probably because I’m an amateur and Chris is actually a spear fisherman – his favorite thing is to don a wetsuit and go diving in the rich coastal environments of New Zealand, to see what he can catch by net, by hand, or by spear. This seemed like an exotic hobby to me, someone born in the desert. It gave me the suspicion that he might like the world of Sub-Verge.

One day, we got lunch and were eating on the rocky coast of the Miramar peninsula, and I pitched him the game. I drew the SubVee and the divers on the back of a pizza box, and diagrammed out the way their conversation formed an interactive puzzle. He took a look, and after many years of experience in game dev, like Darren before him, he said... “Maybe.” And I had, luckily, found myself a programmer.

I was also trying hard to learn more about programming myself. Looking for works that bridged the games and books divide, it wasn’t hard to stumble across 80 Days, by UK studio Inkle, and their scripting language, ink. In the way I tend to learn a lot of things these days, I decided to teach it to my students at the University, which meant: I had to learn it myself first. Luckily, it’s written with writers in mind, and keeps the programming language light and easy to navigate.

Chris threw together the early prototype in Unity, based on the ink script that I had written, and sent me a test:



And the first, working version of Sub-Verge surfaced! And Lo, it was made of tic-tacs.

"People never belonged by the sea. It has always been our enemy.



A harsh, unforgiving, alien world. Deprived of the very things that sustain us: air and light above, solid ground beneath our feet. People drown, people die, they become lost at sea. The sea never loved us. But, until the Krake came, it had never hunted us either.

To isolate our city, to create the Surface, was a massive undertaking. It required all our ingenuity, our grit, and the sacrifice of countless lives across decades. Some in the city forget these sacrifices now. But we do not. It is our duty to honor what was built by maintaining the dry floodplain that surrounds and protects us, and keeping the sea far from our walls.

When the eternal cloud came, and the first drops of the waterfall-without-end fell, we knew we had been anointed by the sky. Every choice we had made was the right one, and fresh water, unsullied by the poisonous creatures and bitter salt of the sea, was ours as long as we kept the order.



And order is required. The High Commissioner, our Dear Leader, his lieutenants, his officers, the sweepers, the barkers, the pipe scrubbers, and the churners, each of us has a role to play. We are all part of the machine. And that machine is life.



We have sworn never to return to the sea. To imprison anyone who does. Order above all. We are the Surfacers.

It always had to be. Even before the day that the first Krake attacked."



--

Hi, Zach here, writer and creative director of Sub-Verge. It’s exciting to slowly unveil this world we’ve built, drop by drop, and these posts can provide a peek beneath the surface – both of the world of Sub-Verge and our process in creating it. Hope you like fishy puns, because you’re going to catch a netful here!

The seed of the idea came many years ago, in conversations with my friend Darren Randall. We had met, improbably, in a birthing class in Helsinki, Finland. Both our wives were due around the same time. Darren and his wife were in Finland for his job at Remedy; he’s an (astoundingly talented) game animator. I had come with my wife for a job at Aalto University. As the only two English-speaking dads in the group, we were also the most terrified. That was an instant bond, and as our families (and new babies) became friends, he told me about game development and the games industry, something I had a growing curiosity about, mostly due to the brilliant students I had at Aalto.

I had become frustrated with the ebook version of a novel (Bats of the Republic) I had published a few years before, which was interactive (in a paper way) itself. The ebook that the publisher insisted on did a poor job of capturing the experience of the book, even the interactive parts of it, and, with future works, I wanted to see if I could do something that would better anticipate the ebook format.

I started to look into enhanced books (a thing growing in popularity at that moment, on tablets, that has since fizzled). I had always been a print designer, and I felt nervous about making the leap into the digital space. My students didn’t see that divide, and Darren was encouraging, so I tried to gather some Finnish ‘sisu’ (grit and bravery) to give the interactive digital world a try.

Darren wasn’t around much longer after our kids were born – his skills were in high demand, and he moved on to Ubisoft in Toronto. When the frozen seas of Finland got too much for us one winter, I took another job, this time at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.

Since Darren was Australian, I called him up to tell him the news and to ask if he might know anyone down under that we could meet. He had an unbelievable response: he’d just taken a job at Wētā Game Studio and was planning a move to Wellington himself. This still feels like an astounding coincidence. Even more so, because when we arrived, the Airbnb we rented for our first few months was literally a stone’s throw from where Darren and his family were.

Watching our kids, by this time almost 3, reconnect and play in the long green grass under blooming pohutukawa trees, we indulged in dad fantasies, which really all boiled down to: what if we had time to make art? We started kicking around ideas for a game. We’d have the studio version of a jam band in the garage, just noodling around with game ideas. To be clear: with tiny kids, this is a total fantasy.

Still, we talked it through. Darren was a sharp critic. He shot down idea after idea. I wanted to do a cult game, where you knocked on doors trying to recruit members. Nope. A shape pattern game about psychedelic memory. Nope. Finally, a game where you had to talk your way out of a sinking bathysphere. Darren said... maybe that one. And I knew I was onto something!

Darren quickly had another job, at Guerrilla, and his family packed up for the Netherlands. But the hook was in me; I had already begun to write and sketch ideas for Sub-Verge...



*All concept sketches by the game’s Art Director, Tiia Reijonen, who I met at Aalto in Finland. Except that last one. That’s all me.

--

I'll be sharing more from below the surface in another Transmission soon, but until then please wishlist the game (this helps us *hugely*) and sign up to the newsletter for more.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3487020

Hark! It is time we made some noise.

The house of misfits is open.



Pantaloon is broadening its mission of platforming bold and bizarre games by moving into the world of original publishing, as we seek to become a home for misfits with our new game label.

First order of business? We’re bringing three (!) games to market this year, and are now actively looking to sign more weird and wayward games to bring to our label of misfits.

Before looking at our first titles, some context: I will submit that the world does not need another indie publisher, but the Pantaloon Label is driven by a different vision, with a combination of philosophies, terms and technologies (no, not that one) that will make it stand out. We’re currently hard at work on a platform that will underpin our new label, and will be unveiling this later in the year.

Our newsletter - now approaching 30k subscribers - will remain the Sun around which everything else will orbit.

We’ll still be providing the most unreasonably delightful mailing list in games, we'll still be offering up games from incredible partners each month, and we'll still be curating and championing the best from the frontlines of the indie.

What we'll also now be doing is weaving email more deeply into the way we operate as a game label, with a plethora of exciting initiatives we'll be lifting the lid on over the course of the year. The newsletter is at the heart of it all. Sign up! Let me show you.

Onto more interesting things! The games!

The first title under our new label is Sub-Verge; a psychological narrative puzzle game from Interactive Tragedy, and a title that builds a fascinating bridge between puzzles and story. Sub-Verge marks Zach Dodson’s transition as a novelist (and owner of a book publishing house) into the world of games.



We’re also partnering with Tributary Games on Occlude, which takes the Solitaire ruleset and transforms it through a lens of cosmic horror, offering a meta-challenge where the rules are esoteric and ever-changing. With cerebral puzzles and a rich, lore-dense narrative, Occlude looks to take the revered card game into uncharted territory.



The third title you might have heard of already; an ever-evolving ensemble of riddles, challenges and interactive oddities. Updated regularly, Puzzletrunk is tied to Pantaloon‘s mission of platforming bold and bizarre games. Solve the puzzle, get your key for a notable indie game as a reward.



This is just the start, of course, and we’re now actively looking to fill our books with offbeat, vibrant games that cock heads and raise eyebrows. For any developers who might be reading this (hello!) and possibly interested in our services, we’ve made our publishing terms public, which we hope offers some transparency to things.

There’s a billion other things I’m excited to talk about, but for now, there’s work to be done.

Please follow our new publisher page on Steam, and join the Discord channel to chat with us about anything and everything related to the above.

More soon x

Ice-breakers are awkward. Hi. We’re Interactive Tragedy, Limited. We’re a computer game company, but honestly, we’d really just like to talk about our feelings. And we’ve got a lot of them today, since we’re announcing... ourselves.

We come from all over the world, but most of us are in Wellington, New Zealand now. We have special connections to Finland. We’ve worked on books and comics and tv shows together. And now, we’re making games...

>Sub-Verge is the first! It’s an underwater puzzle you’ve got to talk your way out of—the story is the game, so you’ve got to really understand the characters and pit them against each other to achieve your ends. Which should be: escaping your claustrophobic submersible. There’s an underwater creature with a secret in its jelly-sac. It’s just bizarre enough that Pantaloon, an excellent newsletter-turned-publisher, in the UK has agreed to release it into an unsuspecting world, and we feel grateful about that. A big feeling.



Other feelings have to do with Kuu, an atmospheric moonbase manager that we’ve been laboring at for some time, trying to get the ecosystem of game and story to live in harmony, hoping to avoid the schismogenesis that collapsed Biosphere 2, our beautiful failure of an inspiration. You can wishlist that game now, and if you’re at GDC, we’ll endeavor to get over any shyness and show you our work-in-progress.

We’re out of the hiding hole. As soon as our eyes adjust to the light, we promise more eye contact and more announcements and stories to come over the next few months. You can sign up for Sub-Verge updates from the Pantaloon newsletter, with an option to choose your allegiance, bestowing you with a unique and exclusive Discord Role.



It’s really nice to meet you. I hope we can be friends. If you want to talk about your feelings, too: we’re listening.