Shamanquest aka Edenquest
(working titles)
This is a game I’m working on solo. It’s a project where all my disparate skills and experiences converge into something that hopefully resonates with some people.
In the game you play an amnesiac shaman who must relearn everything they knew about surviving in the forest, and also looking after the forest. This is a game where choices leave their mark on the landscape and echo in time.
This is a game that lets the player get lost in and become part of a dense forest environment, an ecosystem composed of fictional species, inspired by real ones and placed in real genera.
Survival is the core and ever-present gameplay loop, having enough to eat and drink, keeping relatively dry and warm, having a safe place to sleep. The living world around you is a source of food, tools, shelter, but also hazards and threats. Not every fruit is safe to eat, and any shadow might hide some creature, prey or predator.
Eden, the isle on which this game is set, is a highly reactive environment. Everything can burn, or rot, or be used for something or other. There are complex patterns of weather, and celestial phenomena following recognisable rhythms. Only through careful observation, and earned experience, can the secrets of the forest be unlocked and mastered.
As well as ecologically deep, I want this game to be fun. I don’t want players to have to think too hard if they don’t want to. Every mechanic has some element of chaos built in, like this fumble mechanic that comes into play when inventory is overloaded.
Eden’s environment is built of old fashioned sprites, hand drawn on paper first, scanned and worked on digitally.
Black and white bump maps are another traditional technique I’ve resurrected here, hand drawing them as I learned to do back in the olden days. I enjoy this process, and it will help the game to look like it might be running on a Sega Dreamcast.
All plants grow through their stages, flowering and seeding, spreading over time. This is something that will happen slowly, the process is sped up here for demonstration.
As well as by seed, some plants can spread laterally, or up vertical surfaces.
Eden runs on its own time, the world continuing to evolve when the player is not online. Every 24 hours on Eden is ~111 minutes of our time. The moon and stars, and other celestial bodies are likewise sped up by the same ratio.
Perhaps not coincidentally, every 13th full moon inside the game will line up with the real world full moon. The consequences of this are unknown.
I’m building in Unreal 5, entirely in blueprint. This is my first undertaking as a developer, having familiarised myself with the engine over the last 5 years or so. There is no AI generated code or art.
I’m excited by the possibilities of using this low-rez pixel style together with Unreal’s amazing lighting and materials capabilities.
I love this idea of taking such naturalistic and organic themes and expressing them in this overtly digitized and low fidelity format. It’s a kind of “coincidentia oppositorum”, as T.McKenna used to say.
