Intro

Courier Cabal (working title) will be a text-based narrative RPG taking place in the world of post-war Chrysalis. After a brutal battle between the native humans of Chrysalis and the beings that had invaded from Rifts of shattered worlds, the Ordineer of Chrysalis was overthrown, and the Rifts, as well as those with souls descended from them, were Severed.

After surviving the chaos, you retired and turned to a more calm life of travel by couriering deliveries across the scarred world. After picking up a mysterious trunk with a big payment to have it delivered, you’re set on a wild-goose chase to find the recipient. Following his trail will drag you through multiple ports, messy political intrigue, and a group of fellow couriers trying to steal the job from you. Will you be able to survive the cabal?

Planned Features

• 50k Words: At the least. I’ve attempted NaNoWriMo (writing a 50k word novel in the month of November) so many times and have always failed it, so my goal length-wise for this game is to have it be at least this long so I can fulfill in some way my goal of writing a novel. Or, in this case, a game with enough text that it is novel-length. Of course I still would like to exceed this number.
• Plenty of Choice: Inspired by games like Sunless Sea, Disco Elysium, and Citizen Sleeper, I really want the choices made in this game to have impact and consequence. I want the possibility of at least three playthroughs to have completely different paths and endings.
• Characters: I love, love, love having followers and companions that can join you on your journey. I want to focus on quality over quantity on this, but I definitely want to take inspiration from Pillars of Eternity II with their sidekicks, which were an inbetween of full-follower and a flavor NPC. I want this game to explore different areas of Chrysalis, and want the companions you have to reflect that.
• Discover the World of Chrysalis: I also want this to be a kind of worldbuilding project. I plan on there being 4+ major ports around Chrysalis that you will visit during the story with different cultures, people, and areas to explore. I’m hoping for each of these areas to be a slice of what life is like there.

Engine and Assets Being Used

I’ll be using the Unity engine to make the game, using a few assets, like Dialogue System for Unity and ProCamera2D, to make things easier for myself.

Art-wise, 90% of the assets will be made in Inkarnate, a really cool map-making tool. Down the road, I plan on commissioning enough custom assets so that the maps you see in game aren’t all native Inkarnate assets.

Price

Right now, I would like to release the first chunk/chapter/section for free, and then charge for the rest of the game. I’ve also toyed with the idea of releasing it in its entirety for free, and then only charging for any DLC or addons I make for it. Honestly, until I’m further along in the project I don’t think I’ll know how exactly I’ll want to monetize it. I only know that a significant portion of it will be free to play.

What’s Done

Right now I have a framework done with almost all the features I wanted working. Switching rooms, rolls in dialogue for skill checks, a character menu, and showing extra info on certain dialogue choices are working. Things that aren’t really ‘features’ like the roofs fading away when you click into a building or moving from one map to another are also done, but took some time to implement!

What Needs to be Done

The majority of the writing and mapmaking are what needs the most progress. While I’m still tinkering and polishing everything in Unity still, the only thing holding me back is finding the time to write and work on the maps. Progress on that front has been slow, but steady, and I’m happy with how much has been done so far! Feature-wise in Unity, I still need to add a main menu and polish the camera transitions between rooms and get the save system working.

Background select menu. Each one will have it's own questline and effect on the story.

Showing that rolls work functionally, still want to display it prettier.

Character menu. Currently shows 'Courier' as the name and the Background image.

A better view of the dialogue.

One of the completed maps, Stannum Port

Future Devlogs

From here on out, I plan on doing a devlog every month at least to update the progress I’ve made on writing, maps, and features in Unity.