Howdy! I figured now would be the time to start a development blog for the game we’ve been making with a small friend group of five people. The game goes by the name Paradigm Island and we’ve been working on it for almost half a year now and are currently moving from pre-production to production-phase. Some marketing-savvy people have told me that the best time to start promoting your game is yesterday. I guess today would be the next best option, so here we go.

What is this?

The game could be categorized as an interactive drama or more traditionally a role-playing game. I like to think of it as a post-modern satire, but that’s not exactly something that sells a game, so I’ll stick with the role-playing game for now. It’s a story about addiction, trauma, and people’s day-to-day struggles in a world where the lines between fantasy and reality are often blurred. That must’ve sounded really bleak but I underline that it’s all wrapped up nicely in humor and satire. The story puts the player in the shoes of an orphan boy named Mike, adopted as an infant by a group of mercenaries. The player’s job is to help Mike find his place in the world on the verge of adulthood and to guide him past – or towards – the skerries of life. This here is Mike, our protagonist.

How does it play?

Paradigm Island is a game you can play leaned back in your chair, legs on the table, one hand on the mouse, and the other hand holding your beverage of choice. All you need to do is summon the willpower to click on things that seem interesting to you. By the act of this clicking you get to discover the deranged world of Paradigm Island and meet its equally deranged occupants.

The bread and butter of our game are its characters, who we’re sure you’ll love to hate and hate to love. You’re free to chat with anyone and strike up conversations about life, death, philosophy, music or just to ask instructions on how to manage in this cluster fuck of a world you’ve been thrown into. Each character introduces unique ideas to the player which he can choose to intercorporate into his own worldview and this way shape how the rest of the journey will turn out. Below is a mock-up screenshot of how the dialogue would be portrayed in the game.

Wait, is this a visual novel? Well, to be honest, the game having lots of hand-drawn artwork and text-based narrative with choices that affect the story’s outcome, it’s close to one but we are placing heavy emphasis on a higher degree of interactivity, allowing players to actively engage with the game world and explore it freely.

How does it look?

We are going for this old-fashioned comic book look, defined by halftone colors, ink bleed, and jaggy outlines. My original idea for the story was to make it into a graphic novel so this kind of art direction felt only natural. Here are some of our early tests of how our protagonist Mike could look in the game view.

and here’s a concept for an oil rigging platform that our demo and the game’s tutorial level take place on.

Some of our design principles

We’ve set ourselves out to make a game where the combat takes a backseat to dialogue and the hard-to-figure game mechanics are left out. First and foremost we’re making an interactive play. We’re aware that it’s not going to be a game for everybody but we’re okay with that.

Instead of abusing the player’s fight-or-flight response, Paradigm Island focuses on the less talked about and often overlooked tend-and-befriend response. The game offers peaceful solutions for approaching conflicts and this way underlines the importance of communication in terms of solving them. The players aren’t prohibited from solving conflicts violently – or more bluntly put: being a shithead – but are presented with consequences for their hurtfulness. This way the game attempts to make the player reflect on their decisions without shoving anything down their throat. In other words: if you’re looking for a power trip, this game might not be for you. All this being said; it’s not going to be a cozy feel-good game if you somehow got that impression.

Where are we at right now? What next?

We’re constructing a vertical slice that showcases the game’s mechanics and art style as well as the style of the dialogue, music, and overall soundscape. The story and the characters are pretty much thought out by now so what’s left to do is to actually make the damn game. Of course, things will change as we go but we feel we’re on the right track. This dev blog is made to document the construction of the game and to make the process transparent as well as to get feedback from people. I’m pretty sure most of us that have done any kind of art, know how alluring it is to polish things forever and how hard is it to release them to the world. This dev blog is somewhat an attempt to get rid of that mindset. We believe that all art deserves to be seen, finished or not.

Lastly

If any of this seemed interesting to you, click the button below to subscribe to our e-mail list so you’ll get a heads-up whenever there’s a new blog post or news about the game. I promise I won’t spam your mail box to shit. The goal is to post once a week or so but we’ll see how it goes. Anyway; if you made it here I sincerely thank you for your interest and I hope to see you around! Any kind of feedback would mean the world to us and that being said, you can leave a comment under this post or send it directly to oskar.riekko@paradigmisland.blog