Over the last couple of monthly updates, Corv has given us some insights on both the worldbuilding process for Corven – Path of Redemption, and also on its story. Firstly, worldbuilding is something that Corv has a love/hate relationship with:

The landscape design is a constantly ongoing task that I sometimes enjoy and sometimes hate.

Imagine this: You are stuck in an area and want to get a certain feel and it’s just not getting where you imagine it to be and you spend more and more time on it, remolding it over and over, edging closer and closer to that elusive picture in your brain… “This branch needs to go here, no wait a few inches over, that feels better, YES! that’s it!” over and over until the whole picture is right.  Then you suddenly doubt yourself, “Did I just spend too much time on that small area? They won’t notice this anyway … but it just FEELS better, right? Yeah but you could have gotten a nice looking area by just randomly placing that stuff as well, nobody cares when they chase a Goblin through here. Yeah, but now I am proud of it. You idiot, it’s just a part of a forest… you’ll be done in 2030 if you keep that up.. shut up”

That’s my state of mind when worldbuilding. Maybe I need a therapist, who knows.

Writing storylines and quests, however, seems to have been going somewhat better:

You know how it is when you got 100% motivation for something, then you do it and it actually works out and you are “in the zone”? It’s a great feeling right? Well, I was “in the zone” with writing the last few weeks and I could not be happier about it.

Don’t get me wrong I had written a draft of the full story arc a long time ago and worked on parts of it in detail as well, but really fleshing out the story is something I had put off for a while because I was not inspired to do it for a while. Well I am happy to report the inspiration came back and I made gigantic steps forward with the story, quests and dialogues.

He continues:

Let me very quickly sum up just the first couple of hours of the game, the first town and a bit beyond. Just so you get an idea:

It starts out with you traveling with a talking, walking toad, an intelligent horse and one other human. The toad is actually your king and the horse his daughter. They were cursed by a wicked mage.

Already sounds like a childish fairy tale right? Well, not so fast, let me continue: Your quest is to find the mage who did this to them. It brings you to the first town in the game. There you find out that the same mage burned down his old masters house, killing him in the process. You can still see the burning remains of the house. In order to find out where he went next you need the services of the local seer / fortune teller. Unfortunately he “lost” his crystal ball and is unwilling to tell fortunes anymore. You find him drinking in the local bar. Something is obviously weighing heavy on his heart. His young daughter tries to cheer her dad up but she can’t. She sends you to the waterfall cave where she thinks the crystal ball was lost. After retrieving the ball the fortune teller is not at all happy about it and it is revealed that he threw away the ball on purpose and does not want to offer his services anymore because he once helped track down the parents of a little girl who then were killed. The little girl is actually his adopted daughter now. He could never get over the guilt he feels for his actions…

With some motivation of the daughter he will help you after all, give you vital information he sees in the crystal ball and you move on just to find another victim of the mad mage who he paralyzed and then sadistically stabbed to death. Fortunately for you his soul was trapped in a statue where he was killed and so he could give vital further information. His sister, who is grief stricken and angry, will join you on your quest form then on … 

There’s also a new piece of artwork available at the second link, which showcases part of the process by which Corv transforms backer self-portraits (photographs) into in-game character art.