DRAFT
: Development Notes #1(Heads up: this might be a bit of a long post! I’ve written about Dwelt in a few places — such as here and, more recently, here — but I’ve never taken the time to lay everything out in preparation for actually making the game. If you’re reading this, I really appreciate that you would stop by for a little while and take a look. Thank you so much!)
Up until recently, Dwelt has been more of an umbrella term for a collection of game-centered thoughts, ideas, characters, songs, and sketches I’ve collected over the years than it has a fully-fledged game. You can see a little of its origins on my old site. During these explorations I was seeking a specific vibe, one encompassing “the memory of the land”, and the space between loneliness and solitude. Dwelt started off being about spirits shepherding the archived souls of the dead, before the concept of robots started to take hold in a more concrete way, and I have done a few design and implementation experiments now!
Robots are powerful vessels for themes of memory, connection, and identity. Mechanical creatures who gain sentience or who process emotions in a different way to humans face unique personal journeys and trials; and our own experiences of the world can be understood through their experiences and struggles. I was very glad to be able to experiment with this in Jade Spring, where the jade bot you play has returned from conflict in Inner Nayos, badly damaged and in need of rehabilitation. While the small size of the game didn’t afford too much room to expand on these themes, I was still able to have them reflect on this rehabilitation process, especially through their conversations with the robotic golem Ratchet, who was also saved by the Jade Spring’s steward, Raiqqo.
And now, with Dwelt I want to further reflect on these ideas. The game takes place at an inflection point in an inter-continental steampunk war, one in which different factions have been wielding brass weaponry, machinery, and vehicles in order to wrest control of key magical and alchemical hotspots across the land. You are one such piece of machinery, a robotic armature created to build and repair military bases and equipment for your faction.
The war culminates in the trading of devastating alchemical missiles which shake the earth to its core, and as the ley-lines they are fighting for cascade out of control in sympathy with the now-wounded biomes in which they are nestled. The factions, seeing the writing on the wall, undertake mass evacuation plans, ships and freighters fanning urgently out into space — but the armatures, including you, are left behind. As the EMPs and magical flares recede, you slip into a long, deep sleep, freed from the impositions of your war-time programming but, but still burdened with the memory of it.
You awaken to a changed self, in a changed world. The land is both beautiful and dangerous, wounded and flourishing, bearing the deep scars of war but vibrant with natural magic left unchecked. The world is yours, and yet it has been abandoned. And you too are fully your own, but what is your purpose now? The war has dissipated (and with it your strict robotic edicts and restrictions), but your predilection to build and engineer still run strong. So, purposeless and alone (for now), what do you do? Dwelt is about answering that question.
Dwelt is purposefully a modest expansion of Jade Spring’s mechanics in terms of gameplay! I’m trying to be quite intentional and insistent on not ballooning the scope out of the game way outside of the realm of something achievable for me.
The game experience is split into map instances called shards. Each shard reveals the story of its landscape — how it was shaped, how it was altered by the war, and how you can heal it, here and now. Much like the garden in Jade Spring can be weeded and cleared out until it is fully cleansed, each shard has a series of blights which need to be gotten rid of, and will drop currency and contribute toward decorations specifc to that region. You can then use those decorations to freely build in a “hub” shard.
Map friction is defined by blights, and map progress is measured with insights. The equivalent of blights in Jade Spring would be weeds, bug swarms, and dragonvoid; they give the shard its sense of both life and danger. To clear them is to heal the land. As you traverse the map, shards progressively grow more challenging to clear. The first might just be fires you have to douse, or piles of rubble to clear — things you can do with little setup or urgency. Later they could become creatures, mechanical war-beasts, reinforced siege components, and the like. More complex and difficult blights would require you to place utilities, dodge projectiles while you clense them, and more. The rewards for progressing through this main aspect of the game are two-fold. These blights drop currency which can be used for unlocking decorations to be used in the shard or in your hub shard, and they also drop favour, a special currency which represents the work you have done to cleanse the land.
Spread throughout the shard are insight pylons which represent a certain revelation or unfolding of understanding about what is happening (or has happened) in that shard. Each costs a certain amount of favour to use and, once unlocked, will play a cinematic or some dialogue (and possibly unlock some more unique decorations, too).
