Warp Frontier!

Before I disappear into my usual ramblings, like how WordPress seems entirely different, and probably better, somehow, I should get the important stuff out of the way first. Brawsome’s next game is Warp Frontier, and the first trailer is up on the tube.

There’s even a Steam Page up. I wonder what that wishlist button does? https://store.steampowered.com/app/226280/Warp_Frontier

Okay, but, whaaaat!? I thought you were dead. I hear you say. Well, there’s some truth to that, and let’s face it, is anyone really alive? Find out, in Warp Frontier!

Before I lose the other 20% of you, let’s size this baby up. It’s got a cool 6-8 hours of gameplay, with nearly 30 characters, fully voiced, which equates to about 4,000 lines of dialogue. Inbuilt hint system, in addition to the character’s inner monologue, and robot companion. There are about 50 scenes to explore, and key choices that lead to several different outcomes, ranging from the loss of thousands of souls, to still being able to see your kids. The game is predominantly voiced by Australians, something that’s uncommon for most point and click adentures, in addition there are actors from New Zealand, the US, UK and Serbia. If I’m going to work with everyone remotely, may as well get people that are the real deal.

Warp Frontier is so many things, including the most personal game I’ve made, the most of my own money I’ve spent, and the most time I’ve spent. The personal aspect is that of feeling like an Australian story told as a sci-fi game. The setting is humanity’s newest extrasolar colony – Cetus, a small isolated planet on the edge of civilization, a Frontier, if you will. The people of Cetus are mostly rural, and come from many different cultures, but come together around a quintessentially Cetan identity. The lead, Vince, is a man possibly past his greatest achievements, likely on the verge of a mid-life crisis, whose life has been steered by forces outside of his control, finding himself stuck doing something he is good at, rather than something he enjoys. He is haunted by the loss of his first wife, and friends during the Cetan war, 10 years prior, and feels like he has failed them, with an added sprinkling of survivor’s guilt, but in the midst of this, he still has a job to do, and to be there for his kids, while staying away from the bottle that constantly threatens to make everything a little easier and harder at the same time.

Warp Frontier is influenced by media I was consuming at the time of writing and thereafter, including Ray Kurzweils prophesizing of a singularity, and The Expanse and Altered Carbon series. With thoughts of singularity weighing heavily on my mind I started to explore what might happen after a singularity, what if humanity decides to pull the plug and revert to a potential post Artificial Intelligence dark age? The game is set in 2215, a couple of hundred years after such a singularity when General Artificial Intelligence has been outlawed, as well as replication devices. With the advent of Warp travel, humanity has fractured into factions that derive their identity more from their planetary origin, rather than their original earth culture, which circles back on this idea of an Australian identity. The Expanse series really spoke to me as one of the more grounded sci-fi realities, it really felt as if we could look into the future and see something very similar, it also made me consider how humans grow apart with generations growing up off Earth. Altered Carbon explores living forever, and the body merely as a vessel barely tied to our identity.

Oh, that’s right, short blog entries are hard. I promise when I have more time I’ll write a shorter entry. Or maybe you’d prefer to consume me talking for an hour once a week, like I seem to consume all my media. Look forward to this social media neanderthal figuring it out over the coming months!