I want to clarify the current situation with Transversion since last summer I talked about it and the main point didn't really get across, and of course it wasn't on the blog so there's no neat and tidy way to get a clear cut answer for it. The long and short of it is that Transversion is on hiatus, potentially forever. For all intents and purposes the project is effectively dead in the water. The reason for that being the project kept growing bigger and bigger beyond what we expected and as our first project I was really bad at organizing all the crap, sprite redos being a thorn still in my side. Would we like to go back to it? Sure, just not right now. I'd rather wait until we got more time to flesh out its script, get things more organized (esp. what assets are needed), basically I want 90% of the script done before doing anything else. And at its current size, that would take a long ass time.
The current plan is to produce a smaller project so we get some notoriety and so we can say we're doing stuff, which is where our current project is. Its designed to be a choice-intensive episodic VN similar to The Walking Dead where you can play the first bit, make your choices, discuss them, and have something to look forward to again in 1-3 months. We also like the idea since once the assets are done for the first episode we'll have well over half the art and such needed for the next, and then it just comes down to writing.
So what is our new project? Currently it doesn't have an official name, we've just been calling it "Worms Reloaded." I'm horrible with those, and Transversion took like 2 years to come up with after we had been calling the project "Murderparty" informally. What I can tell you:
1. You play as Everett, a convict from the infamous Leandro Prison which has served in the past as everything from a forced labor camp, re-education center, concentration camp, and arguably is still functioning as all of the above. After disaster strikes you get a second chance at life with a lot more chances at death along El Dorado Highway.
2. The emphasis on "worms" comes from the setting. All roads lead to Lodi, the capital of Langway, with several smaller but major cities spread around the city. However, the fauna of this desert world is deadly - giant desert worms are attracted to vibrations, mountain-sized macrophages move across the land destroying anything they run over, and large trilobite-like creatures hunt anything they can find in the wilderness, and are intelligent enough to bait out their prey utilizing anything from shiny pebbles to the screams of captured road workers.
Only the networks of roads around Langway offer solid protection against the local wildlife, though the cost of maintaining the roads would be staggering even without the money lost due to rampant corruption in Lodi. While larger cities always have a road activated for the transfer of goods, smaller cities and towns can be left effectively isolated for weeks, months, years, or even decades should their registries be lost or forgotten.
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| Scale of Things |
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| A rough map of Langway |
3. We've been working on this script since last summer, and even with long breaks the script is about 60% done. As you can guess, the episodes aren't long.
4. Due to the short length we're putting a lot of emphasis on making your choices matter, both in subtle and more apparent ways. We're hoping that as episodes go on, we'll be able to have your choices compound in different enough ways that replayability is high.
5. We're working on getting the data import system for Renpy to work and its annoying, so even if the method we go with works in testing we'll include a troubleshoot feature to "generate" saves in later episodes in case things don't work because of bugs/corruption/you switched computers/etc.
Sometime early/mid January as the script finishes we'll post some updates including more information about the locations, wildlife, and a bit on characters.
