Dark Place Progress Post #1 (Patreon)

Hello, I'm just talking about Welcome To The Dark Place today. Part of why I want to talk about it is because I'm trying to make WttDP my main focus, and maybe talking about it obsessively here will help me fixate on it. Since Lethal Company is no longer an option for now, I had to spend time to adjust, and it was pretty depressing for a few days. But progress on WttDP is picking up. The posts I make about WttDP will probably feel a lot like the early posts about Lethal Company before anyone knew it was a multiplayer game. (WttDP is not a multiplayer game though, I just don't want to spoil it.) This post will be all over the place.

What is this game

Some explanation: Welcome To The Dark Place is a text-based open-world adventure which was originally inspired by the beginning of Zork which I played as a kid. I never found the underground, which is basically the entire game, so I just explored around the forest and the house (and Hell.) Zork fascinated me a lot like Myst.

Welcome To The Dark Place was also inspired by the choose-your-own-adventure book called "The Worst Day Of Your Life", which terrified me as a kid. I'm pretty sure there was an ending in this book where you literally just get locked in a car and die from heat-stroke. (This book ruined all the other choose-your-own-adventure books for me as a kid because none of them were nearly as realistic and willing to traumatize me, so I found them utterly boring.)

Welcome To The Dark Place is also kind of inspired by the virtual barbershop experience.

If WttDP is starting to sound like a complete nightmare, that's because it is.

Ending

I think I am completely finished with the ending, which means I can get to finishing everything else! One reason that it's my favorite ending when compared to any of my other games is because it's tonally consistent; the whole of WttDP is so strange it makes the ending look almost normal. Conceptually this ending follows all the goals of the project. I also just feel like it's the most honest thing I've written, almost to the point that someone could analyze it and classify my psychological state. The experience of making WttDP is like telling my friend a dream I had and worrying that it will reveal something about me that I didn't realize myself.

References

One of the things that is exciting about WttDP is that its weird development has given it a meta quality. As I worked on Welcome To The Dark Place off and on while getting distracted by my other projects, I've noticed familiar images and symbols being brought over. Sometimes I've wondered if Welcome To The Dark Place refuels my imagination, like I'm reaching into the dreamscape and pulling out ideas that I take into my other projects; that would explain why I return to it between projects over and over. So if you've been paying attention, it may seem like I'm referencing myself a lot in the Dark Place. But if anything, Welcome To The Dark Place is actually the thing that was being referenced. (For example, Welcome To The Dark Place is where I conceived the first idea for my book, which was an hourglass containing someone's soul.)

Current Progress

Yesterday I started adding audio for a new area, which I had thought might be too weird or violent even for this game. But now I think it's par for the course. Sometimes I write something and then only truly realize how messed up it is when I have to design the soundscape for it and find it hilarious and disturbing at the same time.