Dark Place Progress Post #4 (Patreon)

Hello, this week I've worked on fixing up the intro to Welcome To The Dark Place, which has always been a strange part of the game structurally. I'm going to talk about it without spoiling the specifics, and this post might be more interesting to read after the game has come out.

Before Welcome To The Dark Place had begun development, I originally wrote the intro as a short story or the beginning of a novel. I think I was frustrated with trying to write an interesting main character and plot; the entire purpose of it was basically to hook the reader and keep them engaged and nothing else, so I wrote it as it came to me. I wasn't able to get very far with it.

Since I had no idea how to start WttDP, I just stuck this scene into the intro as a hook. There wasn't much thought behind the decision, because at the time, all I knew about WttDP was that it was going to involve a massive variety of dream-like locations to explore. The idea was actually that you would begin in a random environment every time you started up the game, and I would add in hundreds of places. I can't remember how or when it changed into being open-world.

Now the intro is very strange, because it's so "on rails" and focused. I've gradually replaced almost every narrative beat so that the intro hits all of the game's tones/emotions, ranging from intense, to hilarious, to mysterious, to horrible, in that order. (Plus I added an epigraph, one of my favorite devices to set the tone of any story.) Now I think it's truly finished along with the ending.

I suppose this game's thematic color is red, even though It Steals already did that.

What's unique about WttDP to me is that the beginning and ending were never tied together at all; the non-linear middle section (95% of the game) is a massive, nonsensical, structureless gulf between the two; it's fitting that the player must aimlessly search it for the true ending. The ending I wrote in 2020 tried to bring the intro plot-line back (which I hated), but the 2024 ending purposefully leaves the intro behind. The result is a bizarre framing that explores two wildly different states of mind towards the same thing (the object within the frame), five years apart.

Now I've done a little too much thinking about the game as a whole lately when I need to put my head down and get to work.