Irredeamable Developpement Retrospective Part 5: Project Watchmaker

Irredeamable Developpement Retrospective Part 5: Project watchmaker

So before we begin this part, i will reiterate the previous warning that this part will contain some spoilers for the actual game, so this is your last chance to go download and play it. For everyone who already have played Irredeamable or dont care about spoilers, lets begin. ----------

Project Watchmaker was another attempt at creating a global setting for my stories, but unlike The Fountain which was all about about a wide fantasy world, full of strange lands, stranger races, and reality-altering magic, this one takes a more vertical sci-fi form where the focus was instead on an extensive timeline. Early ideas involved a time-traveling story, where one would take control of Excalibur, a superweapon with control over time. The character would travel through a series of timelines in a Metroidvania structure, using time gates and timewarp keys to reach different locations at different times. These timelines included a medieval/cyberpunk utopia, a post-apocalyptic snow wasteland, an ancient jungle, a cyber-totalitarian future, the end of times, and a forgotten prehistoric age. This story also included a bunch of characters based on Arthurian mythology. Such as a post-apocalyptic Lancelot (riding a motorcycle), an artificial intelligence lady of the lake, an evil totalitarian king Arthur, and Merlin as a deathless troll sage that can be encountered in all timelines.

I used to have more details about this one, but then i realized that i dont really have any pictures of it. Still, i wanted to talk about it since a lot of this story did make it into the game themes and characters and it makes a nice buffer for the actual spoilers. So we`ll leave things here as we move onto some transitional maps that took place in the transition between this form of the project and the next.

What eventually cemented the setting current form is the namesake watchmakers. It's based on the old flawed argument from Christian fundamentalist apologetics that posits that in the same way we can determine that a pocket watch on a beach is man-made because of its complexity, we can do the same with the universe. What ended up inspiring me through, is the rebuke to this argument. The idea that if the universe was indeed designed, how did you manage to distinguish the pocket watch from every single grain of sand in the first place? I wont really linger on these debates as i never was fond of arguing, especially about religion, but while i havent believed in gods for a very long time, i always have been fascinated by the concept and all the ethical questions they bring forth. In this very specific case, what is it like to live in an entirely artificial world? What would that world even look like? What kind of creature would even do it in the first place?

...and that brings us back to fairies, the little gods hiding in plain sight. Back in the fountain, they represented infinite potential, and here it`s much of the same, except rather than beings of pure magic, they are simply creatures that have access to technology and knowledge beyond understanding. They are not literal god, they would say so themselves, but they have evolved past a point where neither time, death, or even reality has any grasp upon them. They are only limited by their own mortal flaws and incomplete understanding.

They are all meant to be equal, a group of disparate individuals united by a common goal of figuring out how it all went wrong and use their power to fix it. But Morgan, the purple fairy, was always the focal point of the story, the antagonist hiding as the support character. (back in the Excalibur story, they would be revealed to have been leading you into defeating Merlin and the trolls so Fairies could take over the timeline and establish their utopia)

As the fairies were fleshed out, pocket worlds were designed in their image, connected through a central realm and some other junctions, kind of like an ant-farm. Much of the idea behind the world was that it was both a place of research and a prison. A cosmic-sized panopticon that the watchmakers could use to study some of the most dangerous sapiens species and learn how to tame them.

The realm came through many other iterations, and ultimately some of the stuff had to be dropped to reduce scope. Most notable here was the removal of the elves and suhagins, their roles being merged into the Uris and trolls respectively (trolls even took the name)

There was also a brief attempt at having the entire game take place in the city of new eden. Both the Uther and Ursula boss fights were conceived in this version of the story and new eden remained a central figure of the game story and world. Aniway, we`re almost at the end of this part. We only got some progress shematics left. These includes areas and boss concept. Some made it in the game in some forms, other have been scrapped or pushed for later projects.

Anyway, thanks for following this retrospective so far. The next and final part of this retrospective will be about the project as it was during the 2 years i officially developed it on Tumblr. A little game known as Irredeamable.

Remember how i described that in the fountain, one of the factions encountered was a race of tiny bug people (elves) with advanced tech? It came back in my mind that i had already conceived of a boss for that section so here a quick sketch to share it.

Who knows, maybe ill bring it back in some form in another project.

Adding a bunch of movement triggers and using them to fly around on a rock

Jumping and flying and attacking and dashing in Canto I!!!!! Yay!!!!!!

For free on Steam in just 3 days!!!!!!

Going live on Twitch soon! We're giving ourselves more psychic damage with Disco Elysium! Yyyyaaayyyy!

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Irredeamable developpement retrospective: Bonus part: A lesson in commitment

As much as this retrospective may be a self-indulgent exercise in sharing all the project ideas that had to be shelved or discarded during development, it was also a cautionary tale on how much time and effort can go to waste when you keep starting over because a new idea just seems a tad more interesting than the old one.

This can be especially seen in how i had to completely redo the main character's sprites several times, despite the moveset remaining nearly identical. But she was not the only one.

and those are just the ones with direct parallels. A lot of development time was spent, doing and redoing the same few basic enemies and areas with a few minor alterations.

What ive learned from this is to be both more careful and more committed with what i create. Be more thorough with the design process of characters, enemies and areas, but set it in stone once its actually implemented into the game. The result won't be perfect, but perfect is the enemy of good enough, and a flawed game is always better than one that won't ever come out.