Technical Post - The HoTW Demo

 Heyo,

This is kind of an accompaniment to the "Evolution of the HotW Premise" post that I did a while back. I was recently thinking about the demo of the game that we released last year, and how the final version of the game differed from what we'd been going for originally. So, I thought might be fun to write about how exactly we developed the demo, and where we thought the story was going to go. There's not as much "lore" to this one, although it's a fun trip down memory lane for me. Naturally, this will go pretty heavily into spoiler territory, so if you haven't read HotW yet, you might wanna refrain from reading this post.

First things first: chibi mode is really good and I hope we do more with it someday. I also wish I had this kind of option in real life.

To start off with, we knew, even before it was written, that "Scene 0," in which Maddie and Tara first announce on-stream that they're going to Eysenfeld, wouldn't be used in the main game. Don't get me wrong, it's a great scene. Rachel did a spectacular job with the writing, and minute's direction (and handmade emoji) really bring it to life. Buuuut, it was the wrong note to start the game on.

The moody, hesitant atmosphere that the opening train scene brings was just too important to give up. It really sets the stage for the rest of the game, finishing with the overhead shot of Eysenfeld at night. To me, this one scene is like a thesis statement for the first half of the game. We see Maddie and Tara at odds with each other, but we also see how close they are, and have been for years. There's the ~mysterious~ lights and motion off in the distance (hello, forest spirit) and the creeping chill. Plus, I really liked the imagery of a journey into another world, with the train being the only way in or out. We wanted there to be a lot of questions, and unspoken tensions in the air. Starting off on such a bright and chipper note, like with Scene 0, would've made for some tonal whiplash that I wanted to avoid. Just like winter itself, I wanted the story to start off chilly but slowly get warmer.

That goal of asking several questions, but not giving many answers within the demo, guided our choice of scenes for inclusion. When we first committed to making the demo, we didn't have that many scenes written. Instead, we looked over our (mostly) complete outline and decided which scenes we'd want to include, and thus prioritized writing those ones. We knew that we wanted to keep it at around ten scenes total, that one of those should be an h-scene, and that we had to include at least one cutesy romance scene. There were also several plot points that we took care to avoid mentioning. Off the top of my head, that included Maddie dying, the TaraMorgan romance, the existence of the forest spirit, and more. There were also some plot points that we couldn't include even if we'd wanted to, because they hadn't been invented yet. I'm pretty sure fairy queen Maddie is one of those things, as well as the exact nature of Evelyn and her goals. There was also one point where Geladura was going to be a "regular" talking cat, rather than a deposed fairy queen, but we might have settled on that by the time we got to the demo.

Anyway, with the scenes settled, we started writing. It was a lot of whiplash jumping between chapters, and trying to conceptualize all the events that transpired in between, without having actually written them yet. We committed pretty early on to letting ourselves change the scenes later, after the demo was released, to avoid writing ourselves into a corner. Reading through the demo now for the first time since we released it, I'm pretty glad we made that decision. In particular, the "cutesy" romance scene, where Maddie and Abby first go to the fairy lake, is definitely not my best work. I kind of remember rushing to finish that one on time… Originally, we'd planned to include one more scene: the one where Maddie encounters the dying deer. However, we chose to end things on a brighter note.

From there, we only had a vague idea of the story specifics. We knew that the ending would be a battle with all of the girls teaming up to defeat Evelyn. If we'd had unlimited time and money, we would've made it a battle involving the entire forest, including the souls of those whose bodies Evelyn had stolen in the past. Unfortunately, we didn't. Which is probably for the better, because it forced us to really rely on the chemistry between the two couples, and for Tara and Morgan to get more screentime, rather than their originally estimated three scenes. I'd say that's been a popular decision so far.

To be honest, playing through this demo again was more nostalgic than I'd expected. I remember being sooo excited when we decided to include a talking cat, as well as when we decided to not only add fairies, but to make them important. I remember that enthusiasm really carrying me through writing a few of those older scenes. At the same time, I'm glad that I can say I've improved as a writer since then, even though some of this stuff is barely a year old. I guess that's progress. Right now, I'm super enthusiastic and excited for what we're working on right now, so hopefully that's the start of a trend. Maybe this post will be a little nostalgic in a year, too.

Until then (or probably sooner),

Josh