Wadjet Eye Unavowed - Dave Gilbert's RPG-inspired urban fantasy game

[HoboForEternity]

damn typos. yah, i mean biggest, unless you go bethesda way where the bugs breeds faster than you can squash them

 

[Jaesun]

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

Haven't really been paying attention. Is this set in the same universe as Blackwell?

 

[HoboForEternity]

Yes

 

[bertram_tung]

So, Dave, you lovable bastard, will I be able to play this before summer 2017?

Honestly, it's hard to say. I'm hoping to get it to beta by then, or at least a fully playable alpha. As I said in the talk, this game is looonnng and it's much harder to design for. I've been working on it full time since Shardlight launched in March, and I'm at about the halfway point. I'll announce a release date when I know for sure!

Thanks for your straightforward answer! I appreciate everything you do for this great genre of games. Do what you gotta do. I'll be here, cash in hand, when it's ready.

 

[Infinitron]

Hey, I remember that.

 

[DaveGilbert]

Hey all! We're about to do another round of testing. The game is still quite a ways from complete, but getting early feedback is always helpful.

We've got ten free slots available. If you'd like to be involved, register at the Wadjet Eye forum and PM me your username. I'll give you access to the testing section.

Thanks!

-Dave

 

[you know what time it is]

Well, not really, but this is definitely a D1P material.

 

[DaveGilbert]

You're not too late. Still slots left.

 

[HoboForEternity]

i won't play the beta, i hate to get spoiled before the final product released. would be cool to help, but yeah in the end i will be a good, patient boy over here.

btw i have been playing the gabriel knight games (playing trough chapter 4 of beast within atm) and they just make me more hyped about this game. feel kinda like modern witcher or something. schattenjagers are practically witchers anyway.

 

[Blaine]

This is looking p. gud.

 

[Blackthorne]

This is early development. Dave knows what he's doing - so, I'm looking forward to it and seeing what comes out in the next few months. God, if I talked about every project I had in the early dev project, I'd get declined from ass to breakfast. By the way, I'd like to announce our next game, "Shitlords". You can guess what it's about.


Bt

I just want to go off topic for a minute here and say that I'm still working on "Shitlords" and it fucking sucks. I hope you're happy.

Unavowed is pretty damn cool, though.


Bt

 

[DaveGilbert]

Been awhile since I posted a new screenshot. I've been polishing up the current build to show off at GDC. Have a looping gif in the interim!

edit: Aaand odd. The gif doesn't seem to loop? Dunno what the issue is. If it doesn't show up for you, can see the animation HERE.

 

[HoboForEternity]

O yiss big fire pit to throw people in

 

[bertram_tung]

Been awhile since I posted a new screenshot. I've been polishing up the current build to show off at GDC. Have a looping gif in the interim!

edit: Aaand odd. The gif doesn't seem to loop? Dunno what the issue is. If it doesn't show up for you, can see the animation HERE.

My most anticipated game of (hopefully) 2017!

 

[tuluse]

Been awhile since I posted a new screenshot. I've been polishing up the current build to show off at GDC. Have a looping gif in the interim!


edit: Aaand odd. The gif doesn't seem to loop? Dunno what the issue is. If it doesn't show up for you, can see the animation HERE.

I have one nitpick that I can't unsee now, the people in the boat look way too calm being chased by a sea monster (possibly this makes sense in context).

 

[Blackthorne]

I have one nitpick that I can't unsee now, the people in the boat look way too calm being chased by a sea monster (possibly this makes sense in context).

Have you ever been chased by a sea-monster in a boat? It's amazing how calm you get. For real.

Bt

 

[DaveGilbert]

I did a little devstream of the game today, where I implemented a bunch of new art assets and answer questions about the game. Everything is very non-spoilery, aside from things I've spoken about publicly already.

 

[Boleskine]

www.pcworld.com/article/3181356/gaming/how-wadjet-eyes-unavowed-weaves-modern-design-into-a-gritty-point-and-click-adventure.html

How Wadjet Eye's Unavowed weaves modern design into a gritty point-and-click adventure

Dave Gilbert continues to be the best advocate for Adventure Game Studio, somehow folding elements of BioWare's RPGs into a traditional point-and-click.

Credit: Unavowed

“AGS [Adventure Game Studio] is easy,” says Dave Gilbert, when I ask if he’s started to run up against the limitations of the now 20-year-old engine for adventure games. I’ve met up with Gilbert to discuss his latest game, Unavowed—the first Wadjet Eye title he’s spearheaded since 2014’s Blackwell Epiphany—and not long after we start talking I’m reminded that Gilbert continues to be AGS’s best advocate.

It’s not just that Wadjet Eye is the primary publisher of AGS games nowadays (including critical darlings Gemini Rue and Technobabylon). It’s that Gilbert continues to do things with AGS that I didn’t think were possible—and then he says it’s easy. Maybe it is, for him, but I can’t help but think if it were actually easy we’d see more quality AGS titles.

Unavowed
With Unavowed, Gilbert’s pushed even further, managing to blend a point-and-click adventure with elements of BioWare-style RPGs—character creation, companions, and even the non-linear story structure.

[ Further reading: These 20 absorbing PC games will eat days of your life ]
Okay, character creation’s not quite as in-depth as a BioWare RPG. You won’t be sculpting your little pixel-art face or anything. Unavowed begins with an exorcism. Your exorcism. You’re standing on a rooftop, lightning coursing through your body but still slave to a demon’s will, and you’re compelled to remember your past—bartender, actor, or police officer.

Unavowed
It’s not an idle choice. Your career choice sets up the next scene, a short prologue backstory that, yes, is different for each of the three professions, though Gilbert says each comes to a similarly-grisly end. For my demo we choose a police officer, responding to a murder scene and then...well, best not to spoil it maybe. Suffice it to say, it’s “just like a Bruce Lee film.” The game’s words, not mine.

Three different stories though and then you’re back on the rooftop, lightning channeling through your body again as you struggle to get rid of the demon that’s possessed you.

“You’ve been possessed for a year, and during that time the demon who possessed you has done all these horrible things,” says Gilbert. “Now you need to go and try to fix them and find out what he was doing and put it all right.”

Unavowed
It’s the setup for a tale of redemption that spans every borough of New York City. Set in the same gritty-supernatural universe as the Blackwell games, you join a group known as the Unavowed dedicated to fighting evil. And you make some friends along the way.

“My favorite part of the BioWare games is...whenever I finish a section I love seeing how the various companions you choose react to things. This is basically a whole game based on that,” says Gilbert. “You go through a mission and depending on who you brought with you, all the puzzles change because you get through obstacles in different ways.”

Gilbert takes me through a few examples. At one point we’re on a speedboat, being chased by a demon down what’s presumably the Hudson River. One of our companions, Eli, is a fire mage. With Eli in our group we found a spare can of gasoline hidden away in the speedboat, threw it on the demon, and then lit it on fire.

Unavowed
But replace Eli with Madonna, a more athletic companion, and the scenario changes. This time around we simply slow the boat and Madonna leaps on the demon with her sword.

Other characters even react differently, depending on who’s in your party. Vicki, our fellow police officer from the prologue, is a potential companion. Since she’s part of the force, other officers will be more forthcoming with information. Don’t have Vicki in your party for that mission? The police will be standoffish, and you’ll have to get the info a different way, like using Logan’s ability to speak to ghosts.

“The biggest difference between audiences now versus audiences from the 90s is that the internet exists now. You only get stuck on puzzles if you want to,” says Gilbert. “The fun isn’t getting stuck on a puzzle. It’s the reactivity and the immersion and all these character-based moments which is what I’m stronger at.”

Unavowed
This stuff’s not exactly revolutionary for “Video Games” as a medium. Multiple paths to an objective? Characters reacting to your party members? Yeah, okay. Been there, done that. But there’s something weirdly thrilling about seeing it folded into a traditional point-and-click adventure game, a genre that’s, at least mechanically, barely evolved since the ‘90s.

“Basically I’m designing each mission five times. I really want each path to be unique, and I want that feeling of ‘What if I went back and tried a different combination?’” says Gilbert.

“It’s really to encourage replayability and discussion,” he continues. “The biggest issue with a lot of adventure games, and mine especially, is that once you finish it there’s nothing to talk about. Everyone’s had the same experience. This way, people have different experiences, they talk about it, and even if they watch a Let’s Play they’d still maybe feel compelled to buy it.”

Unavowed
Every New York borough is represented in the final game, and Gilbert says you can approach them in any order—another BioWare hallmark and another rarity for a point-and-click game. “It’s very much got that BioWare story structure where it’s linear for a while and then it’s like ‘Oh here are these four places we need to go’ and you can do them in any order,” he says. “Then it all branches back and goes linear again.”

I’d also like to note that Unavowed is beautiful. It still has that mid-90s point-and-click look, but Wadjet Eye’s longtime artist Ben Chandler has really outdone himself here. The resolution’s been upped from previous games, and the result is some of the smoothest pixel art I’ve seen in an adventure game—not the “Flash” look used in many of Daedalic’s games, but something in between.

It solidifies Gilbert’s vision of New York as this mystical place where the supernatural hides in the shadows. We walked around Staten Island a bit during the demo, and the leap in fidelity over Blackwell and even last year’s Shardlight is noticeable.

And he did it in AGS. “I stick with the devil I know,” says Gilbert, laughing. “If I had the budget I wouldn’t use pixel art, I’d love to have real-time 3D or whatever like Life is Strange or what Telltale does.

“I’m not in that league, but I’m still a modern developer, designing with modern audiences in mind.”

As I said: Dave Gilbert, AGS’s finest advocate. Unavowed is set to release later this year, so keep an eye out.

 

[V_K]

Okay, character creation’s not quite as in-depth as a BioWare RPG. You won’t be sculpting your little pixel-art face or anything.

 

[DaveGilbert]

Reading interviews with myself just makes be think that I need to work on my "speak in soundbyte" skills!

 

[DaveGilbert]

Can you spill the beans whether Vince Twelve is working on some game (preferrably with you guys)?

As far as I know, he isn't. He did write a graphic novel, but nothing game related.

 

[Morgoth]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/03/23/unavowed-adventure-rpg/

How Wadjet Eye’s Unavowed merges RPGs and point and click adventures

By Adam Smith on March 23rd, 2017 at 5:08 pm.

I’ll always be excited when a new Dave Gilbert game is on the horizon. Since I first played The Shivah in 2006, a murder mystery more concerned with the Jewish faith than gangsters and gumshoes, I’ve felt I’m in safe hands with almost anything Gilbert puts out under his Wadjet Eye label. That includes games that he publishes as well as those he creates, and while I haven’t adored every single release, I’ve always found something to admire. With Unavowed [official site], his next game, Gilbert is incorporating ideas from the RPG world into a point and click adventure, and the combination could lead to his most interesting release to date.


The highlights of Wadjet Eye’s back catalogue are found in the Blackwell series, Gilbert’s own quintet of New York stories, which show a city haunted by the ghosts of its own past (and its own popular culture), and often feel like a collection of thoughts about storytelling as well as a ghostly set of mysteries and mysticism. What are the stories people will remember about us and tell after we are gone? What tale will the manner of our death tell to those who didn’t know our life? How do we make sense of a world that often seems nonsensical?

Joseph Mitchell, one of the city’s great chroniclers, is an important figure in the games and, Gilbert tells me, in his own life. It makes sense that he’d be interested in Mitchell (“Inspired by” is the phrase he uses to describe the relationship); both men are natural storytellers, driven by a strain of humanism that values the eccentrics and the workers. It’s easy to look at a city like New York and think of so many of its people as cogs in the great machine. Mitchell was down in the engine room talking to the people elbow-deep in the guts of the thing. One of the most important aspects of his written portraits is that he doesn’t describe the job, position or role, but the person enacting it.

His most famous essays and studies focus on true eccentrics though. People not just marginalised by their social or class status but by their entire way of life. Among them is Joe Gould, who may have been something of an obsession and muse for Mitchell, and for Gilbert as can be seen in this non-fictional investigative story. Gilbert himself has something of the gumshoe about him.

With Unavowed, he is making an explicit move into Urban Fantasy. Though still set in New York, “this isn’t a story about the city in the way that Blackwell was”, he tells me. That’s not to say the scenery won’t be recognisable, and the backgrounds are more detailed and evocative than in any of the Blackwell games, but magic and monsters have come to the streets and waters of NYC, and the characters you control are effectively a fantastical RPG party.

There’s a fire mage, a sword-wielding half-djinn half-human and the next in the line of Blackwell’s “bestowers of eternity”, a person with a link to the paranormal world, whose ghost guide allows him to speak to the dead and, perhaps, release them from the bonds that tie them to our world. In total there are four companions and your own character can have one of three backgrounds, and can be either male or female. The backgrounds might colour later conversations but the main effect I’ve seen is a Dragon Age: Origins style prologue for each.

Most recently, I saw the actor background, which digs into Greek mythology, adding yet another category of fantastic possibilities. This seems like a very inclusive setting, with its djinn, muses and mages. It’s also a violent setting. The origin story sees the player character, no matter their background, possessed by a demon and forced to do terrible things, and a particular moment in the actor’s prologue widened my eyes in a way that I didn’t think this kind of pixel art could. Here be gore.

The possession leads to a six month narrative gap in which the character leaves a bloody trail in their wake, before their eventual liberation thanks to the Unavowed, who are your companions for the rest of the game. Each of those four companions has their own approach to problem-solving and even though you’ll be fighting monsters as well as investigating arcane matters, this is still very much a point and click puzzle game. One combat sequence that I saw has the team trapped on a boat that is under attack. Depending which companions are on the boat at that time, the assailant can be driven away and pacified in several different ways. All involve some combination of items and skills to find the solution rather than simply using an ability on the enemy.

And then, once the creature is pacified, you can have a chat with it and decide what to do next. Kill it or spare it – either way there will be consequences down the line.

What Gilbert is creating here, along with long-time visual and audio collaborators Ben Chandler and Thomas Regin, is, by his own admission, a BioWare style RPG using the tools of his own particular trade. That’s the tools of point and click adventures, and Adventure Game Studio more specifically. It makes sense then that the fourth member of his development party is Jennifer Hepler, formerly a writer on Dragon Age and a story consultant here.

The explicit move toward a party-based structure means that there are alternate dialogues and solutions depending on the companions taken on each mission. Add that to the backstories for the player character and the game is dense. The player character is unvoiced, avoiding the nightmare situation of having to record male and female dialogue for three separate backstories and a web of tangled interactions depending on choices made and companions chosen. There’s still a lot to see and hear though, and Gilbert hopes players will be intrigued enough to go through the game more than once to see the results of alternate choices.

I wasn’t 100% sold on the explicit turn into Urban Fantasy when I first saw the game. Even though the Blackwell series has ghosts and a demonic presence, it felt grounded in reality. Unavowed doesn’t have that same grounding from what I’ve seen, with its monstrous showdowns and magical lairs. It’s more comic book, though a brief conversation with Gilbert about Buffy suggests he is interested in at least that level of grounding. These characters aren’t quite superheroes and will have to find a way to deal with reality as well as fantasy. I love that the mission selection screen is a subway rattling along with the chosen party on board, waiting for you to select a destination.

And even though I might miss Mitchell’s direct influence in Unavowed’s world, which is more influenced by the likes of Jim Butcher, what I am 100% sold on is the idea of a designer who has worked within the very obvious limitations of a certain genre attempting to bring in ideas from other places, expanding the borders of his own chosen genre rather than jumping ship. This isn’t a BioWare style RPG; it’s a point and click adventure game taking ideas from another space and working them onto its own canvas.

That is a fascinating proposition and I can’t wait to see how it turns out.

 

[DaveGilbert]

I did another devstream today! Here's me implementing a bunch of characters and scenes. No spoilers, for those worried about that kind of thing.

 

[DaveGilbert]

Hi all. Sorry for the double post. We are at the rough 3/4 mark and have a new build available for testing. We'd like to get some new fresh eyes on it. If you're interested, register on the Wadjet Eye forum and tell me your username (by PM or by email - dave@wadjeteyegames.com). I'll give you access.