A will, a sedan and a bulldog
Day one of a car combat game about a family, a fortune and the most expensive drive in the history of a country that does not exist. What we are making, and the three rules we wrote on the wall.
Every game starts as a sentence somebody says out loud and then cannot take back. Ours was: what if the race was the reading of the will?
That was a Tuesday. By Friday the sentence had a hearse in it, a bulldog, a gramophone record and a sum of money with too many zeros, and we had started this diary so that in a year’s time we can look back and see exactly where it went wrong.
The pitch, as it stands tonight
It is 1975, in the Federation of Valmora, a country with nine provinces, one long highway and no sense of proportion. Cornelius Vane, the richest man in it, has died. He has left his will on a gramophone record, because he did not trust anyone to read it with feeling.
Four billion goes to the heir who drives the length of Valmora, from the seaside town of Port Saffron to a rock in the sea called Endmost Isle, and makes the most noise on the way. Wrecks, near misses, demolished civic furniture, a rival relative written off: all of it counts.
You play the two people who were left nothing. Wade, his driver of twelve years. Vee, his fiancée, who witnessed the will and was therefore left only the dog. The dog comes too. The dog was never in question.
Three rules on the wall
Every project needs a short list of things it will not compromise on, written large enough to be read from the kettle. Ours:
- Every crash is a sentence. Noise is the currency. If something breaks, the game should notice, write it down and, ideally, be rude about it.
- Watercolour, not grime. Car combat usually comes in brown and grey. We want paper, washes and colour that bleeds when it rains.
- Awful people, beautifully mannered. Nobody in the family raises their voice. They raise their bumpers.
Anything we make from now on gets held up against those three. If it fails all three, it goes in a drawer. We have a large drawer.
What this diary is
We are a small studio called Mild Peril, and this is our working notebook, published. Sketches, wrong turns, playtests, the occasional small victory. We will show work in progress, because it is all in progress: the game is in pre-alpha, and will be for a while. Things you see here will change, some of them several times, some of them tomorrow morning.
Rally Mortis is for adults. It contains cartoon violence, crashes and a quantity of watercolour blood. Nobody in it is real, including the country.
Next time: paint. Specifically, how many attempts it takes to make a mansion look as if it was painted on a wet afternoon by someone who did not like the family. The answer is more than ten.