Night, rain, one lamp
The Coast Road runs from Port Saffron to Lowmarsh along a cliff, at night, in a storm, against a clock. On painting darkness, and why a race needs one warm light.
Lowmarsh closes its flood gates at midnight. You are on the wrong side of them, with a cliff road, a storm and three and a half minutes to fix that.
Lowmarsh closes its flood gates at midnight. We’re not swimming.
The Coast Road is the first stretch of the Long Spine, the highway that runs the length of Valmora. It is also the first level we built at night, and night in watercolour turned out to be a problem we had not thought about at all.
Painting the dark
Watercolour is transparent. The paper is the light. That is lovely in Port Saffron at four in the afternoon and a disaster at midnight, because a dark wash over white paper does not look like night. It looks like a stain.
What worked, after a week of muddy grey, was the opposite of what we expected. We kept the paper pale and let the sky do the darkness: heavy, bruised washes overhead that drip down into the cliff. The road stays readable, the world feels black, and the rain streaks across the frame like ink running down a page held at an angle.
One warm light
The note on the sketch became the rule for the whole level. Everything on the Coast Road is cold, blue, grey and wet, except for the lamps. A single warm light in a tunnel mouth tells you where the road goes better than any arrow, and when you see one, you aim for it. We use warm light as the signpost all the way down the coast.
Traffic
The Coast Road is not a closed circuit. Lorries, vans and delivery trucks use it too, and they have not been told about the will. They are on their way to Lowmarsh with fish, furniture and mail, and they are not going to move for a black sedan doing ninety.
The clock, the storm and the traffic turned out to be the best tutorial we have: by the time you reach the flood gates, you know how the car brakes, how it slides and how much a lorry weighs. Next: the people of Valmora, and their opinions.