The map that keeps its mouth shut

A watercolour of an old paper map on a desk under a lamp, a painted stretch of coast at the bottom and grey fog washed over everything above it. — The map on the desk. The bottom is coast. The top is weather. Pre-alpha: the fog is still a shade too tidy.

Most maps are keen to help. They show you everything at once, put a number in the corner and tell you how far you have still to go. We decided Valmora’s should be more like the family: polite, well dressed and not inclined to tell you anything it does not have to.

So the map of Valmora is now under fog. The places you have reached are painted in. The next step is a single dashed line into the grey. Past that the map does not say, because the map does not know, and if it does, it is not telling.

Painted map of Valmora: the coast and the canal country in colour, the road running north into fog, pencilled notes in the margin: not yet, here be lawyers, ask Crane — Valmora as the game shows it today. One road, north. The rest is fog.

A wash and a name

When you reach somewhere for the first time, the fog lifts off it once, as a wash of colour spreading over the paper, and the place’s name is inked in by hand. It happens once per save. If you have seen it and would rather get on with things, you can skip it, which we think is a little rude but entirely your business.

There are notes in the margins too, in a hand you will come to know. The chapter after this one is named on the map only as "chapter two". Everything past it is grey land and rumour.

Do not count the fog.

Nothing counts

The harder job was making sure nothing else in the game talks. Menus are terrible gossips. A gallery with a tally in the corner has told you the size of the road before you have driven a mile of it.

So the achievements, the gallery and the trophy room now show only what your save can reach, followed by a single card under fog that reads, simply:

More, further north.

Clauses of the will that belong to later roads say "Opens further north" and nothing more. There are no totals anywhere, and we wrote a rule that stops a number of that kind sneaking back in. The loading screens got a few tips that are, we admit, more cryptic than helpful.

Under fog

The terms, sharpened

The rest of the day went on the terms of the will, which is what we call difficulty. Each now comes with one dry line when you choose it, so you know what you are signing.

Lenient is now properly forgiving: Prudence takes more punishment, the rivals drive a little slower and hit a little softer, people in the street are slower to get in your way, and the car quietly helps you along when you have fallen behind.
Ruthless went a step up: rivals quicker and harder, more wreaths to contend with, and less patience all round.

Standard stays as the deceased intended, which is to say not very kindly.

Lenient, Standard or Ruthless. Read the terms before you sign.

the studio

Small mercies

A few smaller things a player will feel rather than see. The first crash of a race used to make the game catch its breath for a moment; it no longer does. Animals and people in the street no longer pop into view: they arrive, as people do, from somewhere. And everyone now keeps a more sensible distance from a car that is on fire.

All of it is pre-alpha. The fog will get thicker, the wash slower, and the margin notes, we suspect, ruder. But the map now knows how to keep its mouth shut, and so, for once, do we.