What have I been working on this past month?

Most of my time on SALTWATER over the past month has been spent revising large portions of the script and planning out some of the final few scenes. I’ve been able to play through large chunks of the game for the first time as several important pieces of the narrative are playable and have started coming together. The script is sitting at about a total of ~25k words right now.

Illustrations and Art

While I’ve been holding back a few new illustrations for SALTWATER until release, here are a few background illustrations without any text from new screenshots I released last month!

Engine + Other Technical Notes

One of my main goals when figuring out how to translate this story into something that you can get your (digital) hands on and read was making sure that it could be played in the browser without any downloads required. There are dozens of ways to make this happen, but ultimately I chose to script SALTWATER using Ink and to use Calico for my engine. If you're interested in creating narrative games, especially ones for the web, I would highly recommend checking these tools out and doing research into different ones as well. There are lots of options available to tell stories like these!

What else have I been up to?

I’ve finished a few new unrelated illustrations in the past month, you can view them here, here, and here! Additionally, I set up a Ko-fi page and have started to put up a few high-res downloads for some of my older illustrations. If you’re interested in seeing my painting process, I have a free download to a fully annotated PSD of one of my favorite older forest paintings here.

Outside of drawing and writing, I’ve finished reading about ~3 different novels in the past month. I’ve started compiling a list of novels, games, and other works that have influenced SALTWATER in some way and I’m looking forward to sharing all of these in a larger post after release.

- Sky