The earliest sketch of the character who would eventually become Rain! This is the only time we'd see her without a cloak – it was suggested as a uniform literally minutes after this initial sketch.Hi, I'm caps, the director, writer and ui artist for Upwards, Rain! The Post Office of Farewells. I thought it'd be fun to take a peek behind the curtain of how the game was handled during the concept phase, since it was a really interesting experience for me and not something I had really done before (like this, anyway!)
Planning Upwards, Rain! was the easiest time I've ever had brainstorming in any form, and I'd be surprised if anything ever tops it in that regard. Normally, given the luxury of time, I tend to prefer to start with big ideas and keep narrowing the scope smaller and smaller from there. Twofold's story was outlined that way: we had the conflict between Caprice and Millie nailed down almost immediately, with everything being created after the fact with the intention of serving that story in some form or another. This is a pretty common way of doing things, but Rain being a part of a game jam (in my mind) necessitated going in the opposite direction; letting the smaller details shape the story organically.
The planning for Rain started with me telling theo that I would love to make a story in a fantasy post office, inspired by a music video we had watched set in an old, rustic looking post. That was nearly the extent of the initial pitch… past that, I originally suggested that the couriers would be fairies! Thankfully, theo mentioned that a post office reminded them of carrier pigeons and instead brought up the idea that our postal workers could instead be based on birds.
The earliest sketch of the character who would eventually become Rain! This is the only time we'd see her without a cloak – it was suggested as a uniform literally minutes after this initial sketch.This served as the proper start of the string we began to tug on. Birds make their nests in trees, so the post office could be in one! Trees are tall, so the story could be about climbing the tree to find something! Oh, oh. There should be four couriers, and they should be named Rain, Sleet, Snow and Hail… like the post office motto! Excluding the main character, that leaves three couriers… which slots into a three act structure perfectly, we can dedicate each act to a different coworker!
This conversation continued on over the course of a day, and before the sun had set on our first day of game jam preparation, we had naturally created a setting, a full character cast, and a general premise. All from the doodle of a little bird girl.
An early sketch of the post office's exterior, then tentatively called the Bureau of Delivery. In the full version of the game, the exterior background has actually been edited to resemble this more closely!I had compared this method to pulling on a string earlier, but in truth it was more like a web, spreading across multiple aspects of the game, story and otherwise. We wanted our then-unnamed fantasy world to be a mix of different cultural ideas and themes. From there came two decisions: the naming of Alchemica, referencing the act of alchemy (obviously) as a means of combining multiple things together to create something greater. The second was the naming of our four couriers, all having their names translated into other languages. All except Rain, who we decided to keep in English.
At this point in the brainstorming process, it had just sort of naturally dawned on both theo and I that this project was going to be an all-ages experience, designed for young children and grown adults to enjoy equally. Keeping Rain's name in English was a deliberate decision based on this – we wanted our protagonist's name to be easy to remember for those who were most likely to play the game. Our primary playtester for our various puzzles was actually 6 at the time of development (for those of you who got game overs during the Neve puzzle… sorry)! The name "Rain" for the protagonist helped us in other areas from there: "Upwards Rain" was pitched as a name just on the basis that… well, rain does not typically go up and it was kind of silly and catchy. That title, though… we knew we had wanted gameplay of some sort in this game, and the "verb, noun" stuck with us in a way that directly inspired the stamp mechanic, not to mention that moment… ah, no spoilers if you didn't get the chance to play the game jam version!
You can't see it from the background's angle, but the front office looks like this we promiseI could go on and on from here and trace back every single aspect of this game, but the ultimate point I wanted to illustrate was that nothing about Rain was created in a vacuum. Everything directly influenced (and was directly influenced by) something else. This wasn't a kind of planning I had ever really done before for a project like this, but it was a lot of fun to work from the top and find a foundation, rather than the other way around! I don't think this would work with every project, but Rain definitely benefited a lot from this "oh, and" approach, and I'd attribute a lot of Rain's consistency when it comes to the world and characters to it.