Hi! Soooooo, we announced a fun little piece of DLC for Upwards, Rain! It's currently the night of said announcement at 1 am as I write this, so apologies for the stream of thought that's bound to occur. Anyway! I'd like to take this opportunity to go over how the DLC came to be as well as what it actually entails, since it's a bit different from the usual kind of update.
We always knew we wanted to make an artbook for but struggled a lot with the timing. The release of the game was a hectic time, and there simply weren't enough hours in the day to throw a book together amidst the final stretches of development. I was a little self conscious about this fact: would people really be interested in an artbook if it came out a significant amount of time post-release? Striking while the iron was hot was totally out of the question for this project, and I debated just scrapping the idea. At this point, I opened old project files for Twofold and Perfect Circle's artbooks, wondering if I could use them as templates to quickly throw something together. Perfect Circle's artbook was always something I took a lot of pride in, bookending each section with in-universe journal entries from a certain character.
This, as you may assume, started getting some gears moving.
The journal was something that existed in Twofold and it was easy to adapt, but what if Rain created a new character from scratch? That'd be a fun angle to explore, and that simple narrative may be enough of a hook to get people on board with a later-than-usual artbook! I pitched the idea to Theo and we brainstormed back and forth about the logistics of it. How much of it would be in-character, what would the character be like, etc. Ultimately we decided on a sort of storykeeper – an outsider whose job was to document an event. That was the initial pitch and where things were kept as we planned out the book together, but we came to a horrifying realization not too long after.
We'd need an actual plot. A satisfying end point for the character and motivation for them to reach that point. Otherwise, them being a new character wouldn't actually hold much weight. Okay. Fine. We need a second individual for this character to bounce off of. Our thoughts began and ended at a sparkbound: while earthfoot had at least a small presence within the base game (as the source of excess magic), sparkbound folk really were only mentioned in passing once outside of the glossary. We fleshed both of them out and what their trajectories would be and came to something we both felt was satisfying. The artbook was ready to begin development in earnest! But… what if there was an in-game element, too…? Uh oh.
From there it's easy to trace the line to where we are now. We figured out our scope and trialled a few ideas for gameplay (including if we wanted there to be any) and started properly refining the idea from there. And so the artbook became a unique dlc hybrid kind of experience.
That's how Reflections of the Chronicler came to be in broad strokes, but what exactly is it? Well, first and foremost RotC absolutely uses the artbook as the actual foundation. The plot and characters exist to match the "pacing" of the book, and a lot of care has gone into things such as the order of chapters and how to match the "intrigue" of the book's contents with a cohesive story.
The connecting thread is red ink. Our protagonist, Sulien, keeps a journal to chronicle her time in Vitae, and words from her pen is in a dark red ink. This is consistent in both the game and book.
We felt a really obvious visual distinction was necessary: we originally debated trying to make the entire artbook in-character and have things like dev commentary be from nameless villagers, but the logistics became too much to weave in a believable way. The artbook has notes from Sulien at the beginning of each section with some full journal entries scattered around ala Perfect Circle. A lot of the journal entries directly reference the in-game scenes, so to fully understand the complete context of the story you should go through both!
From an interactive point of view, the artbook offers the means to teach you the fantasy language, which you'll be able to use to accent your experience by learning to read signs and the like in both the book and game! Since this dlc is being designed for slightly older audiences than the base game, we've upped the difficulty of these puzzles so you can get a really satisfying feeling from learning to decipher the language. In-game, you'll follow Sulien and Techy through their time together, and will be tasked with chronicling different elements you find in dedicated gameplay segments. There won't be any puzzles in these segments: rather, we want to use these as opportunities to flesh out the lore and world. You'll be pointing and clicking, collecting lore entries (from Sulien's pov, it needs to be said!) about oddities in the environment, then reflecting on what you think is most important about your discoveries. Don't worry about this part too much, think of it as a little bonus personality quiz kind of deal!
There's a lot more details we can elaborate on in time but in truth this is something we've never really seen done before… at least in our preliminary research! It's been a learning process, but we think the experience will be a really cool one. At the very least, the idea of creating a little narrative in a place where no one would have expected it is really exciting for everyone involved. We hope you'll share that excitement with us as time goes on!