A talk beneath the tree

 

 

Hey team

It's me again ... hacking on something crazy as usual.

I /might/ have blogged about "A talk beneath the tree" back in 2020. Lemme check.

...

OK. Nope. I did not.
"A talk beneath the tree" is a non romantic relationship simulator drawn in wax crayon.

Two old friends - both Mages, in a world where all Mages are possessed - have a pivotal conversation. You choose what they say. The results echo out through their lives.

I made the original prototype in a 4-day fever-dream at 22.

I only owned crayons in the basic 12 crayola colours at that point, so the colour design was simple and bold. Blue Celeste. Purple Sylvain. Bright orange tree.

Why was the game in crayons?

Why a game, specifically is how I chose to explore the crayon obsession at that time, I can't tell you (sleep deprivation is my best guess), but the origin of the crayon thing, itself, I can tell you a bit about.

There were a dark couple years in my late teens where I couldn't get ahold of art supplies. Without going into the details of that situation, things were /bad/ for a while there. And at that point, even HB pencils were a scarce resource for me.

Somebody gave me a packet of dollar store crayons. And, having little else to draw with, I sketched with them to the stubs.

It was frustrating, at first. They didn't handle like the tools I was used to. There was no subtlety; no control. But in time, I fell in love with those scratchy, colourful lines - and when I had choices again, I kept choosing crayons.

Wax crayons, to me, sit a little closer to the wild side of art than most traditional media, and certainly more than digital media. When you fight with them, they fight back. When you relax into them, they sometimes surprise you with delightful, loose little illustrations.

I think I wanted to make a game about ... uncovering your own past. That year, a lot of my little text games were about people waking up unsure of what had happened to them. A girl tries figure out when, exactly, she became a distinct person from her twin brother. A sci-fi rebel in a grimdark future tries to piece together exactly how he was wounded. Circles on circles and vague tangles of unreal realities. "A talk beneath the tree" was by far the most concrete, coherent thing that came out of that phase of my artwork.

I was working as a full stack dev at a little startup. Remote for the first time, as many of us were.

I started scribbling and hacking one Friday evening, and proceeded to not sleep for four days while I built the proof of concept. I was thrilled with the result.

But it was such a weird little thing and I didn't know what to do with it - so I set it down and didn't touch it for five years.

Well ...

I needed to take a break from my all consuming RPG project for a little while this summer, and I decided to take on a *small* side project and get something ready for release quick. I chose "A talk beneath the tree" for this.

It took about 4 times the time I thought it would - and the content and production quality went WAY up, but it's done, and it's coming out on Steam soon.

This is a bit of a milestone for me.

I've put small games out on itch before, or published independently, but this is new to me.

I'm trying to learn a lot of things I don't really understand, like how to be my own social media manager. It's hard, but I'm gonna do my best.

And you'll be hearing a lot more from me as I figure it all out, and gear up for the big launch.

Talk soon,

Ral