NOTE: This post originally appeared in my Patreon account on August 24th, 2022
Wanted to announce a new project that I'll be working on for some time. Around this time last year, I pitched a few stories to Tales, which is an episodic, choice-based storytelling platform that's available on iOS and Android.
If you're familiar with Choose Your Own Adventure books, or Fighting Fantasy books, or any visual novel such as Doki Doki Literature Club or Steins;Gate, then Tales should be familiar to you.
And, very recently, my pitches were accepted and I was given access to the creator tools. Hooray! I can't even begin to express how excited I am to start this project.
Anyway, I've got three stories lined up for Tales, all of which exist in the same multi-dimensional universe as Ravens of Eternity. The first one I'll be writing is Eclipse Perilous.
Now, I'm not entirely sure how time-consuming creating that book will be, and it's very possible that it may eat into the time I use to build RoE. Or, in other words, I might have to scale back how many episodes I write weekly. But I'll do my best to maintain the same cadence.
In any case, here's my logline and pitch for the story. Hopefully that whets your appetite, and it gets you installing the app. Of course, the story isn't built yet, but I'll post it on here (and everywhere, really) once the first few episodes are out.
LOGLINE: You wake in total darkness just as the piercing cry of a crewmember echoes along the steel passageways. You’re then panicked when you hear the growling of many unknown beasts lurking in the shadows. You dig into your pocket and pull out a candle, your only defense against the darkness, and hope it doesn’t wink out.
PITCH: Eclipse Perilous is a steampunk survival horror where the player is a crewmember of the RMS Galahad, a grand airship designed for scientific study. Ordered by her Majesty, Queen Victoria the 13th, the RMS Galahad has been charged with a quest to observe and record the unnatural phenomenon known as the Shadow Vortex, a violent cyclone that occurs once every hundred years, during the Centennial Eclipse. Many weeks into the excursion, the player suddenly wakes up in their quarters, which has been bathed in total darkness. When they peek out into the passageway, they realize the entire ship has gone dark. They also hear the screams of their fellow crew members as they are torn to pieces by cruel predators. The player realizes that whatever is tearing everyone to shreds hides within the shadows themselves, and the only way to keep them at bay is with light. But all they have in their pockets are a simple penknife, some flint, and a half-used candle. Survival means finding more sources of light - or building them. But the player can perform neither while stuck in their room. They must venture forth in order to survive, or die in the dead of night to unspeakable horrors in the shadows.
