The Empty Inn and Untold Story – Similarities
Hello everyone!
As I’m sure you’ve seen by now, we’ve announced a new game, The Empty Inn!
The Empty Inn is a 2D, horror-adventure game with 8-bit, NES-style, pixel art. If you haven’t already, you can check out the trailer below:
Anyway, pre-orders aside, I mainly wanted to talk about the similarities between The Empty Inn and Untold Story and how they share more than just an art-style. But before I go any further, I just want to highlight that Untold Story is still in development. The Empty Inn is a side story, something for players to get excited for Untold Story.
Let’s start with how The Empty Inn came about:
Whilst developing interior art assets for Untold Story, I had an idea based on the interior pixel art I was creating. The idea was to create a game set inside an empty inn with the player exploring it and discovering its treasures. The game would also have horror elements to it (what’s more spooky than an empty inn?), and would require the player to manage their light resource whilst solving puzzles and exploring the inn.
After producing a quick prototype, I came to the conclusion that the game would be fun and that if I used some art assets from Untold Story I could create it fairly quickly and release it. I thought it’d be am interesting game to release before Untold Story and would get players hyped for the game.
The development of The Empty Inn wasn’t just driven by creative curiosities though.
I wanted to release something small and polished before Untold Story so that I could generate a bit more revenue (using the money I made from The Empty Inn to support Untold Story and any other games I create), as well as help get the Candlelight Studios brand out and into the open. Any money generated from The Empty Inn will be a huge help and will contribute to increasing the quality of my future games (for example I could use the money to get a dedicated sound track for Untold Story!)
The Empty Inn doesn’t just share art assets with Untold Story, the game uses a lot of Untold Story’s code, as well as sharing a lot of the game’s design and story philosophies. In fact, developing The Empty Inn has taught me a lot of lessons which will be applied to Untold Story’s development. This will make Untold Story even more awesome!
I hope this clarifies some things. Sorry this is a bit short! I’ll be making more blog posts about The Empty Inn over the next couple of days, going more in-depth about the game, so stay tuned!
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