Been a minute, hasn't it?
Known Unknown is one of several smaller projects we've been developing between updates for Splendor & Misery. These projects serve as test beds for ideas that will ideally streamline future work.
This particular project was meant to address three issues:
Speeding up the 3D modeling phase for backgrounds
Bringing back animated backgrounds, unseen since the first builds of S&M
Cleaning up the UI
Most of the art and writing for future updates of these projects is done well in advance. As mentioned in a few prior devlogs, the real showstopper has been (and continues to be) the backgrounds. Each background is a fully rendered 3D environment. While that allows for a lot of freedom in staging scenes, or easily going back to alter backgrounds when things change, it takes a lot of time! For instance, the brief scenes of a street in Scivolemo in S&M's last update took several days to develop. It's a deeply inefficient process that forces us to cut or alter scenes and narratives at times, as some environments are simply too time consuming to be justifiable.
Background ambience triggered during a conversation about Solemn Matéi.
Known Unknown is the first experiment in a stripped down, modular 'set'. Much like a film set, what needs to be seen is there, and what isn't is skipped over. The level of detail for the environment is also drastically lower than scenes in projects like The Mirror Eater. While props and details help to ground an environment, most of the time these details get simplified beyond recognition when the backgrounds are prepared for the games. This project is one of the more radically simple sets, as the low lighting conditions help mask a lot of this. Obviously, this method won't always work, but we can employ it when we need to, and can save on time and resources in the process!
Animated backgrounds and cut scenes were featured in the first builds of S&M, but have gone largely unused since, save for the main menu backgrounds. Their utilization in this project was experimental, and may or may not be used in the future. That's what a test bed like this is for! You'll have a clearer idea of what I mean if you opt to play it when it's released. It was important to figure out transitions between 'static' and 'dynamic' backgrounds, as we thought it helps immensely in immersing the player within a scene. There are limited plans for scenes using a similar, scaled-back version of this for a few scenes in the next S&M update. Now we know how to do it!
As for the UI, we started with the foundation of Farewell Intervale, and worked backwards. I personally was frustrated with some of the limitations of the FI UI, and set to work solving them within Known Unknown. The next FI update will use the upgraded version of the UI developed for this project. Future projects using the same format will also adopt this branch of the UI, as it really is noticeably cleaner.
What exactly is Known Unknown about?
You come to in a sprawling home after dark. At the start, you have only faint ideas of where, when, and who you are. There's a man upstairs, and he's been expecting you for some time now.
I think it's best to go into this project blind, but for those interested in spoilers, we'll elaborate below. If you don't want anything spoiled, feel free to come back to this after the game is out and you've had a chance to experience it.
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SPOILER ZONE! YOU'VE BEEN WARNED!
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Known Unknown places you in the mind of Yë Abado, known better under her maiden name, Urzima.
Born to a bourgeois family in Great Xi Lan, Urzima exploited the connections and status of her family to kickstart a career as a children's fiction author. It's during this time that the nation experiences political upheaval, brought to an abrupt end through the intervention of Solemn Matéi.
Forced to relocate to another island in the archipelago to escape the chaos, Urzima met an artist, one Àrwei Abado. A Mornseeker man hailing from Umikut'a, Abado began illustrating Urzima's books. The two eventually marry, but a personal tragedy derailed their personal and professional lives shortly thereafter. Desperate to find an outlet, and incapable of writing anything suitable for children, Urzima pivoted to political essays in a last ditch attempt to find a niche. It worked.
It's through these essays that she was able to attract the attention of the newly elected Solemn Tylòs. But the Solemn was not the only one borrowing her talking points.
In time, her ideas outgrew her, splintering into movements recognizable decades later: Modernism and Totalism.
Urzima lived to see two of the atrocities brought about by her ideology. She did not survive to see the third.
Chronologically, Known Unknown takes place nearly seventy years prior to the events of S&M. It is also the first project to be set on Minerva, one of the two Old Worlds. It was important for us to show the origins of this universe's equivalent of fascism, as well as the twilight of the Solemnic system. We see the ripple effects of these events later on, but it's difficult to parse just how these things came about. In S&M, Jensey later encounters remnants of the Solemnist faith, and through them you're given only part of the story. They make sure to leave out how it ended, with good reason. By the mid '40s, you also see how modernists and totalists have managed to come to power in nations like Monadia, later O'ayoh. These things take time, yes, but history doesn't stop marching forward, nor do ideas.
It was also important to strike a balance in depicting Urzima. She's ultimately responsible for the worst crimes of the last century. Does it matter if she regretted it after her ideas took on lives of their own? Is it right to feel sympathy for someone who becomes victimized by the very things they once advocated for? It's easy to write off ideologues as automatons, or to cast them as 'evil', as though they were born with the wrong switches flipped. It's not nearly as easy to do so when you are forced to measure their humanity against their cruelty.
The unsettling truth is that anyone can be seduced by these systems.
Anyone can enact immeasurable harm against others. Parents, grandparents. The little old lady down the block. Your siblings. Your friends. Your partner. Your children. Some of us have already lost people we cared for to the latest iteration of these poisonous ideas.
There's no real way of capturing that horror, not really.
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The concept for Known Unknown was refined rather quickly. Its original pitch was known as 'Mother of Nations', later referred to internally as Psychopomp.
It was intended to be a heavily altered revival of a cut chapter of S&M originally drafted for the initial release, and would've pulled heavily from the life of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, also known as the woman depicted in John Singer's Portrait of Madame X. That original version featured a character named Kuval Umand, and actually had a single asset created in November of 2023.
Over the years she was steadily reworked into Uzara Ockeryhu, a character featured on the marketing material of S&M, and as part of Döma's interim government.
Àrwei meanwhile is depicted using an updated version of the portrait originally used for Kilian, a character from the relaunch of S&M who was later cut. He was originally intended to be a personal ghost for the player, where so long as you found him in the previous chapter, he'd appear in the next, but was never seen with any other character. Other members of the cast would begin questioning your sanity, as you'd insist to them that a random man from your apartment building was following you halfway around the world. Àrwei's depiction, as well as Kilian's, is based off of a character that is referenced in TME as a folklore figure: Usikana.
Usikana has thus far only had one official depiction. Those of you who played the original release of S&M likely encountered it, but didn't see him.
In Howie's section, you originally saw the following CG:
Adjusting the brightness, you'd find…
Usikana no longer has an 'official' depiction, instead manifesting as different things to different people. The astronaut, or 'sanunusi' that appears to Wren and a few others in TME is one such instance.
But there once was a time where he did have a design that was being developed! The version that appeared in that Howie CG was toward the end of this design period, but we still have all of the different assets sitting around gathering dust.
The CG version is taken directly from this, a mock tarot card from May of 2023.
Concepts from January of 2023.
The note at the bottom: "Doesn't make sense to theme him around the Reaper as he would serve (in myth) as something like a psychopomp" ultimately was what prompted the removal of any overt depictions of him.
Also from January of 2023, during the development of the scrapped game Inland Empire.
Also from January of 2023.
A flag variant of Usikana intended for a nation on Minerva. Inspired by the Swiss canton of Glarus. Created in November of 2023.
Usikana and the Emirigashi, February of 2023.
Kilian's full-res portrait, October of 2024.
Àrwei's full-res portrait, February 2026.
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Work on Known Unknown is still progressing, so I don't want to give a firm date yet, but it'll be soon. Work is also still going on for the next S&M update, as well as some work on Farewell Intervale.
Sorry things are taking so long, real life has been busy since I wrapped up uni. ^^
Thank you for your patience!
'Til next time!