Hello, everybody! I hope you are having a great time. Today, I want to present you the first-ever executable version of TOSOD. This version is literally unplayable… because there is nothing except the title menu. All projects start somewhere, and I want TOSOD to start with the menu below.

Dragonrider and Sorceress

When the player starts the game, the first thing they see are two main characters: Dragonrider and Sorceress. Their current sprites are a work in progress, and certain things may change, but the general idea should stay the same. Dragonrider is a melee warrior-type character with a longsword, and Sorceress is a mage-type character who casts spells.

The thing I dislike about most modern single-player games is that the player is way too often alone. The NPCs may occasionally join you in certain areas, but it seems that your quest to save the world is mostly yours and yours only. In rare cases when companions are present, they are commonly just smarter NPCs at best and often just straight-up useless.

My goal with TOSOD is to make a game in which you are constantly followed by your smart companion, who has a huge influence on the plot, lots of dialog, and choices. I want the player to feel that they are not alone on their journey and that they have someone to rely on.

An important thing here is that the characters are a man and a woman, and both of them are playable: the player picks one in the introduction cutscene and continues to play while the other becomes a companion. There is a certain ideology behind why I want it to be this way, but I will explain it in the later DevLogs.

On Typography and Design

The game’s current logo and identity use a font called TupoVyaz, which is made by Paratype. I deeply respect this company and certain people working there, such as Alexandra Korolkova, whom I consider today’s greatest Cyrillic font-maker. However, I decided to use TupoVyaz not only because of my admiration but mostly because this font meets certain expectations that I have:

1. It looks Slavic but not too Slavic. This game’s plot and lore are influenced by Slavic mythology and culture, so I want to use a Slavic-looking font for its identity. However, being Slavic is not the ultimate goal of this game, so I don’t like the font to be way too Slavic, such as Ruslan font, for example.
2. The font is licensed under OFL, meaning I can use it freely for commercial purposes, including logos.
3. It’s all capital letters. This is debatable, but I believe in making UI fonts all caps. My reasoning here stems from my experience with Medieval books. I’ve seen lots of them, and many of them use all-caps fonts in places with very similar functions to what modern UI does.

There is definitely room for improvement. For example, it is worth searching for a font that supports so-called small caps, but for now, TupoVyaz is sufficient.

Another quick note on design: Dragonrider faces left, and Sorceress faces right because this is the proper way of balancing them. Who faces the right is who faces the future, and who faces the future is more interesting than who faces the past. If Dragonrider faced the future, he would draw too much attention to himself (he is already bigger than Sorceress), so to avoid this, I made him face the past.

The First Build and See You

After setting up my Godot project with all the necessary build requirements, I managed to make the first executable version. You can find it in attachments below this post. I don’t quite ask anyone to try it because there is literally just two characters, some sounds and music playing and nothing else, but I will definitely feel honored and touched if someone finds it interesting enough to check it out.

Thanks for reading this far. Stay tuned, and if you are interested, join the game’s Discord server: https://discord.gg/8buQ6myukB