Cursed Travels: what more to expect

The second entry in my Cursed Travels series, The Shattered Labyrinth, was very recently released; play it HERE if you haven’t already! And if you’ve finished it already, have you found the secret room yet?
Anyway, I thought this might be a good time to write about what my current plans for the series are.

The first entry in the series, Flame of the Banshee, was quite fun to make. Usually when carefully approaching a new project I start with some base gameplay mechanics, and work from there. Flame of the Banshee, on the other hand, started with a vague idea for an (arguably) interesting visual I had one late evening in March. Some quick doodling yielded the following result:

First draft of what would become Flame of the Banshee

I figured a game in this style might be worth a shot. This time the challenge was designing from a very basic premise and visual style, instead of gameplay. This in turn forced me to think more about the why, thus pushing me to create more lore for a change. I early on decided that Cursed Travels would be a series if it was well-received.
Another thing: I assumed this visual style would be quite challenging to work with. Not only is it a bit pixely (all visuals are doubled in scale), but more importantly it only uses two colours. I assumed sprites would blur together into a noisy mess of the same colour. As it turned out, this was way less of a problem than anticipated thanks to some easy tricks. Firstly, important sprites such as characters or significant objects have an outline of the dark colour. This outline isn’t all that noticeable perhaps, as the background is often the dark colour itself, but when moving these sprites in front of other light visuals they’re still easily distinguishable from them. Secondly, simply using dithering appropriately goes a long way, as long as you fill the rest of the sprite with the dark colour. For example, the graves in some backgrounds are barely filled in with just a little usage of the light colour. Because the rest of the shape is still there in the same colour as the background, you still get a good sense of what shape they are when they overlap with other objects.

Some of you might be wondering what happened with the mysterious bottle you get in Flame of the Banshee, which was absent in Shattered Labyrinth. Don’t worry, this artifact has not been forgotten. I’m saving the bottle and the very related fabled Sunken City for something bigger in the series. Before we get to that point though, it seemed appropriate there should first be a couple of entries like the first two to flesh out the world and the characters a little bit. Additionally, these first games serve as a nice opportunity to play around a bit with the gameplay and puzzles, see what works best. Flame of the Banshee had the mechanic of placing candles, whereas Shattered Labyrinth was more about the titular labyrinth and throwing flasks. Future entries in the series might have more or less focus on exploration, puzzles and/or platforming. Some things will always remain the same: the visual style stays (although each game will have 2 different colours) for example. The games will always focus the most on puzzles and riddles and such, less so on platforming skills. And I’m quite fond of the high five at the end. Ultimately, things that work well can be reused in a larger game centered around the Sunken City, or other instalments.
In short: expect more stand-alone Cursed Travels games before the mysterious bottle makes a comeback.

As for right now, the third entry is already in the works. More specifically: most of the game has been designed on paper, and the main backgrounds are done. It’ll be on hold for a little bit though, as the latest one just released and I’m working on that there little Steam 2D platformer thing.
A fourth entry has also been mostly designed on paper. So I’m thinking maybe just those 2 (the third and fourth entries) plus perhaps a fifth “small” Cursed Travels instalment, and then it’ll be time to look for the mythical Sunken City.

Ok bye.