My brother and I released our first game on Saturday. It is called Sounds from Beyond.
Jack Holloway’s fiancee vanishes the morning after he proposes. What follows is his account of the two years after: the drink, the obsession, the memories that will not stay where he puts them. Five chapters, linear, one ending, about an evening long.
David wrote the first script draft in Spanish, in Buenos Aires. I read it in Atlanta and started building. We used AI to carry the noir register into the narration and to translate the text into English, so it ships in both. The narration is English only at the moment.
The look took the longest. We ran style tests until we landed on something we call cinematic ink: dark, part photograph and part drawing, held together with brush strokes. The illustrations are generated.
The voice took almost as long. Several passes on synthetic narration before we had something we could stand to listen to for an hour, and then I paced the delivery by hand, beat by beat, because the timing a model gives you is not the timing a scene wants.
The first chapter is free, so there is nothing to buy to find out whether it works.
The thing I would most like help with is what to call it. Narration and on-screen text are separate systems rather than one serving the other. With the sound off it reads as a short graphic novel. Without looking at the screen it plays as a narrated audiobook. We think of it as sitting between the two, or as an evolution of both, but I have not found a name for that and I suspect one already exists and I simply do not know it. What would you file this under?
A smaller second question: for a linear piece with no fail state, what makes a choice feel worth making when it changes what the narrator says rather than where the story goes?
Content warnings: alcoholism, a missing person, a car crash.