Hello, and welcome to Everend’s spiffy new game development blog! Our team will update the blog with at least one new post by Wednesday each week, so check back often to see if there is anything new to check out. I look forward to keeping you in the loop with everything we are up to, whether it is gameplay, characters, art development, music, I hope we can share with you all the hard work that will go into making Everend a great game. Thanks for coming along for the ride!
We will start off the page by answering the what is both the most important question, and the most general;
What is Everend?
In short:
Everend is an Adventure/Puzzle game. You play an owl, making it’s way to the surface from deep inside a complex cave system. The gameplay is a mix of third person and side scroller, where you have to solve puzzles involving getting through environmental hazards, avoiding hostile creatures and perhaps using them to your advantage to get further along in your journey. It’s a type of game that focuses more on exploring the space, enjoying the atmosphere, and following the storyline.
The Story:
In Everend, you are in adolescent owl, who is part of a flock that lives in giant, towering trees. Your kind is said to have descended from a highly advanced ancestral line, who built great legendary temples, which are now lost to the ages. Your flock has continually been trying to return to their lost homeland, but to no avail.
You always were a little different that the rest of your flock*, but it was where you belonged, your flock was both family and home, and all you’ve ever known. During one horrible monsoon, you were wrenched away from both family and home by a lightning strike hitting your flock’s home tree, singeing your wings and casting you down from the rest of your flock. You wake up alone, washed deep down into what appears to be a gigantic cave. Unable to do little more than glide because of your damaged wings, you must traverse through these complex caves back using what few items you could find in the caverns, and ascend towards the surface through all the obstacles standing in your way back to home.
But sometimes a cave is more than simply a cave, and as you continue on your journey, perhaps you will find the there is more behind this place than what first you see at the surface. (Surface? In a subterranean cave? haha, get it? Ah, cave puns and owl puns, get used to them.) You will given be various hints and objects along the way that help you being to piece together your kin’s past, and find that perhaps home isn’t always the place where you belong, and the bravest adventures are the ones you don’t expect.
This game is being created by a team of 12 UW Stout Game Design students, as their final senior project. We will introduce ourselves in our next major post, but until then I hope you enjoyed reading the barebones idea of what to expect out of our game and our project. I look forward to sharing more with you in the near future!
-Megan, of Strix Game Studio
*Fun fact, a group of owls is actually called a parliament, or a stare.
Everend DevBlog 