friendship!! angst!! afterlife!!!

"if there's an afterlife after this

i want to find you there.

if there's anything,

i hope the echos of my dying heart

can reach yours,

making a soft sound

that ends with a promise to return.

if theres anywhere we have to go,

i hope i find you in the line

so we can wait together

for the future, for the end."

this is part of a poem i made back in 2023 for a friend of mine. we both really enjoy the purgatoryverse games, and the theme really resonated with me. i liked this idea so much that i actually started to feel like writing a small game exploring it. a short thing about friendship... and afterlife...

(this was one random knight sketch i made that ended up becoming paulo's design...)

people who know me for a while know that i'm a bit obsessed with knights and armor and medieval stuff like that. considering that, coming up with the characters was quite easy. of course the story had to be about two knights, comrades of battle, and their friendship that would last even after death. *swoons* wahh i love knights and i love friendship...

the problem was... the tone of the story.

i really didn't know what feeling to write. one of my inspirations was a song called 'volta' ("come back") by my favorite brazilian band, 'o terno', but the song is actually romantic so it didn't fit... (though i used the name in the title, lmao). i could write a optimistic, hopeful, sweet story, but i was feeling depressed personally and it didn't feel right. i didn't know how to write paulo, i couldnt think of what he had to say. 

until some weeks ago, i had no idea.

then i went to play other stuff to see if i could get a grasp of what i wanted to tell. or rather, what i could tell with them. i played a very good game about meeting your beloved one last time and a game about an armor haunted by a ghost knight. both bangers (i recommend them). i also replayed another game about the wonders and melancholies of the afterlife (this dev's work really inspires me...)

some days after playing the knight game, i started to draft. even though i was more interested in improving some skills in coding (animating images and such) i wanted the story to be meaningful. it was a bit like my process in waiting for eurydice, to be honest -- i knew what i wanted to do coding-wise, but i was lost in the dialogue. in both cases, i had no inspiration and had to lean on my technical writing skills and experience lol (and both i finished in one single day...)

adding the animations was a bit complicated, but thanks to the help of some friends i managed it (thank you guys.....)

i wasn't planning in adding voice acting, but i finished the whole game so quickly that i convinced myself it could be done. and then i picked all my courage (and friend's encouragements) to go ask joey if he could voice paulo. and you canot imagine my happiness when he said he would do it. like!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! he honestly has one of my favorite voices in games and it was really a dream come true to get to work with him. thank you very much, again!!

i also want to give a shout-out to oddie's va which is the nicest person ever!!!!!! it was really nice working with him and his voice is really really amazing..... thanks you too!! :'')

honestly everyone involved in this game was really sweet... i'm grateful for everyone...

now, you may ask... does oddie remember paulo? does he not? are they really just friends or there's more to it?... haha, well... byee *runs away*