Distillation

None of those moving pictures this time... In the beginning of the year we applied for some money from the cultural funding foundation. It's a government fund that any culture project can ask money from. With the additional funding we planned to work with the game during summer and add in-game events. These events would have used local folklore from remote North-Eastern areas of Finland. We applied to this funding in February and yesterday we got a negative reply.

The would-be source material for the events can be found in Finnish and English from here: http://tarinakartasto.karttatiimi.fi/ You can change the language from the top right corner. Check the box next to "tarinakohteet" (story objects) to get access to the actual stories and their locations.

There are smaller and bigger stories. Some of those would be perfectly suited for a game. There are local versions of misbehaving will-o'-the-wisps and old women crawling on all fours across a lake. Some are about wizards who reside by (actual) places with names like Gut-Lake. If you are into storytelling or folklore, it's definitely worth checking out.

Getting the events into the game would have given more depth to the world. It is of course a bit disappointing to be denied a boon. Not that the money was that much anyway, but for a small student team all extra financial support would be welcome. Now we'll have to reconsider how much we can work on the game during the summer time.

On the positive side the material isn't going anywhere. And it's only made more delicious by time, so we'll see if we get to use it at some point. It might not be for this game though. Now that we have to cut most of the events (like non-player-characters), we have even tighter focus for the the rest of the game. We also snipped out a smaller feature earlier this week. Distillation makes the end product stronger.