Hello everyone!  

Today I want to write a little about how Dark Reality came into existence. While the development of the game started around mid-September 2024, the seeds were planted many months before.

While I was still working as a narrative designer at an AA studio, I shared the room with this colleague of mine, Alessandro. Chatting during breaks, we discovered we both appreciated listening to video game ambience as we worked. Immediately, he shared with me this mix of King's Field 4 tracks:

In those days, I was playing Dark Souls for the first time and had gotten knee-deep into reading blog posts by game developer Kayin, incidentally a FromSoftware connoisseur who writes extensively about game design. She wrote a review of King's Field, which had already sparked my interest in the game even before Alessandro suggested the mix to me.

I got immediately hooked on the tracks. Their vibe was evocative enough to drench me in a mist of concentration, yet not too aggressive, or my thought process would end up overwhelmed. I used the mix (which amounts to about an hour) as a larger pomodoro timer, playing it over and over throughout the final weeks of my previous job. It was April.

Fast forward to June, I'm still listening to the mix almost every afternoon as I work on my personal projects. It has become routine by that point, and I can already recognize each track by the first seconds. I like the entire mix, but there is one track that I subconsciously look forward to as I work toward the end of the pomodoro. The title is Dark Reality.

Who would have expected that, huh?

It is such a haunting track, and it became even more meaningful to me when I finished Dark Souls and, a couple of weeks later, watched this video by YouTuber and dataminer Zullie the Witch. The background music is, of course, Dark Reality from King's Field 4, but the map explored by Zullie is the Ringed City from Dark Souls 3.

The blend of the decadent imagery of the Ringed City with the archaic vibe of Dark Reality; the ghostly perspective of the data miner's camera, freezing every moment of gameplay as if time itself had ceased to exist; the ruins of Anor Londo in the distance, no more a place, but a wound crystallized in time, forever lost in nothingness. I was touched by the video on a very emotional level.

"That's what I want to do," I said to myself. I wanted to make a game, to create a world that a player could inhabit—a world a player would suffer to see crumble to dust, just like I was affected by the distant sight of Anor Londo, where I had once fought and died and won.

I started taking notes in a small spiral notebook. They piled up until I had characters, a story, and themes—but the game was still missing. Then Nicola joined me, and the game took shape.

What follows is material for another devlog.

Thank you for reading!

- Luca