Announcing away in the woods!

Pumpkin Snake Games is pleased to announce its next title: away in the woods! 

away in the woods will be a non-combat RPG Maker XP game based around exploration and item collection. The player will take control of (and name) a woman who lives alone in the woods, and live three days in her life: one as a 25 year old, one as a 50 year old, and one as a 75 year old. Each day, the woods and what you can do in them changes with time, and so will the woman. The choices she makes will influence how the people in the nearby village perceive her, resulting in one of five reputation-based endings.

My goal is for each playthrough of the game to take around thirty minutes to an hour to complete, so exploring everything the game has to offer should take about 3-5 hours. Or you can just do one playthrough! It's up to you.

Currently, the entire game is essentially planned out (every ending and how to get there), and I'm working on actually putting it together in RPG Maker. Ideally I'd have a bit more screenshots to show before announcing the game, but I wanted to announce it now for a very special reason: it's Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week 2022!

I was less explicit about this during the development of seaglass, but I'm aromantic myself, and it's an important component of the stories I write. seaglass is about the type of life I've ultimately found myself (very happy) in - an ambiguous, long-term and long-distance (well, not anymore! but it was when I was making seaglass) partnership. But away in the woods is about the life I grew up wanting for myself - happily alone, and ideally tucked away in the woods. It's inspired by every piece of media that helped make that feel possible to me, but especially the Hermit ending from Aveyond 1: Rhen's Quest by Amaranth Games. As happy as I am in my relationship, wanting that future as a kid was the clearest way I could express my identity growing up, and so it's not something I want to give up on now. So I decided the best thing to do was to make a game about it. Along the way, I ended up also being influenced heavily by the "old woman in the woods" archetypes I'm familiar with from high fantasy, which helped form the jumping off point of the game's endings. Ultimately, I'm really proud of what this game is shaping up to be, and looking forward to sharing it.

Before I close up this announcement, I'd like to yell in excitement about the title screen, which was drawn by Rosie Cerrone (Heckosart) of Rat King Collective! She's an amazing artist and I'm thrilled to have her work in the project.