Hello, everyone! After a few weeks of silence, I hope this to be the first of many regular posts that I make about our progress on The Anatolian Trail.
Fortunately the government is open once again (and looks to stay open), which means we’ll now be able to start work on a game that immerses the public into the culture, language, and time period of Proto-Indo-European (PIE).
One of the cool things about this game is that pretty much everything we include will be grounded in reality at some level.
In some instances, such as with the language and culture of the people Gwen and Lucas interact with, it will be based in our understanding of the ancient PIE world through careful analysis and comparison of the ancient Indo-European cultures and languages. I’ll of course be writing more about this in the weeks ahead.
But in other instances we’ll be basing the game’s content off of things that exist in today’s world. Perhaps the clearest example of this will be the zones of the game themselves that Gwen and Lucas travel through.
Today I’ll be posting some images from the first of these zones, showing you background art that one of our artists, Zachary Hunt, has created for us. In my opinion, he’s done an incredible job re-envisioning what Ancient Crimea may have looked 5000 years ago.
The twins begin their journey back in time in a zone called Trxwéntix, or the land of Trxwénts, the god of thunder.
The name Trxwénts is the likely source of the Norse god name Thor, which — believe it or not — is still nestled in the English word Thursday “Thor’s day”.
When the twins travel back in time, they land on a cliff overlooking a beach. We’ve chosen to have the twins arrive a specific beach in Crimea called Novyi Svit.
Below you can compare the four beach scenes that Zach has produced alongside the reference art of what Novyi Svit looks like today.
In the last scene, you can see what playable Gwen will look like. She was drawn by Martin Gonzalez. I’ll show you more images of the characters in the next post.
Until then!
-Andrew
