When we first came up with the idea for Chicken Police, we wanted to create a gritty but funny noir set in a dark, corrupt city. But these modest ambitions quickly outgrew themselves, with our writer and director Bánk sketching out a world with its own history, culture, religion, countries, and factions years before the game was actually developed. This gave Wilderness its backbone, but even we were surprised at how it evolved...
THE SACRED LORE
Of course, the most critical foundation for world-building is the in-game lore. Little nuggets of information that may not be relevant to the game's story, but slowly build up a sense of the world in the player. After all, the world doesn't revolve around the Chicken Police, or Clawville even! The Wilderness is its own thing, and everyone you know and love from the Chicken Police game (soon to be plural) exist in it.
Over time, you begin to see how the inhabitants of this distinct world live and think, where the ways animals live together – with all the difficulties and dangers – are as much a part of everyday life as the ins and outs of our own real world. Where some religions are based on the rules of predation or the food chain, modern churches and ideas promote tolerance and peaceful coexistence.
However, the important lore details in our game are not just a few half-sentences in a dialogue. As soon as you discover something useful, a detailed codex entry is created, There are a total of 40 codex entries in Chicken Police – Into the HIVE! to discover, all diving deep into their own subject matter. Exploration will be rewarded!
WORLD BUILDING IN PICTURES
Our biggest weapon, besides written information, is the message of imagery. The game will be rich in colorful, world-building imagery that show small segments of everyday life, giving a more comprehensive picture of life in the Wilderness (and Clawville in particular). Be it just a movie poster, an advertisement for a beer brand, a propaganda poster, or a street mural. Each little detail is a piece of the puzzle that is The Wilderness, and makes the world more vivid, lived-in, colorful, and most importantly, more understandable for you.
We've put a lot of effort into these images, which our artists have taken great care to create. You'll be able to collect most of these in the game in your own internal gallery.
A BLOODY HISTORY
The Wilderness has an extremely rich and rather wild (pun intended) history, marked by constant wars and conflicts. At the heart of all this is Clawville, the city in which our game is set. A vast, vibrant metropolis, but also the center of a colonial empire that has been a central player in Wilderness power games for nearly a millennium.
NEWS FROM THE WILD
One of the most exciting tools of world-building for us was our own newsletter, 9 issues of which we edited as if they were real newspapers from the Wilderness. It contains a wealth of additional and side information to make your gaming experience that much richer.
You can find the newsletters here...: CLICK!
...and subscribe if you haven't already: CLICK!
NOT JUST A WORLD... BUT A BRAND?!
Yes, Wilderness is not just a world, it's a brand! As 'World of Wilderness', we want to expand the world to more games, even more game series, and we have a lot of exciting plans for the future. We unfortunately can't talk about any of this in further detail, at least not yet.
The Wilderness is a world with a lot of potential, so we can't leave it unexplored. Stay tuned and keep your eyes peeled, because we'll be bringing you some surprising news soon.
And most importantly, spread the word, follow, and wishlist the world's wildest animal-noir-adventure game.
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