Update 0.6.0 – Faces and Voices

The biggest update yet in how Kolver looks and sounds. The people have faces now, the men have voices, and the game opens the way a disc in a grey console would.

01 · A new look

Faces

Everyone is rebuilt: low-poly bodies with real faces and real fabrics, in the spirit of the late-90s console and PC shooters.
Arms join the shoulders properly, the shoulders sit lower, and ears are shaped like ears.
The picture is drawn at 480 lines now: sharper, with the same wobble and dithering.
On the dialogue screen, the portrait is the person’s own face as you see them, hat or helmet and all.

Three of the King’s Guard on the football pitch.

02 · Spoken dialogue

Every man has a voice

The men speak their lines: soldiers, Varden, looters, the people who stayed behind and the voices on the radio. About 1,150 recorded sentences.
Three voices, young, middle-aged and old, each face at its own pitch: English with a Norwegian accent, crushed down to the PS1’s sound like everything else.
The words type out at the pace of the voice. Spoken dialogue in the settings turns it off.
Women, children and the boy himself still mumble, for now.

03 · Title and splash

Press Start

A new title screen: KOLVER over slow shots of ten places on the map, each one in turn before any comes round again.
Before the game, the studio’s logo is sprayed on a wall as you watch: the can shaken, the ring in one hurried lap, the cairn stone by stone, the paint running, all to the start-up jingle. Any key skips it.
A new game opens with the boy waking up in Grandpa’s bed. The pause menu matches the title screen.

04 · Music

Kolver’s own

Kolver has its own main theme, on the title screen once you press Start.
In a helicopter, flying it or flown, Chopper Journey. In a car with your squad, Army Ride. The music fades when you get out, and the engine and the wind ease down under it.
These replace the helicopter themes from the last update.

05 · The calendar

October 1998

Kolver is set in October 1998 now: the game begins on Monday 26 October.
The papers, diaries, notices and gravestones you find have moved with it.

06 · Smaller things

Fullscreen, and smoke

Kolver plays in fullscreen, so Ctrl+W can’t close the game by accident.
The flight course marks its waypoints with violet signal smoke that rises, swells and drifts with the wind. You can see it through the fog from the pad.