It's been way over six years since I started working on what would eventually become Virtue's Heaven. The game went through many iterations, but throughout its cursed development there was one thing that stayed the same:
Movement should be expressive and exciting.
It was born out of a deep appreciation for maximalist mid-1990s action platformers and the frustrations I had with Metroidvania games and their insistence to lock cool movement abilities behind hours of needless progression.
I wanted a game, where you could explore a larger, connected space, without requiring players to collect several wardrobes full of movement upgrades in order to for the game to feel cool to play. And so, I created the most maximalist movement system I could think of.
Things always fell apart when I had to think about trivial things such as level design, or god forbid, narrative stuff and so the game was canceled at least four times.
Every once in a while, I would boot up the project again, run around in those very basic areas that I had, and every time my brain would go: "This is amazing! There's has to be a way to turn this into an actual videogame!"
In early 2019, I actually spun parts of Virtue's Heaven into what, almost two years later, would become GB Rober. The reason why GB Rober has a Dash, double jump (that also works as an attack), as well as a weirdly complex drop-dash ability, is because all of these were parts of Virtue's Heaven at that time, and some still are.
But GB Rober was its own thing, and after I was done with it, I had to come back to Virtue's Heaven. I was ready to make something that isn't an action platformer, but this project would haunt my life if I wouldn't get it out of the way.
So back to Virtue's Heaven I went, and now more than two years after starting this iteration of it, and having almost scrapped it twice since then, it has now finally reached what I would call its final state.
Virtue's Heaven is going to be a game about the final day on Earth. It's going to be about recklessly fighting for the people and ideas in your life that the world at large has deemed worthless. It's going to be about shooting laser beams at abstract representations of the Enlightenment, and exploring what can genuinely be considered "Humanities greatest failure": A curse that has already claimed many worlds before this one and will continue to claim even more, unless it is stopped.
And you won't have to play it for 20 hours, until you finally find the pair of shoes that let you double jump.
Virtue's Heaven has a Steampage. Obviously putting it on your wishlist is greatly appreciated, but even more so would I appreciate it, if you could tell folks of its existence.
Not enough people are aware of it, and I would like for this to change:
Thank you for your time and interest in my work.