Hello dear friends, thank you all for tour feedback, we've been fixing things here and there. We will keep improving the game so if you've noticed something please let us know.

Here are fixes in this version:
1. Fixed bad loading of dialogue statuses in the save files
2. Fixed crash caused by having UI elements open during scene transition
3. Fixed final titles overlapping each other
4. Fixed pointing at certain characters braking tooltips until restart
5. Fixed BnB bug (accured mostly in match with Hilda) where AI stuck midgame

Hello!
We hope you are enjoying Whateverland, please consider leaving a review :)

Check out Whateverland Soundtrack!

As you may have noticed, a little more than two weeks ago we released a free demo of Whateverland, which features the beginning of Vincent’s journey. The response from you has been great, we never thought it would be so rewarding to release our prologue.

We received a lot of valuable feedback from the players, fixed many bugs, and made some changes to UI and controls. And we will keep working in order to make your experience with our game as enjoyable as possible not only by regularly updating the demo but also on the release of the full game. We’ve already fixed many issues in the latest update of the Prologue, and will continue to improve it!

Creating a community around our game has been a very rewarding process as well. Thanks to our Kickstarter campaign[kck.st], we met a lot of wonderful people, some of which have generously helped us with translating the Prologue into several languages. We've already added Chinese localization, as well as German.

So, if you want to become a part of our community, or simply reach out to us for whatever reason, we have a Discord server[discord.gg] that you can join and get all the latest news on the development of Whateverland. Welcome aboard!

While Kickstarter has been taking a lot of our time (no, really, we never expected it to be that demanding) and effort, the majority of our team is actively working on the game itself, and soon we'll have a lot of new stuff to tease you with. It is impossible not to mention how much the support from the players means to us. It is a pleasure to work in this new environment because we know that many of you are waiting for our game. It motivates us to do better and strive for perfection, even when our working routines are far from getting back to normal anytime soon.

Actually, there is something new that we'd like to show you today. Right now we're actively working on one of the chapters of Whateverland, where Vincent will have to deal with an insufferable Russian aristocrat, Van, and his disobedient servant, Zachary.

As always, you will have the opportunity to get Van's piece of the spell in two different ways. We can't tell you what you'll have to do without spoiling all the fun, of course, but we can show you a half-backed part of the location you're going to explore while figuring it out. Please note that everything you see is a work-in-progress version of the characters and backgrounds subject to change.

By the way, can you spot a familiar face in this living room? If you can, let us know ;)

[kck.st]

Hello, lovely Whateverlanders!


We've been in quarantine for over three months now, and life is still in no hurry to get back to normal. Of course, this adds to the frustration of our team, because we can't get together, which makes many aspects of our work on the game much more complicated. But there's always a silver lining, folks! You'll see that for yourself once you listen to the main theme of Whateverland performed live by our awesome musicians, straight from self-isolation.

Andrey Tyulenev, Caligari Games sound designer and composer, about the process behind creating Whateverland’s soundtrack:

I wanted to limit the number of instruments used in the game from the start to encourage myself to come up with new approaches to my own original ideas. Limitations boost creativity and all that. Inspiration for Whateverland came from very different sources – from French Chanson, Balkan and Gypsy music to Alfred Schnittke. I also wanted to create a soundtrack with memorable melodies, like the music in many Soviet movies and cartoons. Music in Whateverland is supposed to sound like something that could be performed by a small local town band just as strange as the world around them.

The desire to record live instruments came about because working with musicians always makes the sound not only feel more vibrant but also adds a lot of subtleties to each part as every performer brings something different to the table. So the end result gets much more daring, interesting, and textured. I'm really looking forward to working with each performer on their part and hear their ideas.

Love, Caligari Games ♥


[kck.st]

Hello, people!


A lot happened since our last update, not just with our project, but with the world itself. Amongst all the madness, injustice and the pandemic still far from over, it's a weird time to be talking about games and such, yet here we are. The least we can do is to keep working and try to take your mind off these things with some news about Whateverland. Especially since we have so many things to tell you about.

First and foremost, we have just launched a Kickstarter campaign! The world has changed in a matter of a few months, and it’s getting harder and harder to stay afloat as an indie studio. But we really want to finish Whateverland without any influence from publishers or investors, so we decided to go on Kickstarter. If you're interested in our project, we would appreciate your support very much. And if you can’t support us financially (which is completely understandable), you can spread the word about our campaign.

What's more, the Prologue of Whateverland is now available on Steam for free! You can experience the first 30 minutes of the game, check out our Tim Burton-inspired visuals, meet some of the characters, and hopefully provide us with much-needed feedback so that we know what we should improve and work on. So yeah, go ahead and hit that download button.

The Prologue is the very beginning of Vincent's adventure, from the fatal attempt to steal from Beatrice to the first encounter with his quirky sidekick, Nick. While he’s trying to find out what the hell happened to him, you will get to discover the world around you as well as meet a couple of Whateverlanders.

Here’s a quick overview of all the characters you’ll see in the Prologue:

• Beatrice. Oh yes, it all starts with her sending Vincent to meet his fate in her personal playground that is Whateverland. You’ll get to meet her very briefly at the beginning, but the encounter will be a memorable one, for sure. First of all, she is a witch. Second of all, she’s doesn’t like people stealing from her. This lady definitely has her own reasons for creating a place like Whateverland, but what is it she seeks? Well, we’re not going to reveal all her cards just yet. But don’t worry, you’ll find out. Eventually.

• Vincent. You’ll get to meet the character who will walk you through this bizarre world, as foreign to him as it is to you. The protagonist of Whateverland is not a cheerful guy, but he definitely has his moments, so look out for awkward jokes and sarcastic remarks.

• Nick. Our favorite boy and your trusty companion on this journey. He’s the opposite of Vincent in almost every way – optimistic, bubbly, and ridiculously flamboyant. In his past life, he was a writer who, in search of inspiration, decided to literally sell his soul and stumbled upon Beatrice in the process of summoning a demon. Well, one could say he succeeded.

• Harold. A local mad scientist who hopes to build a helicopter out of junk and finally reunite with Beatrice, whom he believes to be not a witch, but an actual Goddess. Eccentric and freakish, he'll be wary of Vincent at first, but perhaps you will manage to warm his heart. Or not. One can never tell with this guy.

• Eddie. Another delicate soul, this character will appear before you in the form of a huge raven with a striking personality. We won't give away too much, but you should know that he's a poet, and he absolutely hates being criticized. That’s all you need to know, really.

The Prologue also features the ability to complete each section of the game in two different ways – either by being helpful and dealing with people’s problems or taking a shortcut and stealing from them whatever it is you need to move the plot forward. You won’t have to choose your “side” at the beginning and stick to it for the rest of the game – every chapter can be completed through either path and each of the paths offers a unique gameplay experience, that can’t be accessed otherwise. And the Prologue is no exception, so choose wisely – once the full game is out, your decisions will make an actual difference in the end. Feel free to explore all the possibilities in the Prologue!

We wish you a great playthrough, and please leave reviews to let us know what we can do to make Whateverland as good as it gets!


Join our Discord[discord.gg]

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Buongiorno to anyone who still cares to read these unforgivably infrequent devlogs. This is Eli, reporting for duty from voluntary confinement. I do narrative design and writing for Whateverland, and when I don't do that, I write devlogs like the one you're reading right now. You are in luck because Caligari Games team is quarantined along with the rest of the world, which means that it is time to finally do things I've been trying to avoid for a *very* long time. So get ready for a lot of these in the upcoming weeks of self-isolation and thriving casual alcoholism.

But let’s get back to the task at hand, namely, talking about our progress with Whateverland. We’re currently polishing our demo and considering launching a Kickstarter campaign, so yeah, there’s a lot of waiting and nail-biting happening right now. Also, the economy is collapsing, which is depressing but adds some drama to the existence of our little studio and it’s a nice fuel for creativity. After all, when everyone's stuck at home for what seems like forever, what are they going to do if not play video games all day? Start eating clean and adopt that at-home workout routine? I doubt that.

Our entire office is working from home and we communicate mostly through memes and gifs on Discord. Apparently, with enough discipline working from home can actually *work*. We have conference calls twice a week to discuss our progress. At the moment we are busy prototyping Bell&Bones and making an animated opening intro, which looks pretty sick so far if I do say so myself. Also, everyone shares their daily conquests on a special channel. It's cool and all, but the progress of a writer is pretty hard to summarise in three sentences. Some days I just stare into a wall and consider it productive. And sometimes I complete several parts of the script a day, but it feels like procrastination.

[media.giphy.com]Anyway, it may seem like we’re living the dream, but sometimes you just want to look your programmer in the eyes and see all his pain and some broken blood vessels in there. It’s an essential experience of an indie game studio that can’t be lived through lifeless pixels on the screen. But for now, I can only hear his tired voice two times a week, telling me that a feature that was supposed to be ready yesterday will only be finished by his grandchildren. Oh, well.

On the bright side, I can now *squish* my cat as much as I want to, although she probably wants to claw my eyes out at this point. But what are you gonna do, you gotta get some love while you still can, right? Also, I’ve never cooked so much in my entire life, and if I keep going at this pace, a time will soon come for me to ditch game dev and finally show Gordon Ramsay who’s boss. I also tried to make some fancy fluffy coffee that’s apparently *in vogue* in Korea, where they call it ‘Dalgona’, but my hand almost fell off from all this whisking. I’ll try it again later, but something tells me I’m better off drinking whiskey instead of endless whisking.

Fine, I’ll stop whining and tell you a little about our demo that we’re planning to release in the upcoming two months. It’s going to be a prologue to Whateverland and its main attractions, but there will still be a lot of nice stuff. It will feature a cool-ass intro, some music that will get stuck in your head forever, the beginning of our hero’s journey into the unknown and most importantly it will give you a *taste* of the story and some of the main features of the game. In particular, you will be able to reach the end goal of the prologue in three different ways, one of which is reserved for all the *bad boys* out there. I see you. We like to call it “paths”, and I’ll tell you all about it in one of the upcoming devlogs, but not today. Today we celebrate the sadness and stagnation of working while on quarantine.

[media.giphy.com]So please, for the sake of humanity, stay home, torture your cat, cook extravagant shit, don’t buy any more toilet paper and imagine that it’s not a pandemic, it’s just that introverts have finally taken over the world and introduced mandatory social distancing to all of our butterflies. In the meantime, please share with us how you are coping with all this madness. Have you signed up for TikTok yet? Hugged your cat so much that it started to hate you more than it already did? Considered making friends with a creepy middle-aged dude with a goatee who lives under your bed? Whatever you do, please stay sane and safe.

xx (from a safe distance ofc)
Caligari Gals and Guys

We have already talked a little bit about the world of Whateverland and how it came to be, and now it's time to dive into another important aspect of any story – the characters. Oh yes, those motherfuckers that you'll spend a great deal (at least we hope you will) of your time with, trying to figure out how to please them and eventually get something from them. Some make you want to marry them, while others deserve to be killed with Elon Musk's flamethrower (are those still a thing?). As you might have guessed, Whateverland is not the right place to look for some ordinary folk, so each person you meet is going to be insane one way or another. And we're going to introduce some of them to you in many devlogs to come!

But let's start with our main characters, shall we?

Meet Vincent, Beatrice, and Nick!

First came Vincent. Actually, his design was the first thing that we ever made for Whateverland back in 2018.

But before we found his final look, our Character Artist, Ann Jean, had a lot of ideas. As you can see, her first sketch was the closest to the version we had in mind from the beginning.

Ann Jean, Lead Character Artist and Animator

One of the main rules for creating cartoon characters is that their silhouette alone must be expressive and distinctive enough. That's why I tried to model the inhabitants of Whateverland based on simple geometric shapes.

Drawing a character in a vacuum is quite difficult, but fortunately, our background artist Alexandra Kert joined the project almost immediately and it became a lot more fun. The main inspiration for me in terms of visual style was the game "Don't Starve" and Tim Burton's cartoons, which is probably where the main character got his signature phlegmatic look and some stylish eye makeup from.

Unlike in the first game by Caligari Games, "The Great Perhaps", where the protagonist only moved from left to right, Vincent will be moving around Whatevereland in eight directions, exploring all corners of the mysterious world where he was trapped by an ancient witch. In order to make my life a little easier while drawing the different angles of the character, I molded his plasticine prototype, which loved to fall off the table and lay on the ground, contemplating his life choices.

Vincent was followed by another important character, his chatty friend Nick right here.

It's worth noting that Nick's character was originally inspired by the famous Russian writer of Ukrainian origin, Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol. He wrote a lot of creepy shit in his lifetime, so it was a natural source of inspiration for us. Obviously, the most important detail that Nick got from his prototype is his amazing bob haircut.

But we also wanted to make Nick resemble someone that most of our international players would recognize, so he ended up looking a little like William Shakespeare as well (you see that collar? Yeah). So, he's basically a lovechild of Gogol and Shakespeare. Could it be any better?

Also, Nick's appearance changed significantly over time. At first, he looked a little more emo, and at some point, we realized that this look doesn't go well with his cheerful flamboyant personality. That's why Nick got a little makeover that made him a lot more conventionally cute. Emo Nick might've been cool, but this one looks like he might ask you to toss a coin to a certain brooding protagonist.

The last one of the main characters to get a design was Beatrice, the *evil* witch herself.

The first thing that's likely to catch your eye is that Beatrice looks like a very modern witch, although she became a lot fancier over time.

We didn't want to portray a classic image of a fear-inducing crone, so our Beatrice looks more like a character from some Ryan Murphy series. We just love ourselves a stylish witch with a mouthpiece and a hat decorated with an actual beating heart. By the way, the heart was added by accident. In the original sketch, Beatrice had some abstract decoration on her hat, which wasn't supposed to be a heart, but it certainly looked like it, so we decided to give her an anatomical heart on a hat. Why not? Whether it's the heart of her unfaithful lover or an own naturalistic version of "wearing your heart on your sleeve" is yet to be determined.

Let us know your thoughts on these three beautiful humans. Well, more like a human, a half-ghost and a witch, but that’s beside the point!

Meow, meow, meow (What? Haven't you seen our announcement teaser?)

So, you wanted to know how Whateverland came to be, isn't that right? Well, you didn't actually ask for it, but we're going to tell you anyway. And it's a great story, by the way, so get yourself a cup of tea (or a glass of warm vodka, no judgement on our part), sit back and tune in, for we're going to talk about the excruciatingly fun process of worldbuilding for "Whateverland".

First of all, the origin. Because every story has to start somewhere, and this one starts at a literal junkyard. We mentioned before that for Beatrice this world is a sort of bottomless dumpster, where the witch throws whatever she likes or rather whoever she doesn't like. But the world of Whateverland lies beyond an ordinary junkyard, there’s actually a whole city out there waiting to be explored. But who built this city, you ask? It certainly wasn't anyone from the merry band of misfits that got there first, we can tell you that. All of them were completely useless then, and nothing really changed since. Sure, the inhabitants of the city have greatly influenced its appearance, but they weren't the ones who built it from scratch.

The thing is, Beatrice is a pretty fiery lady. And we mean it literally. Like any decent witch, she was once burned at the stake with all of her possessions, including the grimoires. Thankfully, the inquisitors were stupid enough to think that magical books would burn down irrevocably. Guess what, assholes – they don't! After her "firebath" Beatrice got angry (and who wouldn't?), so she created tiny creatures, Bookashes, out of the ashes of her grimoires and ordered them to build a place where she could trap all those who wronged or annoyed her enough to even bother. The witch said, 'Let there be a city'; and there was the city that later became known as Whateverland. And it was good.

Are you still with us? If so, then that's enough for the lore, time to dive into the inspiration behind the visual style of the city and its architecture. Since technically the world was built by magical beings that exist outside the traditional framework of time, we could make the city itself look any way we wanted. The idea was that all the buildings would be designed roughly in the same style, and then we'd gradually add a variety of details, which would make the appearance of the city more vivid and lively. The people of Whateverland come from many different countries and time periods, and each of them has something to bring to the image of the city. But before getting started with the architecture and all the other good stuff, we had to create a map.

Alexandra Kert, lead background artist:

"The first challenge was to determine the overall shape of the map – what kind of city Whateverland could be. I wanted it to show at least some history of its origin, so I started thinking about what surrounded the city (like a river, for example) and most importantly, how it developed through time. Most likely, Whateverland was never strictly planned by anyone, unlike cities like New York or Barcelona. So, it had to be designed as an old European city like Rome, which grew organically on its own. This is why Whateverland is centered around the building with a square in front of it that later became the Casino, a key location of the whole game.

Then there was a question of perspective and the depiction of the map itself. As a reference, I used both the maps of medieval cities with a weird angle and modern plans of cities, including in-game ones. At first, the idea of drawing an entire city by hand scared the shit out of me by its magnitude, so I decided to at least prepare the base by creating a 3D model. At some point I even wanted to make the whole map in 3D, but in the end decided against it.

However, in the process of 3D-modeling came the understanding that I needed more creative freedom. I wanted to experiment with the angle of view, without being strictly bound to isometry or a more realistic view from above, and here we are, drawing a whole fucking city by hand."

So yeah, we kind of made a map. But what about the architecture, the "feel" of the city? In our opinion (or rather in the opinion of the game's author), there is no architectural style more mysterious and bewitching than art nouveau. So it was decided early on in the development that most buildings would be designed in this style, or at least have some of its visual features. During initial sketching, some of the buildings ended up looking very Haussmannian, that's why Whateverland may remind you of Paris from time to time. But the vibe of an old European city mixes with whatever it is that the residents of Whateverland have to offer, so don't be surprised to find an authentic ramen shop or an actual souq in the midst of some rococo houses.

In the end, the look that we want to achieve for Whateverland is that of a mysterious city where anything can happen, populated by some very weird people, each one more bizarre than the other.

Obviously, our work on worldbuilding is far from complete, but we're trying really hard out here, so… you know. Press all the buttons you need to, but the best of them say "add to your wishlist". And we'll keep filling you in on all the details of making "Whateverland" in future devlogs.

If you have any questions – good. You can ask us whatever questions you want, even if they're about your very own existential crisis.