I have something to admit. . . That past 4 years I’ve been making The Source, well. . . I’ve been lying to you all. The Source is. . . [tears streaming down my face]- A meta game!

I want to go over what this means for The Source, and how we even got here in the first place. There will be some major spoilers for Inscryption in this post, a game which you should definitely play. I will also have some minor spoilers for The Source. I’m going to try and avoid spoiling anything too major, but if you want to go into The Source completely blind when it comes out, you might want to skip this one.

Lets turn the clock back to the summer of 2022, when I played a game called Inscryption. I had been sitting on this one for a while, and finally decided to give it a try. As far as I was aware, this game was just a gritty, tactile 3D card battler with escape room elements, a concept that I liked a lot. I was not at all prepared for what this game would become.

If you’ve played Inscryption before, than you know what is in store for that game. At first, the game plays as this dark fantasy card game inside a dimly lit cabin. Part of the charm is that it’s all in 3D, and you are able to stand up from the table and walk around in the cabin to solve puzzles. It seems that your goal is to beat the card game, and figure out how to escape the cabin. But when you finally make it to the end, and defeat the game master who holds you prisoner, the game completely flips everything you knew on its head. Instead of escaping the cabin, you are greeted by a new game button, which previously was not available. Using it transforms the game into a 2D old-school game, and it is revealed that this is a game whose characters are aware of their digital nature, and manipulate the game’s code to their own advantage. Throw in segments of found footage and a full scale ARG to uncover the dark secrets hidden in the games code, and you have an unforgettable 4th wall shattering experience.

Finishing this game changed the way I think about video games, and how I wanted to develop them. Soon after finishing Inscryption, I participated in a game jam where I made a game called The Zip. In The Zip, you would solve puzzles by opening your save file and editing it to change elements within the game. Sadly it is no longer available to downloads, but it was the predecessor to The Source. Some of the story elements, characters, and the way I wanted to tell the story came from The Zip.

I’ve grown to love ARGs, but one of the biggest issues I tend to have with them is they are often so difficult that they require entire communities to solve, and once they are solved, they’re pretty much done. Those are things that make ARGs unique, but it leaves out those who don’t have the time or talent to participate, or those who learn of them after they’ve been solved.

The Source has changed over the course of development, but the core pillar I started with has stayed the same: Making a game with an ARG that is built in a way that anyone can solve it, at any time. I’ve wanted to give people the feeling that they are treading into places they shouldn’t be, that they are real detectives uncovering a mystery that expands outside of the game. And that is what The Source is about.

Act 1 of The Source is a build up. It establishes many of the core characters, and sets up the mystery. Act 2 flips the game on it’s head in a very similar way to Inscryption, and requires the player to find the clues to finish the game outside of it.

For a long time, I’ve been afraid to share any of this information, because I remember how magical it was to experience Inscryption for the first time, and I didn’t want to spoil that kind of experience for people playing The Source. However, the longer I’ve thought about it, the more I feel like the ‘accessible ARG’ part of The Source is the primary draw to the game, and I want people to know about that going in. Not as a spoiler, but as a core part of the game that (hopefully) will make people excited to play it.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading this! I’m hoping to show more progress soon, so keep an eye out for that! Until next time!