Trip the Ark Fantastic: an immersive story-driven scientific adventure RPG

[Iggy_Gamechuck]

We have crapload of lore and background to share, and the perfect days for that occasion are Tuesday and Thursday when we have our so-called weekly #ArkLoreTuesday and #ArkBlogThursday. Well, since there is much more lore to share, this Thursday we'll share more of it, instead of some technical stuff about the game…

Anyway, this article is more about the previous leaders in the animal kingdom, and King Michaël was the first one to find the Ark Fantastic… Sort of.

It’s hard enough figuring out the politics of the Animal Kingdom. Even though, we decided to clue you in on a bit of history as well. So in January we are going to go through the rulers of the Animal Kingdom one by one.

The lions ruled the Animal Kingdom for millennia, but the elder line of kings has been mostly lost to history. The past few centuries, though, are very clear. This is due to several factors:

• the influence of Dabrovit, a scholar who worked at the court of King Michaël
• the relative peace and prosperity that ensued after King Marius
• the invention of the printing press which helped preserve historical manuscripts

So we will start with King Michaël, the first king of whom most information is known without doubt. Like all kings, scholars posthumously gave him an epithet defining his rule – King Michaël the Zealous.

King Michaël

The King Who Found the Ark!

Michaël inherited the kingdom in great unrest from his father Marius. However, Michaël actually spent less time dealing with the unruly nobles and more time obsessed over the ark myth. At the time, a young scholar beaver named Dabrovit has popularised the scholar’s method in the Kingdom. The scholar’s method (similar to the scientific method in our world) is a methodical way of approaching the Kingdom’s mysteries. Inspired by Dabrovit’s method, Michaël funded many scholars and explorers and tasked them to find the mythic Ark Fantastic.

Eventually, after many failed attempts, one scholar returned with good news. He found the wreckage on an island shore southwest of Pride, with evidence suggesting it is the Ark Fantastic. Along with its great historic significance, this had a surprising effect on quieting the kingdoms unrest. Many historians believe this discovery was what ushered in centuries of peace in the Kingdom.

If you want to stay informed, be sure to visit our Facebook, Twitter or Discord.

 

[WilliamRobhe]

That is one beautiful game. Love the graphics!

 

[Iggy_Gamechuck]

That is one beautiful game. Love the graphics!

Thank you! Our artists will be very happy to hear another positive comment about their work

 

[Iggy_Gamechuck]

WE HAVE MOAR ANIMAL KINGDOM KINGS LORE!!!!

As we wrote about Michaël the Zealous in our previous lore article about the Kings of the Animal Kingdom, today we are continuing the saga with King Valent the Scholar, the longest-ruling king. His biggest legacy is finding a huge unexplored region whose location was lost in history.

Prince Laurent was oft ill and short-lived, and so he died before he could succeed to the throne. His son, Valent, took on the Kings mantle at a very young age, and was thus the longest-ruling king in historical memory, being known as The Scholar King.

King Valent the Scholar​

Even as a child, King Valent was tutored by Master Dabrovit, and fell in love with science and exploration from an early age. He funded many great expeditions to all sides of the Kingdom during his long reign and remade the kingdom in the image of science.

He funded academies in every regional capital, and built the largest library in Blackbark, holding copies of every book found in the Kingdom.

His biggest legacy, however, is finding the southern continent, a huge unexplored region whose location across the sea was lost in history.

 

[Iggy_Gamechuck]

In the continuation of our Ark Fantastic lore, we talk about probably the strangest of the recent kings, Vincent the Explorer. As the only son of Valent, the king who found the southern continent, he was less interested in ruling than in the vast unexplored reaches of the newfound land.

Nevertheless, denizens of the Animal Kingdom adored him, and his exploits were the talk of tales all over the Kingdom. He oversaw much of the Kingdom’s exploration and mapping. Indeed, most of the maps in his expeditions are in use to this day. Many feel that his early demise in the southern jungles was the end of an era.

While still a prince, Vincent grew up with tales of strange animals and cultures in the southern continent – monkeys and crocodiles, mysterious jungles and wild rivers…

Vincent the Explorer

Some say his father financed the first colony in the south, Valencia, mostly to please his son. And indeed it was but it was King Vincent who made it into the huge town it is today. He was so enamoured with the colony, he spent more time ruling from there than from the capital, Blackbark.

He died relatively young, contracting a strange disease while leading an expedition into the heartlands of the colony. His most enduring legacy is his deathwish. On his deathbed, he decreed that his castle be remodeled into the central hub for exploration in the colony. Thus Vincent’s Keep becomes the Explorer’s Guild, a crown funded organisation tasked with exploring and mapping this new continent.

Does worldbuilding interest you? Do you love discussing royal bloodlines of fictional kings? In that case, be sure to check out our Discord! We’re also active on Facebook, Twitter and many other places! Till the next lore blogpost, Long Live the King(s)!

 

[Iggy_Gamechuck]

The most brutal King of them all, also known as "The Tyrant King" reigned over 30 years ago, but the Kingdom still resonates from the consequences of his reign.

King Leopold, The Tyrant

The steam engine changed much of the industrial landscape of the Kingdom… This, along with the vast resources coming from the newly discovered colony, all gave rise to new powers. Not all of these new powers were satisfied with their newfound wealth, and some wished to secure even more power.

Feared of being usurped, and to secure his hold on the Kingdom, Leopold, the Tyrant tightened his grip. He slowly transformed the royal newspapers into a mouthpiece of the monarchy. In his later years, he also funded a secret spy network that operated throughout the Kingdom.

Read the whole story about Kingdom's Tyrant King on https://www.tripthearkfantastic.com/ark-lore-tuesday/kings-of-the-animal-kingdom-king-leopold/

 

[Iggy_Gamechuck]

Hi everyone!

In this lore post about our upcoming game, Trip the Ark Fantastic, I'm giving you more info about how we created our caste system. We even named it!

Estateology is a branch of “science” in the Animal Kingdom that tries to explain why certain Animals belong to certain castes.

It is a form of pseudo-science, even though it is not considered that by the Animals in the Kingdom. Wetake a cue from real-life existing pseudo-scientific ideas such as Biblical literalist chronology or the descriptive parts of eugenic theories, as well as phrenology, etc.


As our game deals with science and its relation to mythology, this pseudo-science which tries to bridge the two is an important motif that the player will encounter and investigate several times through the course of the game, and will have to form an opinion towards it.

Our own caste system.​​

It was invented when the first new animals were found in the Southern Continent, and an approach on how to fit them into the castes was needed. As the Ark mythos states: “All Animals were of the Ark, and all are now of the Kingdom”. The statement was previously descriptive – it told of how the world is, and afterwards, when it was shown that there are Animals who didn’t even know there was a Kingdom to be a part of, it had to be prescriptive.

We took inspiration from the French "estates", or classes.​​

Rejecting the doctrine would have been fatal for the Kingdom, as it discouraged dissenters from leaving or forming new communities by framing the Kingdom as civilisation itself, or even civility itself. ‘Where would you even go?’ they ask, ‘There is nobody and nothing outside the Kingdom.’ The important aspect of the doctrine was that there was no alternative to the Kingdom, even in theory, there simply didn’t exist any successful societies outside of the Kingdom, only dens of bandits and lunatics doomed to failure within a generation.

To make sure that the idea of no alternative to the Kingdom alive and well, the Kingdom had to take a certain stance towards the natives: The Kingdom had to pretend that these natives never had a society, that theyare simply backward savages who never figured out a form of social organisation beyond small villages. The Kingdom cannot abide by the idea that they have another ‘country’ as an enemy. Or any outside enemies at all. There is no one outside, so who could be an ‘outside enemy’?

Specifically, this means that the Kingdom denies that there is a Monkey society, let alone a Monkey Country or Kingdom. There is a Monkey culture, that’s not problematic, after all, there is such a thing as a Squirrel Culture.

However, if these natives were once part of the Ark, which caste did they belong to? And in answering that, the scholars wish to answer – which caste should they belong to now? This is the field of “estateology”.

Within estateology, there are many possible approaches or schools of thought. However, all sides agree on the basic premise: the Castes reflect a certain inherrent moral aptitude, ie. the Cats are somehow better than the lower caste. Where this quality comes from is a matter of debate, and that’s how the schools are distinguished. The main two schools of thought are these:

1. Historical Realism: The historical realists believe belonging to a caste is question of historical merit: the animals belong to a caste based on the merit of their behavior on the Ark (and by extension, Civilisation). The placement in the castes is like a criminal sentence/meritocracy and reflects a presendent for the behaviour of a certain species.
2. Biological Descriptivism: Animals in each Caste have certain biological features in common, if you could only determine which features are salient for each Caste you could sort any conceivable animal into its appropriate caste. For instance: Commoners are small, Vermin have scales, Stewards are large and have imposing teeth or horns, etc.

Read much more on our official development blog!

 

[Iggy_Gamechuck]

Today in our lore blog for Trip the Ark Fantastic, we're talking about Charles the hedgehog.

As our main protagonist, we decided it's important to flesh out his life and history as early as possible. So here it is: the portrait of a scholar!

One of the youngest scholars to receive the illustrious "Master Scholar's Seal", a commoner whose inventions and writings are known all across the Kingdom.

The Quill-Quorni hypothesis revolutionised the field of botany. We don't go into much detail about it, though, as there are only a handful of people in the Kingdom who actually understand the hypothesis - and we're not one of them!

Even his forays into engineering were legendary - when he built the sprinkler system for his arboretum, little could he know that it was going to be repurposed into a shower system and used all across the Kingdom!

Charles' fame is also partly due to the romanticised aura the Kingdom has of the recluse scholar: he - unlike the politicised scholars near the capital - decided to move away from the spotlight and focus on his work more than on the dealings of the court. A scholar of such repute among all the castes of the Kingdom has rarely been born, apart from maybe the beaver Dabrovit, whose Scientific Method is in use in the Kingdom even today (and whom we also wrote about recently as well in another biography!)

So, without further ado - read about Charles Quill of Burrows, the Master Scholar, son of Herbert, an equally illustrious hedgehog we also mentioned before (a key scholar in the Lav rebellion and a member of the Lion King Lav's council)!

Tell us what you think, and would you enjoy playing such a main character? After all, reclusive scholars are not really the epic protagonist archetypes we usually find in RPGs!

 

[Iggy_Gamechuck]

What do animals eat in our adventure RPG game - and why we have decided that they don't eat each other?

What do animals of the Kingdom eat? In the real world, carnivores and omnivores all eat other animals. It’s a bit of a “tough sell” when writing sentient animals. Not to imply that it can’t be pulled off – it’s been done a lot in fiction, but it’s just not what we wanted.

For example, Watership Down was filled with creepy scenes. However, in Watership Down it’s obvious that the cat and the rabbits are antagonistic, sworn enemies. This can easily be extrapolated to whole civilisations fighting against each other in a war for dominance, similar to the cat and mouse game Root.

However, our setting (and the atmosphere and story we wish to convey) require a tranquil kingdom (at least on the surface), one where the hierarchies are not accentuated by the beastly behaviour of certain castes, but by the seeming wisdom they exude.

Some food can be seen in the left side of the picture

So we decided that for many many years (as long as written history exists in our world, and beyond), the animals have all been herbivores.

Check out the rest of our lore dev blog on our official website.

 

[Iggy_Gamechuck]

May 6 is a pretty special day for the whole world. The world's first postage stamp was produced. A rather significant thing for remote communication among humans.

Well, in the Kingdom, postage stamps are still not a thing. Letters are sealed, inked, and hand-stamped in the old fashioned way.

And don’t forget it’s not the internet era yet either (D’UH!), so unless you’re royalty with your own carrier service, you need to get your letter all the way to the nearest post office to have it delivered!

The entire game starts with a letter. As Charles receives one from the royal messenger, he is summoned to the capital.

This is how communication and remote communication (sending letters) work in our game.

 

[Iggy_Gamechuck]

If you have been following my previous lore posts that deal with the past and the present of Trip the Ark Fantastic, I have something new, and this one is a wee bit - edgy.

Even though the game looks really beautiful on those screenshots and artwork, the past of the Animal Kingdom has been rather grim.



This lore blog deals with a dark and disturbing past of Prisons, Gulags, and Work Camps of the Animal Kingdom, where animals (in the most part) worked day and night, and died of hunger and agony.

Please let me know your thoughts!

 

[Ripper]

Arbeit macht frei? That's some heavy stuff...

 

[Winterfart]

Despite the fact there's a trillion games about WWII, German concentration/death camps are almost never evocated (evoked?) in video games, same with Russian gulags.

On top of my mind, I can only think of Valkyria Chronicles 1 or Wolfenstein: the New Order.

Glad to see some devs are not afraid to tackle the topic.

 

[Iggy_Gamechuck]

Yeah, we simply want to make it "clear" that Trip the Ark Fantastic isn't a game about cute animals going to adventure The lore of the game is rather grim, and as you could see from the latest one, rather grim, too.

We are not glorifying the holocaust in any shape or form, but the topics around labour camps from the history of humanity are something we wanted to tackle with the lore.

 

[Ripper]

Yeah, we simply want to make it "clear" that Trip the Ark Fantastic isn't a game about cute animals going to adventure The lore of the game is rather grim, and as you could see from the latest one, rather grim, too.

We are not glorifying the holocaust in any shape or form, but the topics around labour camps from the history of humanity are something we wanted to tackle with the lore.

I wasn't suggesting you were promoting anything nasty. I just think it's quite challenging to address such heavy topics with cartoon animals and not have it come off as kitsch or trivial. I'm not saying it can't be done, or you shouldn't do it, but, if it were me, I'd be nervous about doing it justice. The idea of "work sets you free" certainly invites direct parallels with some very heavy history.

 

[Iggy_Gamechuck]

New lore: The Mysteries of the Southern Continent

This week’s lore post is about the various mysteries that Charles will encounter (and hopefully solve) in the southern continent of the Animal Kingdom while searching for the origins of the Ark Fantastic (this being the second act of the game).

Since we don’t have many art assets for the southern continent yet, this blogpost will be filled with pictures of the step-by-step artwork process for our first artwork ever – the three protagonists exploring the southern jungles.

This artwork was done way back in 2018 when we still had many different ideas on what exactly we want out of the game, and served as one of only a few mock-up pieces we sent to our Creative Europe application in 2019.

In a way, the pictures tell their own, separate narrative from the text, and hopefully, both are equally interesting.

The Mysteries of the Southern Continent

For as long as collective memory serves, the Kingdom has been a large landmass, surrounded by sea on all sides. This is the continent we now call Kingdom Proper. However, a new southern continent was found during the recent times of King Michaël.

This caused major ontological and cosmological troubles for the scholars of the Kingdom – how to fit this new continent into the world we thought was just a single landmass surrounded by sea and nothing else? Many hermeneutical ideas about the Ark myth had to be done away with, and many more had to be re-framed to fit newfound truths – such as the existence of monkeys, crocodiles and various birds found on the southern continent, all of which bear no mention in the Ark myth. At least not in its modern form.

If you like what you see, read the rest of the lore post on our development blog

 

[Iggy_Gamechuck]

Ark Fantastic stories: Legion of the bloodthirsty undead

Unlike in some other RPG titles, you should not believe just everything you read, and not everything is a part of the game lore. Or is it? As a reputable scholar, Charles will often be in a position to debunk such stories, or, better yet, use his scholarly reputation to prove them true!

In this Ark Lore, we bring another tale from the Animal Kingdom, written in the form of a diary by an unknown hero, who fought a legion of the Undead.

Author’s remark: The images seen in this blog may not be related to the characters or the places of the story.

“How I defeated the Scourge of Blavgoz and his legion of bloodthirsty undead” – A true story
Dear reader, How I would love to tell you of my successful infiltration into the wolf’s den!

Infiltrating the lair of the villainous monstrosity has become quite easy after using my superior intellect. Letting the poor townspeople deliver me in an empty casket of wine, as an offer to the wolf, was really an ingenious plan!

The hero is unknown, but his diary has been preserved. Legends about his adventures are still alive among the town folk who occasionally talk about the grim past of the Kingdom. But, they are just legends, after all.

But now came the more difficult part of my quest: finding and destroying the ritual foci so that these bloodthirsty undead might finally be put to rest.

Unfortunately, I found myself in quite an ordeal: They had delivered the barrel right in the midst of their living quarters and from the sounds permeating the thick oaken barrel, I could hear their vile gurgles and cries, as well as smell the thick rancid stench coming from the decomposing bodies of the undead soldiers.

The only thing that stopped them from breaching the barrel this instant was a speech from their master, the dretched scourge of Blavgoz himself!

The legend says, some herbs can protect from the “blood-suckers”. Garlic is the best, apparently.

I was sure that I could take out a dozen or so of these creatures with my martial prowess alone. (My rapier was left behind in Blavgoz as the still wine-coated inside of the barrel would taint the fine steel of the blade, a risk I was not willing to take.)

There were, going from the sounds, hundreds of those creatures just waiting for their master’s speech to finish! Even my formidable abilities would be tested to their utmost limits when faced with a horde of that magnitude!

And suddenly, in a flash of insight, I connected every puzzle piece and clearly understood what I had to do. From my satchel, I took the wooden doll I had found by the roadside. This, dear reader, was the doll that started this entire adventure, the doll of which I had traced the origin the entire way to the downtrodden village of Blavgoz.

An ominous-looking gate.

All the while under the impression that I had to find the poor little girl to whom it belonged. Nothing could be more false… I actually had the ritual totem on me all the time and I didn’t even realize it!

I took another look at the doll and clearly saw the vile miasma surrounding it, why hadn’t I seen this before? I made my decision and snapped the doll to pieces in a single, fluid motion.

Suddenly I heard bodies collapsing on the ground, at least a hundred of these bound creatures were finally free from their wretched curse. The wolf almost choked in the middle of one of his sentences and it became quiet…. Very quiet…

If you want to hear some scary stories from the legends of the Kingdom, camping is the best activity for that.

“Well”, I thought, “Time for some fine ass-whooping!” as I burst from my barrel in a cloud of oaken shards and metal fringes. And let out one of my world-famous battle cries. Before beating the ever-living snot out of the still bedazzled scourge of Blavgoz.

 

[Iggy_Gamechuck]

Hi guys, I'm back with something new, and hopefully interesting.

Even though the environments we publish on our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are often beautiful, lush, and “friendly”, some of those can be considered rather unhabitable and hostile.

We are talking about the wastelands Charles will explore in Trip the Ark Fantastic. As you may have seen in the “Mysteries of the Southern Continent”, Charles looks like he is embarking on an adventure through the jungle with his friends.

Looks pretty neat, right?

Well, this part of the game will require some navigation skills, as you’re going in an uncharted territory which is literally uncharted. There won’t be any maps guiding you to go up or down, right or left. You’re on your own.

The wastelands are a dangerous place. They used to be a lush forest, but have turned into a scorching desert in the last 1000 years. Charles, being a hedgehog, can’t survive in this blazing heat, but we’ll leave this part of the game to you, the player.

There is an interesting lore background for the wastelands.

Over 3000 years ago, the lions tried to usurp the hierarchy and failed which resulted in the usurper family being banished north over the mountains – which is considered a death sentence.

The so-called snowy wastelands. If you end-up there, well, good luck with that.

The usurper’s son Antimocles the Red was the father of Alexander the First who founded the Animal Kingdom. The split (and the harsher climate) made the lion’s rule weaker and in the following millenia they eroded from a powerful force that ruled over everyone in the southern territories to just a lion tribe in the caverns ruling over themselves with Nerva as Emperor.

After a couple of generations in the southern continent they decided to leave because they saw they could not prosper in the monkey civilisation which was thriving and they went over the land bridge to the northern continent and started subjugating the primitive cultures of smaller animals (rodents, birds et cetera).

After a few generations, they had built the Animal Kingdom that spanned the entire continent, subjugating also the great cats. Some animals were still very resistant because they weren’t used to living under the centralised rule and so after many generations, one lion family had invented the Ark myth after a failed bloody rebellion by other animals.

Following the change of the ruling branch, the myth was thought to be true even by the ruling lion family, and the way it was fabricated was lost to history.

By that time, the land bridge to the southern continent had already collapsed after centuries of diminishing because of the rising sea levels. The ice melted, which led to warming in temperature.

The warming in temperature made the barren wasteland Charles will have to pass.

What do you think, with Charles being a hedgehog, how can he pass through the wastelands?

 

[joxer]

What do you think, with Charles being a hedgehog, how can he pass through the wastelands?

Easy one: invent a portable airconditioner.

 

[Iggy_Gamechuck]

Easy one: invent a portable airconditioner.

Welp, Charles will have to get busy :lol: