Dev Diary #4: The World After the Collapse

Welcome to our fourth Dev Diary, where we return once more to the world of DREADMOOR to look at what came after the collapse.

In our first Dev Diary, we introduced the world of DREADMOOR, one that has been drowned both literally (by water) and figuratively in loneliness, melancholy, and tension. It is a post-apocalyptic world that is not fully dead, but at the same time not truly alive either.

In our second Dev Diary, we spoke about fishing not as a mechanic, but as a necessity. After all, in a flooded world, survival depends on what you can gather, craft, and carry with you; this pretty much makes fishing a necessity!

In our third Dev Diary, we looked at the Sea Blight, one of the most important forces shaping the world of DREADMOOR.

Today, we want to step back and look at the world itself. Not just what it looks like, but how it became what it is now, what remains of the old world, how people understand the past, and how geography, isolation, and fear shape life after the collapse.

The World That Remains

The world of DREADMOOR is not simply an endless ocean; it is made up of islands, fragmented landmasses, swamps, flooded ruins, and isolated settlements. On the land, memories of the past still remain, buildings, factories, and other high-rise structures. Some of these are ruins, rotting in the damp air, but not all, after all, the remnants of humanity need some place to live, and these buildings can still provide good shelter.

As we mentioned in the first Dev Diary, DREADMOOR is not a fully fictional world, nor is it a direct mirror of reality, instead, it is a hybrid. You, the player, should be able to recognise parts of the old world, but what is recognisable will also be rotting, overgrown, infected, and shaped by time. Yet, as we mentioned before, this is not a dead world. Life remains, even if heavily mutated.

How the World Became This Way

The collapse of DREADMOOR ’s world is not understood in one single way.

Communication between settlements has long been lost, and enough time has passed that no explanation is universally accepted. Depending on culture and beliefs, the collapse may be interpreted as a technological disaster, a religious event, or a mystical phenomenon tied to the occult.

This may sound vague, but this uncertainty is a major part of the game.

That said, there are things that are known. Before the collapse, humanity developed technology intended for climate control, it was a truly global effort involving multiple nations and the best scientific minds. The goal was designed to regulate seasons, create predictable and reliable rainfall, control the tides, and generally stabilize the day-to-day weather.

Some people (DREADMOOR survivors) claim that this technology was weaponised, triggering the collapse, but no definitive proof of this exists.

• Some may understand it as a technological disaster.

• Some may see it as punishment.

• Some may connect it to something mystical.

• Some may only care about surviving what comes next.

The player will uncover fragments of truth, but DREADMOOR is not a world where every answer can be agreed upon, ultimately, it is down to the players to piece together their own interpretation from the information they discover.

Flooding, Broken Land, and Swamps

During the collapse, the world of DREADMOOR was reshaped by both geological shifts and rising waters. Land sank, water levels rose, and melting permafrost and flooding drastically reduced the remaining landmass.

This was a sudden event, but unlike traditional natural disasters that strike and end relatively quickly, this process kept going until the world became what it is now. And though the world now (now being the time that the player joins the game), has stabilized, it does not mean that everything is safe as high humidity continues to degrade the remaining land, turning it into swampland and rapidly rotting nature and man-made structures. Ultimately, much of the world is hostile to life.

As we discussed in the fishing Dev Diary, the further you move away from inhabited areas, the more unpredictable and dangerous the waters become. Being far from safety at night is something else entirely.

That same principle applies to the wider world. The further you travel, the more risk you take.

Settlements After the Collapse

Humanity survived the collapse, but instead of uniting to survive together, the divisions grew ever wider. This means that settlements in DREADMOOR will be very different to one another, some resemble structured towns with economies, while others are tribal or even cult-based.

As for the people themselves, many simply see survival as the main goal, while others move around, searching for safer lands to live in.

There are a few who try to preserve the knowledge of the past, and fewer still who try to fix the world.

And then there are those who have built beliefs around the Sea Blight.

As we discussed in the Sea Blight Dev Diary, the Sea Blight changes everything that it infects.

Some cults worship mutation, going as far as to see the Sea Blight not as corruption, but as a pathway to evolution.

Put all of this together, and there is little room for trust between people and even less room for trust between settlements.

If you think about it, in such a world, resources will be scarce, traders will hold significant power, and desperation, mutation, depression, and madness will exist side by side. This makes suspicion rife, and trust rare. However, this has the knock-on effect that, should trust be found, it becomes all the more valuable.

DREADMOOR tip: As the story progresses, trust can become one of the few things that still feels truly human.

Myth, Truth, and the Past

One of the themes we want to explore in DREADMOOR is the way people understand the past when no single truth remains.

Before the collapse, the world was connected. After the collapse, that connection was broken.

What’s more, over time, settlements became more isolated, communication broke down even more, generations passed, stories changed, facts became rumours, rumours became beliefs, beliefs became the foundation of a new culture.

This means that people in DREADMOOR do not all talk about the old world in the same way. Science, punishment, mystical forces, mistakes, and even apathy are all topics that will come up when people talk about the past.

Why did we include apathy? Because knowing why the world ended will not help people survive the night.

From a design point of view, this gives us space to let the player uncover the world slowly.

Rather than explaining everything at once, we want the player to feel like the truth is out there, it can be pieced together, but how they do so, and what they understand from it, is up to them.

The Sea Blight and the Changed World

While this Dev Diary is focused on the world after the collapse, it is impossible to talk about that world without mentioning the Sea Blight.

As covered in our previous Dev Diary, the Sea Blight existed before the apocalypse, discovered during an expedition to the far North as a biological substance. Before the collapse, it was not known as a blight. It was used in medicine, science, and engineering, and was seen as a breakthrough for humanity.

After the collapse, that changed. The Sea Blight spread and it changes, whether it changes due to the collapse, or it was always like this, just waiting, no one knows. However, what is known is that after the collapse, it began to mutate whatever it came into contact with.

How does the Sea Blight travel? In some regions, only through water, but in others it also exists in the air as a faint green mist. Why it is like this is currently unknown.

Naturally, the area that the player finds themselves in has a particularly aggressive version of the Sea Blight.

What we want DREADMOOR to feel like

We want to make DREADMOOR feel like much more than a flooded world.

Not everything will attack you, but you should never really feel sure whether something will attack you or not. As a wise man once wrote, not all that glitters is gold.

Yes, DREADMOOR is a dark world full of rot, decay, rust, and corrosion, but that does not mean that it has to be visually ugly. Think of real life: even in places that match this setting - places that are so often linked to death and decay - can look beautiful, lonely, or almost peaceful; often it’s the knowledge of what happened there that makes it haunting.

We want the world to feel unsettling, but mesmerizing at the same time. As we mentioned in the first Dev Diary, the world is not a graveyard. Life persists, but it is twisted, hungry, and watchful.

DREADMOOR is a world where humanity survived the end, but survival did not mean recovery. And as the player travels through the Submerged Lands, they will uncover pieces of the truth for themselves.

About DREADMOOR

DREADMOOR is a dark first-person fishing adventure game. Anglers explore both land and sea, fishing for a wide variety of aquatic creatures lurking in the depths of the treacherous waters, and fighting their way through a flooded wasteland filled with danger and mystery.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3629430/DREADMOOR

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