Welcome to Skipclaw! [Lore + Design]

For this week and upcoming weeks, we wanted to provide some lore and behind the scenes work on how RUNT came to be~! There will be no spoilers for the full game, but there may be some for the Demo, so give it a shot if you haven’t and come right back here for more~!

This week, we wanted to talk a little bit about how Skipclaw came to be, both in the world and how it was designed. To give an overview, I’m passing this over to Soren!

Also RUNT will be at PAX East next week! If you are attending, swing by the DreadXP booth and give the PAX demo a try, as well as other DreadXP games!!

Welcome to Skipclaw!

Skipclaw is a small, rural town that was suffering long before the apocalypse hit. Before the establishment of a lumber mill in the early 1900s, it was little more than a small settlement, a cluster of families using the nearby land to graze cattle. The mill brought jobs, people, and paved roads, but some time before the Strayers showed up, the mill was shut down and forced the town into a slow collapse.

This is pretty close to home for one of the devs, who grew up in a town just like this. It's a beautiful place, but strange--rolling hills of wildflowers in the spring, snowcapped mountains overlooking the town in the winter. Schools, restaurants, bars, gas stations abandoned and slowly decaying with the old mill at the center of it all. Paved and landscaped driveways leading to gated vacation homes sit right next to the washed-out gravel drives of homes stuck in poverty, their yards growing knee-high weeds alongside broken down cars, cracked toilets and sun-faded flags flapping conservative propaganda. There is at least one crucifix on a hill, at least one hand-painted sign crookedly displaying a Bible verse for passers-by. And the churches are like weeds--every denomination is there, keeping whatever grip they can on a dying population.

Steam post image The first drawing of Skipclaw, by Soren

This is the kind of town the Strayers showed up to. It was already suffering before the apocalypse; the run-down state of the town isn't just because the sky is black. It was already dying.

Unlike the town I grew up in, Skipclaw diminished in population so rapidly and severely that the government wanted to take it off the grid entirely. It just wasn't seen as viable to run power out to anymore. This happens sometimes--the last lingering inhabitants get paid to move, and the towns end up completely empty and abandoned.

The residents of Skipclaw, being on a river, decided they could set up small hydro power and keep the town going that way. I did a little research into this--just enough to write about it decently, I think, but probably not enough research to those who are actual experts on this.

The hydroplant is the only thing keeping Skipclaw going--and I think it's barely going, at that. Beyond the constant threats of Smoke and Twister attacks, food is the biggest concern in this new, dark world.

The obvious solution is what Skipclaw has going: green houses. High tunnels, more accurately, where the temperature can be controlled and all the light comes from grow lights. Let's say, there was probably some kind of growing operation out in the woods nearby that they got these lights from. There's always someone on a back road growing some stuff out of sight of neighbors who might want to tattle. Willy would've lead them there (begrudgingly.)

Everything Skipclaw can't grow or access themselves, they get in from traders. Cherylise's sister, Ivy, is one of those. They cross the darkness, connecting surviving settlements and scrounging where they can for anything that still might be edible or useful. The day one shows up with a load of goods has got to feel like Christmas… but probably an old-fashioned Christmas where you get an orange in your stocking as a treat and are truly excited for it.

I can't say I've mapped out every single food item that grows in Skipclaw, but I can tell you that the Strayers have chickens at least, which means plenty of eggs (whether you want them or not) and Runt grows hearty kale and brassicas in the back yard, which don't mind a winter too much.

What no one in Skipclaw has anymore is all that lovely tropical produce; even if it was grown in a warmer part of the US, it's just not transportable anymore. There's no coffee, no bananas. Rice is rare. Sacks of refined sugar still might be languishing in a grocery store that hasn't been visited by a trader yet, which leaves Skipclaw living on honey (though I fear to think too much about the bee population in all that dark), and things like birch and maple syrup for sweetening.

The classic Skipclaw meal, no matter the time of day, is some form of eggs and potatoes. You've got to eat it with your mask on, just to be safe, and it's not got quite enough salt, seeing how a trader hasn't been by with any for a while…

THE MAP

I designed the map for Skipclaw, and the people that have pinged it as being very Silent Hill aren't wrong! Both that and old 60s-70s brochure-style tourism maps were the inspiration. It was made in Clip Studio Paint and Photoshop and then went through a lot of real-world distressing and filtering to gunk it up properly.

To keep it from looking like we were using a straight JPEG of the map image in the game, I printed it out and scanned it back in for a real dot-matrix look of a printer that Photoshop filters can never get 100% right. Plus, this way is just faster than spending time fiddling with different filters.

I took a separate piece of paper and folded it, like a brochure, and then stepped on it, crumbled it, and used some very fine grit sandpaper on the edge to approximate the look of a map that's been in someone's bag for a long time. The first distressed page I did this way ended up with a very prominent footprint on it; I was wearing socks, but you could see individual toes. I tossed that one and the next time I did it, I put a shoe on.

Steam post image Map with the horrible footprint (on right)

This worn brochure texture was overlaid on the map, and the edges cleaned up here and there as needed. Runt's scribbles were done in a gel pen (the classic Pilot Precise V5) and scanned in and overlaid as well.

A lot of this work might seem unnecessary to some people, but all the wear and tear and analog-ness is a huge, deliberate part of the overall design aesthetic of RUNT. Even if it's really subtle, these touches of real texture are important to help sell the player on the experience of being in this imaginary world.

Steam post imageA real texture creates, even while looking at it, the sense memory of touching a similar thing in the real world (this is part of the idea of "haptic visuality"). When this is successful, we identify the image with more than just our eye; the eye becomes the organ creating a phantom of touch; this solidifies the world as feeling "more real"--which is what you want in horror, especially in a game like RUNT which is entirely 2D and mostly text-based, and doesn't have the illusion of 3D space to sell the player on its reality.

So as much as I can, I print things out, scan them in, use actual ballpoint and gel pen to get the right scratchy the-ink-is-drying look to a line. I think it helps sell the look well and I really enjoy doing it.

That said, most of the art is digital, and it's only a subtle (but constant) final polish of real textures on top of things.

To talk about the initial map design, I'm passing it back over to Yves.

When I was making concept art for the game, this was the original mock up for the Skipclaw map. I grew up in the midwest, so I was looking for a very flat town, simple, kinda prairie types with little to no elevation in big fields. This was all using just general photos, so it wasn’t anywhere super specific, but a small town with a main set of streets that was walkable was key to Skipclaw's layout. We hadn’t even started character names or locations - it was much more a feeling that the player would get looking at the map, with the darkened edges, the vibrant red overlay, etc.

The original idea was that the Map screen would be more of a birdeye's, colored photo view, but ultimately, having a separate map screen didn’t feel as diegetic as we wanted.

Steam post image (Early Map Concept)

(Final Map) Given that the game is entirely from Runt’s literal perspective, it made much more sense to give Runt as a physical map that he can pull up. It also gave rise to the hand you see him have when holding that map, which later carried over to the Journal! Soren did a wonderful job making it as realistic and tangible as possible and it all helped make the HUD + UI more cohesive.

We hope that you look forward to exploring more of Skipclaw in the full game~! We will be back not next week, but the week after with more behind the scene Lore and Design!

Fanart

Additionally, we’d like to showcase some RUNTsonas and fanart that have been made! It was an unexpected delight to see so many people get involved in the world of RUNT with their own characters~!

We’d like to showcase Ryugure on Bluesky for this post for all their wonderful drawings of scenes in the demo!

If you have fanart, be sure to post it to Bluesky and tag it #runtVN or @grimstastestudio! We would love to see it~!!!

That’s all for now! Y’all come back now, ya hear?

Love,

Soren & Yves (Grimtaste Studios)