Dev diary no.1 - What is The Fold?

The Fold: Ingression, or just "The Fold" for short, was originally intended to be a small project for fun while planning something bigger, but the universe expanded rapidly. The project began its prototype stage with 3 of the devs from Antagonist's Through the Woods but was acquired by Audvyr Studio shortly after and is now being single-handedly developed by one person. Let me introduce myself; I’m Stian Willums from Norway, an artist at heart, who has picked up a thing or two over the years with a steep learning curve.

Story The main plot for the story was relatively clear from the start, but with little to no experience in scriptwriting I had to do a lot of research and planning to connect everything. Many parts of the story are loosely based on strange old Norwegian myths and legends, but in this game not so much focus is put on the stereotypical folklore creatures. I wanted to go for something less common this time and there are many strange pieces to gather from church stories, often in a more Norse-like manner than one may think.

Lore Most stories and legends are taken from my Norwegian home county of Telemark, with traces to the Iron / Norse (viking) and Bronze Age. A lot of the more traditional fairytales also come from this region. Several stave churches here have stories about their construction from around the year 1000 where ‘trolls" in particular were involved in the building process.

The stave churches themselves are rather special ancient buildings, basically built by ‘vikings’ forcibly turned Christian and are the closest, and amazingly well preserved, remains we have from the era. In some of them one can see mockeries of the Christian faith and ancient runic graffiti.

Many churches were supposedly built on top of the old Norse divine ritual sites. It's not known for certain if it was to literally bury the Norse faith or to exploit the power or divine magic of the area. Possibly both, and the locations often truly are quite special as well. Some of the stories also involve very un-Christian, more pagan rituals up to a couple of centuries ago and even still to this day.

Lovecraftian Influence After reading many Lovecraft stories myself, the first thing that comes to mind thinking of them isn’t all the massive insane looking creatures, but rather the mystery and buildup of each of them. There are ‘beings’ and elements in this game with clear inspiration from these typical creatures, but I’m focusing more on making this a story that possibly could be one in that world, but not based on any existing ones. I’m holding back some of the most ‘insane’ stuff until release just to keep the Unknown at bay, but you have a lot to look forward to!

If you would like to find out more, feel free to join my Discord server, I will do my best to answer your questions there; or just post here in the Steam discussions, of course!