Welcome to the March - Devlog #02

I’m Arn, game director on Trailblazers: Into the March and this my first devlog.

Have you ever wondered what the world might look like a thousand years after humanity nearly wiped itself out in an orgiastic cataclysm? Fantasized about what kind of explorer you would’ve been when the world was still wild and wide? Spent sleepless nights thinking, “Isn’t it Into the Marsh? Did they make a typo in their title? Should I be worried for them?”

Well fret not, benevolent reader, as I’m here to answer some of those questions.

As the title says…

Welcome to the March

Firstly, let’s clear the air: It’s March, not Marsh. Unbeknownst to some people with a richer social life than me, a March describes a borderland territory and was used during Medieval European times to qualify all kind of contested land, untamed regions or buffer zones between different states. In our case the best variation of this word comes from the Old Norse word mǫrk, meaning “forest, woodland, borderland”.

We choose this word for two reasons:

1. We thought it was a well-known word.

2. It described exactly what we wanted our game world to be.

Here is a fun fact: In WoW, the French translation of “Westfall” is “La Marche de l’Ouest”. Which means Westmarch. It has absolutely nothing to do with our game. But I don’t see another time in my life where I’ll get to share this, so I’m taking the shot.

From phantasmagoric sea to ever-shifting lands

As you might know Trailblazers: Into the March started as a project about pirates. The pitch we decided, as a crew, to develop was “FTL X Pirates”. So the first iterations of the March were actually iterations of the “8th Sea”:

Players were supposed to navigate the 8th Sea, a sea of phantasms and magical realism.

We weren’t sure of the 3D vs 2D direction yet so were looking to make it interesting in top-down view also.

I just like this one so I’m showing it to you. Shout out to @arnowillustrations who was working as an artist on the project back then.

The fundamentals were very close to what we have today though:

• The player would leave a main port to explore an uncharted area at the fringe between reality and the supernatural.

• Expeditions were prepared in the port. Player had to manage their resource stock, choose a hull and loadout, pick crew members, and venture forth to fulfill contracts.

• The sea was everchanging by nature. We kept that idea with the March.

When we decided to commit fully to our 2D top-down perspective and transitioned to the idea of Landships we looked for a way to maintain the core premises we liked with the Pirate fantasy : the crew, the port, the uncharted and living unknown to explore.

We found inspiration in many places, but the most essential ones were :

• Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (and generally speaking Hayao Miyazaki’s work as a whole)

• Stalker, be it the film from Andrei Tarkovski or the games from GSC Game World

• La Horde du Contrevent, a French science-fiction novel by Alain Damasio

Nausicaa: Voracious toxic jungle

Nausicaä is a post-post-apocalyptic world, a bit like Horizon: Zero Dawn, Zelda: BotW, or ours <3.

It means the story takes place long after the world as we know it has ended. The cataclysm is far away in the past, and civilization