[Patch Notes] August 1, 2025

• Fixed several small editing mistakes. Shoutout to Jolimaku.

• Fixed forum login issue when using Discord. Shoutout to FellSwarm.

• Hid several debug-helper messages that shouldn’t display to readers.

• Fixed Molly’s name tag is Bodenforst.

• Fixed mention of a side character that no longer exists (lol).

[Preview] Into The Woods

A couple weeks ago, we released Veiled Age’s second episode, Dwellers of Bodenforst. Without spoiling it, I wanted to give a little preview and share a little of how it was made.

First, it’s inspired by Grimm’s Fairy tales. The Grimm brothers, by the way, were collectors and editors of the tales, not the original authors. Many of their stories were folk tales gathered from German peasants, who were inspired by Germany’s Black Forest.

One of these stories is Little Red Riding Hood, sometimes called Little Red, or Little Red Cap. As is often the case with folk tales, it’s unknown who first came up with the general story, but the first published and widely distributed version was written in 1697 by Charles Perrault. In 1900, Arthur Rackham bestowed it with color illustrations.

Today, the image of a girl with a red cloak in a dark forest has become a symbol of fairy tales in general. It catches the imagination, as does the story’s supporting cast of a predatory talking wolf and a lone hunter. There are probably hundreds of works that adapt or reference the story in some way. Dwellers of Bodenforst is my own tribute to it.

Besides my longstanding desire to write a “dark forest” story, I wanted to challenge myself to build something bigger. Secret of Gloam Lake has a dungeon of sorts with multiple rooms and a puzzle. But the dungeon itself is very small. Bodenforst is a proper, oldschool dungeon maze with several things going on. So, while you’ve come to the forest for one main purpose, there are multiple solutions, hidden objectives, and missable locations, characters and events.

In going bigger, I hoped to capture the feeling of not just exploring a fantasy forest, but being lost there. This is a beloved trope in fiction, but interactive mediums are uniquely equipped to explore it. The Lost Woods in Zelda games comes to mind, where the map loops and connects in a nonsensical way.

Looping paths are a neat trick, but I had an alternate idea. I wondered if we could invoke the magic of a dark forest by simply making the forest a decent size and NOT giving the player a minimap with arrows and icons, as if your medieval hero is walking around with a GPS-enabled smartphone. If you’ve ever hiked through a real forest with winding paths, you know how easy it is to forget whether you’ve turned right or left at a particular fork. Not only that, but you must remember to reverse your rights and lefts on the way back. Well, our forest is like that. Here is a map of it, with the labels removed.

In beta tests, this worked a bit too well. Though testers eventually found their way, they would sometimes get frustrated with all the turn left / turn right shenanigans. So, the published version offers a choice. When you enter the forest, the game asks you whether you want the navigation difficulty to be “normal” or “evil.” Normal gives you a compass, making it much easier to map out in your head on on paper. “Evil” offers no such luxury, but grants greater Insight (what is Insight even for? I’ll tell ya later). Normal is still a little bit challenging; there is no Ubisoft mode offering a GPS map cluttered with icons so you know exactly where to go.

Dwellers of Bodenforst is not just a maze, though. What happens in the forest influences future events. In Secret of Gloam Lake, the story is pretty straightforward after you solve the dungeon. Bodenforst gets a lot crazier. You’ll likely have some choices to make, but your options depend on the circumstances up until then. Here’s a map of the possible plot points that happen after the “dungeon”. The contents have been redacted, of course. Diagrams like this are how I keep the plot structure straight as I’m writing.

Secret of Gloam Lake had multiple endings, but only one was a proper canon ending, while the rest were various forms of Game Over. Dwellers of Bodenforst is different. My first two testers got two significantly different endings, and they both assumed that it was the canon ending: the natural outcome of the story. That is an encouraging sign I’ve done my job.

I will almost certainly make some updates to it based on feedback, and an explorable forest maze is a particularly good setup for adding hidden content on a whim later. But all in all, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I think it’s a good balance of fantasy / fairy tale novella and Zork-style exploration.

You can buy and then play Dwellers of Bodenforst from the campaign screen between episodes. Though you can play it right after the Prologue, I still suggest playing the stories in canon order: Prologue → Gloam Lake → Intermission → Bodenforst.