Now that we’ve announced our upcoming game Tryhard (... WISHLIST ON STEAM?) I can talk more openly about our design and development process for it.
Today's post is about the game's setting, world, and worldbuilding.
Like many RPGs, Tryhard has an explorable 3D town hub where you can talk to NPCs, visit shops, and randomly barge into homes to steal things. These RPG towns usually exist in a magical fantasyland of make-believe, but Tryhard's town is based on an actual real-life magical fantasyland of make-believe called Auckland, New Zealand!
Specifically, you live your RPG life in a unique IRL neighborhood known as Karangahape Road (pronounced like "ka-rawng-ah-hawp-ey").
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| "painting looking north over Auckland c.1840" |
Karangahape Road has a long history. It even existed before New Zealand itself, when indigenous Māori people regularly walked along the ridge for hundreds of years before European settlement. It's had multiple names as local iwi (Māori tribes) have different traditions and claims, but Karangahape ("the place of the calling of Hape") is what stuck.
Later, even the English-speaking colonizers couldn't agree on what to rename it. Broadway? Elizabeth Road? Thankfully, none of those boring names won out, and if you couldn't say Karangahape then you nicknamed it “The Road." As if there's no other road.
After all, no other road in the country could compare with Karangahape's many theaters, dance halls, and shopping arcades. It was the center of daily life where you went to run errands and get things done, but also relax and people watch. At night it'd get so crowded that police would have to direct all the foot traffic.
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| K Road with crowded sidewalks, late 1930s |
In 1965, a government campaign of “urban renewal” slammed a new highway through the surrounding neighborhood, displacing the local working class community and triggering the neighborhood’s “decline” into a red light district synonymous with sex work and the LGBTQ+ community.
Today, some of the city's few remaining strip clubs, gay bars, record stores, and vintage fashion shops are still here, making a heroic last stand against the forces of bland gentrification. Despite the many changes over the years, it still retains a certain queerness and honesty that makes it a strong and authentic center of culture and nightlife in the city.
For Tryhard we want to reflect this past and present of K Road / Auckland / Aotearoa New Zealand in the design of the RPG town hub itself.
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| photo of K Road at night; facade of St Kevin's Arcade with rainbow street crossing |
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| (left) photo of St Kevin's Arcade on K Road; (right) WIP screenshot in Tryhard |
Our virtual K Road will change and evolve as you progress through the game. Some stores will close, new shops will move in, and ongoing construction will reveal new areas to explore. We want to emphasize K Road as a place where people live and work and get things done, much like its heyday back before the 1960s.
But we also want to reflect the socioeconomic pressures around K Road and the city. Maybe halfway through your playthrough, a (virtual) inflation wave will hit (virtual) New Zealand, forcing limited shop hours with higher prices. Or maybe the (virtual) New Zealand government will defund (virtual) public transport, and now it'll cost you twice as much to travel to your rugby matches.
What if the worldbuilding for a game was simply the world we already live in?
Also I do believe in the old adage to "write what you know." I can't really make a game set in a small town because I've never lived in a small town. But I *can* make a game set on K Road in the 2020s.
I just have to slap some rugby on it somehow.
K Road doesn't actually have a rugby field though. So I had to imagine -- if there was a K Road rugby club, where would they play?
In Tryhard, you manage a fictitious club called Road RFC. (Some of the oldest rugby clubs started with names like "Town" and "Country", so "Road" hints at a similar primordial origin.) This fiction also helps to avoid offending an existing real-life club, while providing some freedom to imagine this club's worldbuilding and dramatize its struggle.
Behind the bright storefronts of K Road near St Kevins Arcade, there's an awkward car park nestled in the back. This is the fictional home of Road RFC. Gradually you'll learn about how this once prestigious club sharply declined in 1965 along with the rest of K Road, and about how the landlord decided to pave over its legendary grass field to convert into a pay-by-the-hour parking lot.
It's a terrible place to play rugby. And so this is where the game must begin.
But remember: under the pavement -- the grass.
PS: did I mention you can wishlist Tryhard on Steam, or even idle in our Discord too?
