C.L.A.Y. - Devblog

Welcome to the devblog of RPG narrative-driven PC title "C.L.A.Y. - The Last redemption"

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Here we go!

Welcome to the official blog by developers of “C.L.A.Y. - The Last Redemption”! We are MiTale, an indie gamedev team from Finland, with huge passion for narrative-driven experiences and utilizing gaming technologies in variety of scientific and educational fields.

C.L.A.Y. – The Last Redemption is a story-driven rpg, set several generations after the collapse of civilization. The survivors of the apocalypse live in tribal societies and tell stories of the day the cities came alive and devoured all who lived in them.

The apocalypse was caused by C.L.A.Y, a ubiquitous AI-enhanced smartmass that was used to build, enhance or modify nearly everything in the pre-apocalypse; whole cities were built with it, as were drones, vehicles and weapons. No-one expected the AI that controlled the mass would learn to hate humanity.

In the post-apocalypse, C.L.A.Y. lives on both as a curse, in the insane clay golems that hunger for human blood, and as a blessing, as some have learned to control it through ritual and alchemy.

We are having weekly Twitch streams by Natasha Skult, feel free to join her art production process LIVE on Wednesdays from 6PM EEST!

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The Tribe - A look at the inhabitants of the Moving City.

The Elbéar consider themselves the One Tribe, which all humans in the City belong to. Although there are other groups out there, the Elbéar see them all as temporary off-shoots, and when the day comes and the City begins moving again, they will all join together once more into a single caravan. Currently, the Elbéar make their home in the Corral – the ancestral home of the tribe, where every clan has its own assigned Stack and every street and square has a name passed down through the generations.

The Elbéar are led by the chieftain – a man or woman with the skills and will needed to lead the tribe and to help them survive in a City that often seems to actively want to harm them. Whenever necessary, the Council of Elders - the matriarchs and patriarchs of the many clans that make up the tribe - elect a new chieftain to lead the tribe. For the sake of stability, that chieftain is often the son or daughter of the previous chieftain; provided they have proven their worth.

The Elbéar know two things for sure: one is the Work and the other is the Debt. The Work is what every Elbéar is expected to do for the City – every day, come rain or shine, wercrus are sent out into the City to perform whatever tasks the Bozes require. The Loretellers, going back to the First Elders, speak of the Work, and although not even the shamans fully understand what exactly it is they do, all Elbéar know the Work is of utmost importance, and the foundation of the compact they have with the Bozes.

The Debt is something that is both communal and individual. The shamans claim that when the Hunger came, and the other Cities came alive and consumed their inhabitants, the ancestors of the Elbéar were saved by the Bozes. In return, they do the Work, as a tribe. But every Elbéar must also individually work off their Debt: those that can participate in wercrus, but equally important are those who stay behind to grow food, take care of the children or mend clothes. They say that one day the Elbéar will have finally worked off their Debt, and that day they will be permitted to leave the City.

When not doing the Work or otherwise paying down the Debt, the Elbéar pride themselves on their oral tradition: their Loretellers can recite stories dating back to the earliest days of the tribe, to the time of the First Elders, and every Elbéar tribesman enjoys sitting down around a campfire to share a story. Storytelling serves two purposes: one is entertainment, and the other is education. In a City that is ever-changing, where its very fabric is alive, a story correctly told can save lives – or just provide an evening of escape. Stories of beautiful Sirens luring men to their doom, glowing Leviathans sailing between skyscrapers, Dragons in the sky and golem-apes with golden eyes looking for the chosen one…

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You are the scion of the Elbéar tribe and your father, the chieftain, is dying.

Welcome to this series of blog posts about the world of C.L.A.Y. – The Last Redemption! In it, we will talk about various aspects of the world and what you can expect to find during your time with the game. The intention isn’t to spoil the story (and in fact there won’t be much talk about the story!): rather they will be appetizers, a way to whet your appetite in the long wait for the finished game. 

In order to maintain some of the mystery of the world, not everything in these blog posts will necessarily be entirely true. They do represent what you, the player character, would know about the world – although written in a way to be more accessible to the casual reader. Still, go into it with a dose of scepticism, and expect to be surprised.

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The City In the game, your tribe is a native inhabitant of what the outside world calls the Moving City. The City is alive in the most literal sense: it is built out of the titular Clay, programmable smart-matter that is capable of forming into anything, and inside that Clay lives an ancient, inhuman intelligence. For reasons unknown, the City is constantly expanding, erecting new districts and building new roads according to some unseen master plan. Clay, however, cannot replicate: whenever the City runs out of material, it begins to cannibalize the oldest parts of itself. And so, the City moves, material surging from one end to the other in a seemingly endless cycle.

To the outside world, the City is like an unnatural disaster. Its edges swarm with autonomous drones and crawler bots, clearing the way for the buildings themselves (or helping with the process of disassembling old districts), and they are not kind to any ‘trespassers’ they come across. Whole communities find themselves forced to evacuate or risk getting swallowed by the City as it approaches. Many have tried to fight back, but to little effect: how do you fight buildings, roads and parking lots that appear overnight, slowly snaking their way across the countryside? To the people outside the City, waking up one day to find a skyscraper on the horizon is a very real fear – especially as it is joined the next day by another, and another, until your fields are paved over, your game scared away, and what remains of your forests are filled with drones cutting down trees, burning away grass, and killing anyone who dares to try to stand up to them. 

That, at least, was the way of the Moving City before you were born. About twenty years before the start of the game, the City for no apparent reason came to a halt. Its perimeters are still closely guarded, the drones not letting anyone in(or out), but the City itself has become dormant. In the decades since, nature has moved in, growing over the half-finished districts where it could, streets becoming meadows and empty stacks sinking into the ground. But the City still lives, and dreams: buildings disappear or appear overnight, the internal geography of the City remains in constant flux, and in the Center, construction of the great Crescent is never-ending. 

And now, the shamans augur a change. A return, perhaps, to the old ways – or something else? Whatever it is, you will have to prepare if you are to become the next chieftain of your tribe.