Hello Kookoorooza!

Well, it wasn't actually my intention that the ending was a *Bad* ending. If it seemed like it was, then that's on me (and some good insight for me to make things like that clearer in the future).

My actual intentions for the story and the ending was supposed to be focused on Change, not doom and gloom (sorry If I didn't make that clear in the story).


Barotrauma has major themes of decay, debilitation, and dementia throughout the base game by the way the devs implemented the aliens, multiplayer (and the chaos that ensues) and by showing a society constantly on the verge of collapse and basically eating itself with pirates, revolutionaries, and oppressive authoritarian regimes. All of this is in addition to a toxic planet trying to kill the player at every turn.

A big part of the theme I was going for was the Gene Splicer in the last map (Change) and how that single unfathomable piece of technology would allow humans to adapt to Europa rather than just trying to kill it (and themselves). The point I was trying to make throughout the maps was that humanity couldn't hold onto the old ways of Earth and needed to find a way to coexist with Europa (and themselves) and the Gene Splicer (the last gift of the *Entity*, a mysterious being that struggled with holding onto what was, rather than working to help create something new and beautiful) was a way to help do it.

I setup the ending to do try and do two things.

(1) Give the player an escape route (a shiny new submarine that the *Entity* gave you as one of it's last acts) where (after the story ends) you would presumably take the Gene Splicer and bring it to Europan civilization to integrate it into their technology. Basically, part of the story was a non-canon way to explain why the Gene Splicer even exists in the main game.

Also, If the player was able to erase their criminal record in Sierra Station by going through the computer systems, then they would've been free from the law when they arrived at the next station after the last section of the story.

(2) The new -Entity- I put on the ship wasn't there to kill the player. It was connected to the player's mind like the old *Entity*, except this new being was a potentially malevolent force following you around to do many mischievous things. It wasn't able to kill the player, just hover around and mess with them if it wanted. I was using that as a teaser in case I ever wanted to continue the story in a new series of maps.

As for why everyone in the last level was dead, it was because it was an excavation site and they dug too recklessly and incurred the wrath of the guardians (the remnants of which you fight midway in the map). The guardians tore through the excavation team, and you get there Long after it happened.


"And some of my thoughts. I created one adventure map before and some ideas just cant be done there, so your map helped me to make those ideas real."

I'm glad the maps helped you do that :)


"In first level I removed PUCS, cause it is overpowered against husks + breaks"

lol, Yes, I can see that. I kept the PUCS suit because I thought the husk virus was too overpowered, but I can definitely see your point of view.


Also your English is good * Thumbs up*

Yeah, thats the language problem i was talking about. By "bad" i meant that it feels illogical, not that something "bad" had to happen to the character. But honestly, after your message and reading memory components from last level just now, it all makes sense, but i completely missed it.

Now i understand what you mean by "it's not quiet my vision".
-*I'm*building*something*that*Will*help***just*keep*moving* now makes sense to me.
Well, count it as "Dead space" endings. Your brian is ill, but you can live, or if you messed up with boss, your brain dies.

But how real are the stuff that happend? From the very beggining of story.
If we take maps 1-2 partially real, 3 real and 4 real only as some parts of ruins and Dugong?
What about "0 0 0 255 people" in level 2? Shadow sillhouettes(with eyes) is the same character as character in starting square?

Now i honestly have no idea how i can even make it more clear to player, since me and my comrade missed main message. Mem.comp. need to explain to player somehow, that this is years before main story of game, make it super clear and explain that gene splicers arent exist at all, because i saw splicer as something common. (would be funny if there were husk genes. In original map splicer was empty, was it intentional?)

p.s im mostly interested how everyone died in sierra, not in ruins, might i missed it too?

Once again, thanks for your work. It was pleasure to play other person`s adventure map in barotrauma, there are like only 3 of them for more than 4 years, and it feels lucky, that i actually found it buried in steam workshop.

"But how real are the stuff that happend? From the very beggining of story."

Well for how real things that happen throughout the maps are, I'd say you're mostly if not completely correct. The starting "dream" segment and all segments like it are happening in a mental dream space. The other normal looking segments are real, including when you come out of the mental insanity space in the final map.


"Shadow sillhouettes(with eyes) is the same character as character in starting square?"

Yes, the shadowy creature is supposed to be a projection from the *Entity* you communicate with throughout the story. Other people weren't clear on that either. I tried to make it clearer by saying that they had the same voice, but I probably should've added some more direct dialogue about that (although I did enjoy making the players feel uncertain about what they were actually talking with, to add to the alien strangeness of what was happening).


"What about "0 0 0 255 people" in level 2?"

I'm not sure what you're referring to, could you explain?


"Now I honestly have no idea how I can even make it more clear to player, since me and my comrade missed main message."

Yeah, missing the memory components is a problem I've yet to solve. I tried adding some lights a while back to mark dialogue spots but I could never make them look nice. What I ended up doing was just placing dialogue memory components in interesting places hoping the player would look at them (it didn't always work).


"p.s im mostly interested how everyone died in sierra, not in ruins, might i missed it too?"

Well, for Sierra Station there was a band of Husk Cultists and both the governor and Security Chief where members. The Security Chief as patient 0 who voluntarily infected himself with the husk and the entire station because of that. I tried to put in a little subplot about some of the guards digging into odd stuff in the security department, and being murdered because of it. Hopefully there were husks actively infecting the random NPC citizens on the station when you played (every now and then the NPC citizens would either kill all the husks or die in mutual destruction with the husks, leaving you alone on a quiet and empty station).

I didn't directly say, but I was trying to allude that the cultists had been hearing whispers of the *Entity* or something like it from some of the ruins but they couldn't comprehend it, so they formed crazy ideas about the husks being a gateway for humanity (they aren't). Again, I never outright say this (looking back maybe I really should've) but I was trying to softly hint that the reason the *Entity* is able to speak to you is because your brain is mush from radiation poisoning.


"Once again, thanks for your work. It was pleasure to play other person`s adventure map in barotrauma, there are like only 3 of them for more than 4 years, and it feels lucky, that i actually found it buried in steam workshop."

Glad you enjoyed it! I'm a big fan of the Pathos 1 map you made too. It's a heck of a lot better wired than mine. I'm sad to say I was never able to finish it though because I got stuck and became distracted by work and other things. So now I have a question for you.

In Pathos 1, I got stuck after getting the green card. I did some shenanigans underwater, entered the green card zone (the one with the letter K, fought some fires, and then got confused. Slowly succumbing to the dark as my flashlight died, leaving me in pitch blackness to become one with the shadows. What did I need to do in the green card room? And please don't laugh if it's something incredibly obvious because as the text on my profile reads, I'm an "amazingly average gamer".

You did a fantastic elevator sequence by the way. Loved the creepy atmospheric scenery moving by in the background.

"What about "0 0 0 255 people" in level 2?" - Sillhouettes of people celebrating something(birthday?). Is it "It's just a burning memory.mp3"?

Don't downplay your merits, especially since you didint finish my map to the end, if it is still make people stop to quit, after years and dozens of playtests, it is an actual problem. Pathos has zero story at all, it is all about puzzles and then survival, and all the "environmental storrytelling" is just random assets, i thought look cool enough.
After you finished with fire and hatch is opened, you go upstairs and find safe, which contains orange pass to last floor of elevator.

LOL, yeah I guess that really was obvious (thanks for not laughing at my lack of skill). Like I said, it was a very busy time in my life and I guess it caused me to overlook the safe. Thanks for the tip.

I also wouldn't downplay your merits either *looks at 5 star steam review on Pathos I - Adventure map*

As for the silhouettes celebrating a birthday party, I was playing with a theory called Genetic Memory. The theory basically goes that certain instinctive acts that aren't learned and seem to come out of nowhere actually come from memory encoded in your genetics.

I took it a step further, playing with the idea that entire memories were encoded in your genes and that sequence of the game in the second map was the *Entity* delving into your genetics and into the memories of your ancestor (taking you with it) to try and figure out what they were like and why they had come to Europa in the first place. The scene it found was a ritualistic birthday party, where (not having much) they were passing a single gift back and forth around the colony ship and celebrating the event as a major thing to distract themselves from the harsh conditions they were living in. It was showing both a loving communal atmosphere and one of crime and fear (they were taking problems of old Earth with them to Europa, which would later be exacerbated by the planet's toxicity).

The segment after that is the *Entity* allowing you to enter it's own mind because it delved into yours. I was also trying to allude during the segment where you crowbar your way deeper into the *Entity's* mind that it let you do that. It could've stopped you going in deeper if it wanted (as evidenced by some locked doors you find deeper in its mind but have absolutely no way of opening) but it wanted to build trust so it let you in.

Man, storytelling is hard... For now, i have not questions left.
Not sure if i will try to change something in map, since im not a writer, and even add couples of lines to creatures at second ending cause headache, but i probably will make some important lines, especially at final level more noticable or unskipable.
Sadly, as steam works, people will play it mostly 1 week after release, that is almost ended, and much less players 6 months later, and then it will be buried in workshop too...(

lol, yeah I'm going to agree that storytelling is hard. I've heard it described as a muscle that you have to exercise and I think that's very true. It's a good skill to learn though and I also think it's something fundamentally important to all of us. Storytelling goes back to the dawn of humanity for a reason after all.


For me, crafting these maps was kind of a foray way outside my comfort zone. I knew enough about the map-work of Barotrauma to start the project, and I felt I was solid enough in traditional book writing to interweave a story into the maps.

What I had to learn was how to make sprawling (nice looking) maps, and how to make very short, very confined lines of dialogue text in the style of a point-and-click game. That was very new to me.

I can certainly say that I did a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong in the old maps. Even if it never really saw the light of day (which it didn't until you posted your version) I still learned skills and understood what I should and shouldn't do going forward. Experience is kind of priceless in that regard, and that's what I got, experience from the project and I'd say you got experience from yours as well.

I'm sorry I'm not offering to help you with work on the updated map you've posted. You've caught me at a bad time where I'm already working other projects right now (some of them are fixing other old stuff of mine too *sighs at old work*) and I don't think I have the capacity to go back into deep edits of the Whispers Story maps right now. Maybe in the future but unfortunately I can't now.

If I can give one piece of advice in case you decide to incorporate memory component storytelling in one of your future projects, I think made a big mistake writing all the text in a lower scale UI setting. I think I should've written them to fit the screen while using the MAX UI scale so people wouldn't have to hurt their eyes trying to read a ton of microscopic text. As it stands now, if you up the UI to MAX then it cuts off some of the text and makes it inconvenient to read. (I don't advise trying to fix it in these maps because that would be a BIG job).

Thanks for being inspired enough to do any of this in the first place, It's been a pleasure having this conversation with you. If you have any more questions feel free to ask.