Hour Of The Wolf was the first game I ever made with my own actual 'story'- all the other games I'd made up until this point were either small experiments I made to have fun with and explore gamedev software, or were built off of someone else's writing.

The game is primarily based off of my own experiences as a teenager, of course. I wanted to capture that feeling of being on the brink of graduating high school, as well as the specific experience of coming-of-age in a small, rural town.

The game has no routes, since I didn't know how to code very well at the time and wanted to finish the project without stressing about it. I kind of like it better this way, since I think it succeeds in the story I was trying to tell.

I made this game primarily for fun and self-expression, but it's always great to see what other people think of it. I really enjoy everyone's interpretations, both those who grew up with me and those who did not. I'm glad I was able to capture a small piece of emotion. Video games are truly one of the best mixed media platforms in existence.

Doralice is this game's main character. She's interesting because she acts recognizably similar to me in high school since she's based on my own experiences, but I see her as an entirely different person from me. I think her personality only became apparent to me after I finished the game.

She comes off as fairly social in-game, but I think she's the quietest out of all the characters. She comes off as kind of mean, generally, because she doesn't have a very expressive face and she can be somewhat blunt and standoffish. Doralice is Mexican, and she's experienced a lot of racism along with the general high school stressors. At this point she's pretty tired of people. I think she's a nice person at her core, but she's used to constantly being on the defensive.

Doralice hates all of her high school subjects except for English. She's spent most of her time in high school wishing she wasn't there, so she's completely ready to get out of there. The only thing she really enjoys within school grounds is reading and analyzing literature, so she always aces AP English courses and does mediocre in everything else. She loves really intellectually angsty stuff like Kafka and Camus. She'll read pretty much anything with a 'classics' label on it, but she prefers mid-20th century literature. She'll also want to argue with you about it.

My hope for Doralice is that she enjoys college and allows herself to become softer and trust people more. I left things ambiguous intentionally and I actually have no idea what she'll do after she graduates. I get the sense that she has a lot ahead of her, though. I wanted these characters to only be percieved by other people in this moment, but I believe in them.

The HOTW characters are kids who have been bonded together since childhood because they've always grown up together and have never been without each other. Because of this, some of them don't have much of an idea how their friendships will continue once they move away. They've always taken it for granted that the others will be around. The majority of them are privileged enough to go away for college, so they'll be scattered after they graduate high school. Dora has a romantic moment with Alison in-game, but I wanted the main focus of the game to be Dora's relationship with her friends, specifically Tara, Sydney, and Hunter. Tara and Dora's relationship is a big focus of the game for me even though it's not explicitly in the limelight. They're very different people- Tara is more popular than Dora in general since she's outwardly friendlier and more social. I think Tara is the kind of person who keeps most of her thoughts and feelings to herself while maintaining an outward friendly appearance. Dora knows this, and it's partially because of this that Dora doesn't trust that Tara actually loves her. The implicit trust between them is tangible, though. Even though Dora doesn't trust that Tara will stay in her life, when Tara tells her to assist with a divine mercy kill, Dora does it almost without question.

Hunter is a different kind of character because he's barely in the main story, but Dora refers to him as her best friend as the game ends with a frame of them sleeping together (in the literal sense). Hunter and Dora have an ease with each other from many years of coexisting. Their relationship seems less angsty than Tara and Dora's relationship. Even though Dora talks about disliking being around white people and feels aggressive towards Logan for being a predatory man, she doesn't think anything of staying the night with Hunter, who is a white man. These two are childhood friends and their relationship is close and entirely platonic, but I don't think it would occur to Dora to confide in Hunter about her experience with the angel.

I wanted to write relationships that I recognized, specifically the kind of relationships that can be born out of a small town childhood. I don't think Dora has any idea how deeply she's grown to know Tara and Hunter, as well as how little she actually trusts them both. They're good kids, and they're super angsty, and I have faith in them to figure out their future.

So what's up with the angel? Does killing the angel represent the end of Doralice and Tara's childhood? Maybe the angel is a proxy for the things we leave behind from high school, the things we try to forget. Sure, I think any of those work, but really I just wanted to write something about the angel again. The angel is the oldest character in this game, and I first wrote a story with it involved when I was 12. In the original story, the angel comes as a kind and divine missionary from heaven. Initially people see it as the angel it is, but because it is so strange and unrecognizable it ends up being killed by the U.S. Military. It's just too raw and it makes people uncomfortable to have it around. I only just realized that every time the angel comes up it ends up being brutally killed by humanity. Unfortunate! That's often its narrative fate. In this story, though, the angel is killed by Tara and Dora privately after it is mortally wounded. So, maybe a more merciful interaction on the part of humanity than in the original story.

I also just wanted to have the shock of something super weird happening at around the 12-3am point of a small town house party. Because it feels like something always happened. It was like a canon event. And with the woods we grew up in, it was generally a 50/50 shot it'd be something mystical. It might've even been more like 75/25. Definitely more subtle and less brutal than the buisness with the angel, though. But that rawness was necessary to express what Dora and Tara are feeling about their coming-of-age underneath that skin of being party-happy. That's just the intensity level of the situation sometimes. Dora, I think we're gonna have to kill this guy.