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[riffst]

New demo playable!

Checkout new demo on Game Jolt

Gameplay Video

First Chapter Teaser

Check out our presskit

Hi! We're glad to present our project Isles of Umbra.



It's first-person exploration game and you are John Wilbur. Every night John suffers from the nightmares. He finds himself wandering at the ancient islands inhabited by chthonic creatures.



Your goal is to perform the Seal Ritual and imprison evil beings.

Time is running out: every sleep reduces it. You need to communicate with islanders and solve puzzles to find artifacts for the ritual. Beware: all of the islanders are eager to break into our world at any cost.



Concept is heavily inspired/influenced by H.P. Lovecraft novels, Year Walk, Samorost series, Sword & Sworcery, Severed and JRPG's.

This is our first project! It's very ambitious for such a small team, but we believe in luck (also in Unity and in Chtulhu powers).

Our team:

Bogdan Sereda - narrative design, sounds.
Marina Nechaeva - art.
Ross Kaminski - code and game design

In this devblog we show sketches, announce plans and highlight course of development.

You can also follow us on Twitter:

Developers team - @riff_studio, @coauctor, @neiplace

Official Isles Of Umbra twitter, where John Wilbur is complaining about his life: @IslesOfUmbra

Thanks for your attention! Stay tuned!

[Coauctor]

Hi! I'm Bogdan, composer and narrative designer of ISOU. Hope you'll join us in our journey. If you have any questions, please, ask. Also, sorry for Engrish. 

[riffst]

Happy Friday The 13th! John wrote the letter to us.  
Deviecer si rettel t'srif eht.

[riffst]

Screenshot from pre-alpha version. The player will use this typewriter to access his diary. Bed will be used to get into world of dreams.

[Panurge]

Mmm, this looks almost inhumanly beautiful...

[riffst]

Thanks! It's because of almost inhumanly beautiful work of Marina, our visual artist. You can also check out her portfolio on Deviantart.
It was huge motivation boost when she joined us.

[YellowLime]

Isles of Umbra is a first-person exploration game where you’re playing as John Wilbur – archeologist who suffers from chthonic nightmares.

As in, chronic? 

You would benefit from playing this game, if you haven't already:
http://indiestatik.com/2013/12/04/consuming-shadow-beta/
It has a more or less similar premise, in that you have to solve puzzles to fend off otherworldly monsters (but instead, it's a survival shooter/rouguelike)
There could be some wisdom in someone else's take on this theme.

I'm curious as to how would you show a sense of urgency in your game, since you didn't seem to mention timers of any kind. If the only thing that stops Cthulhu from coming is a set number of nightmare nights, I would try to do everything I could on the first night

Good luck with your project!

[riffst]

You would benefit from playing this game, if you haven't already:
http://indiestatik.com/2013/12/04/consuming-shadow-beta/
It has a more or less similar premise, in that you have to solve puzzles to fend off otherworldly monsters (but instead, it's a survival shooter/roguelike)
There could be some wisdom in someone else's take on this theme.

Hi, thanks for your comment!
When we started Isles Of Umbra, I was very inspired by Ben Yahtzee’s project. Our first Game Maker prototype was similar to The Consuming Shadows: you had limited quantity of days to explore Islands and to perform The Seal Ritual.
Also we had exactly the same start screen
But since that time we have changed the general concept.

I'm curious as to how would you show a sense of urgency in your game, since you didn't seem to mention timers of any kind. If the only thing that stops Cthulhu from coming is a set number of nightmare nights, I would try to do everything I could on the first night

Good luck with your project!

We're using the sanity system. Player spends sanity points to travel in dreams, to interact with ancient creatures and to fight with the enemies. When the sanity is reduced to 0, the game will automatically end(ancient evil is released).

Also, the protagonist room is changing with the sanity decreasement. Just like in SH: The Room, where player can find some clues to be used in dreams.

[riffst]

New menu and room screens. Finally finished scripting for them!


Menu scene inspired by The Consuming Shadow


Table with books and (maybe) some clues


Strange closed chest

[eblomquist]

Nice artwork. Reminds me of Gorogoa!

[riffst]

Nice artwork. Reminds me of Gorogoa!

Wow, I see this game for the first time. It hooked me with interesting puzzle mechanics. Need to play the demo immediately!  

It's similar to the protagonist room visual style. Though, we still have not define visual style for dreamworld.

[Coauctor]

Hi! We're use Unity for Isles of Umbra, so we would like to talk about useful plugins we found in Asset Store.
Maybe they will help you too!

So, first of all, PlayMaker:
It is visual scripting system that covers all the game logic we need. Since we aren't programmers, we needed to start making the prototype quickly. PlayMaker is an ideal plugin for game designers and artists who want to create games without learning how to code.

It's working like Finite State Machine. Best to use with adventure games, where you have many states which are changing when the player interacts with something.

NGUI:
We’re suffering from the native UI system in Unity. NGUI has a vast amount of actions and it is optimized! However, NGUI is not so friendly with Playmaker.

The last, but not least, EasySave2:
Our inventory system and some user data storage are based on this plugin.
It's integrated into Playmaker, so you can save all data that you need easily.

All these plugins aren't free, but they can save your time.
So, happy week-end! We're almost finished hero room.
It's time to polish it and move on to Forbidden Forest, the first dreamworld.

[Gueib]

This has a lot of potential. Looking forward to see more.

[Coauctor]

Thanks! Hope we'll do the best for Cthulhu. o,,,o

[ephoete]

That's quirky I love it!

[Coauctor]

Thanks! In the next devlog entry I'll show some music of ISOU. 

[riffst]

This week Marina sketched creatures John could meet in the dreamworld.
This is Ultar The Blind, the watchman (well, he needs no eyes to watch) of Forbidden Forest.  

[riffst]

Bogdan wrote this post yesterday, but since he does not have access to the internet, I post it. Below you will find a bit of info about sound design in ISOU.

And sorry for soundcloud links instead of player, because I couldn't find how to insert player into this post. If you could help me with that I would be very grateful.

Imagine that Lovecraft was not a writer, but a music composer. What his music would be like? Dark, solemn, vibrant, symphonic,
I thought that way when beginning to explore ISOU music aspect.

So, the first demo was the mix of distorted strings, voices and tympani:

https://soundcloud.com/coauctor/isles-of-umbra-demo

Good for inspiration but distracting. Game experience should not be diluted. So I made the light version of this track in order to integrate it to the first location – John's bedroom:

https://soundcloud.com/coauctor/bedroom-ambience

When the scene was ready, we notice that even the light version was drawing away the player's attention. If to be honest, the biggest challenge for me is to create natural, easy, tolerate music background.

So, I've decided to start from the SFX work firstly. The rain, wind, scratch, whispering sounds were implemented into the scene. It was easier to find the missing piece of the puzzle after that.

Finally, we completed the puzzle with the idea of radio.

It's natural to have a radio. No problems with the game lore. Plus, It's a chance to explore the world of old radios for Marina, our concept artist. Plus, the player can turn it on and off when he wants.



So, I've improvised a short melody and put a few distortion layers on it.

https://soundcloud.com/coauctor/the-old-radio

Authentical? Maybe so.

Summary: game ambient should not distract the player from the gameplay. It is easier to start building scene soundscapes from SFX's. Search for the natural sources of sound and music in the game environment.


Thank you for reading!

[Coauctor]

Hey, we have a small update with new pre-alpha video! Check it out:



What’s new:

• Menu music;
• Menu buttons aren’t shaking anymore;
• Inventory system and interactions
• Protagonist room SFX and music. You can see there the radio from our previous post.

There’s not much to be changed at first sight, but we’ve done a great piece of work over the past weeks.
Though, we still need to learn how to make good video showcases.
Maybe you can help us with some advice?

[riffst]

Today I want to show how our inventory system works.

You could pick up item in scene and take notification about what item do you picked


When you picked item it appear in in the upper left corner.
In inventory you could keep only one item at a time. This system helps player concentrate only on one puzzle at a time and remove all mess-up with a lots of item's.


All items use automatically when you have this item in inventory and interact with scene object.