- A 2D puzzle plaformer with a novel and broad mechanic: Cloud is constantly throwing lightings at Gnome. This is both a curse and a blessing, since these lightnings will kill you but also help you solve puzzles with their side effects.
- Gorgeous digital painted art: Our talented artist Juan Novelletto has been crafting amazing concepts for Nubarron's world. All the graphics of the game will be done using digital painting techniques, providing it a nice artistic look, something that is hard to find in this type of games.
- Vast universe full of stories, creatures and awesome landscapes: We want this game to be the first instance in a series of stories about this broad universe. We're creating a bestiary book with short story fragments and sketches gathered by adventurous scouts that travelled across these lands.
- A fairytale story with a dramatic dark twist: The story of Nubarron is not like any other fairytale. Things don't work as one might expect in this twisted world, and the forest is aware of this. Perceive the world morphing in the most mischievous ways at every single step.
- Hardcore puzzles: The game is based on difficult puzzles that will put you in the dilema of using Cloud's thunder bolts to modify the environment. Usually not in happy ways.
- Made with Unity: We're using Unity engine so porting to different platforms will be an easy task to achieve.
When we think of a fairy-tale forest, a warm and friendly feeling arises. It certainly smells like flowers in bloom and rainbows give color to every morning. Well that's not the case in the Peaceful forest of the Deep Blue Sky. Something has brought trouble to the ever happy neighborhood. Something is terribly wrong with one of its inhabitants.
Gnome, one of the merry and lucky inhabitants of the forest, lost his lucky hat. This unfortunate event turns out to be a little bit more important than it may seem at plain sight. Gnome's hat was the source of his luckiness and with it gone an unpredictable thing happened. The stormy Cloud formed on top of Gnome taking the place of his hat. This was no game. Cloud seemed to enjoy throwing lightnings at every single thing below her. An Gnome was no exception.
Gnome wanted his luck back. And so, a shakespearean drama began…
Cloud is Gnome's dangerous companion in this long journey across the Forest of the Deep Blue Sky. She has several skills, among those known by mortals one can find:
Kill Gnome: You'll have to be in constant movement to avoid Cloud's lightnings. If not, poor Gnome.
Take care of enemies: If you manage to avoid lightnings, the next step is to use them at your favor. Those bolts will take care of any unfriendly creature that you may cross.
Bring light to dark places: You know abominable creatures live in the dark. Luckily, Cloud's Lightning bolts produce enough light to keep shadowy places visible. For short time spans though.
Turn machines on: Those same lightnings that kill you can be used to power up machines that need electricity. You'll find several of these across your journey.
Set stuff on fire: Sometimes you'll need to get a little aggressive with the environment to find your way. Cloud's bolts will set several things on fire when hit.
There is an old version of Nubarron that was made in pixel-art. We took that path mostly because the whole idea was to make a homage to the 8-bit era.
In this new instance we completely changed the aesthetics for a digital-painting art style, but following more traditional techniques from the romantic period, like Caspar David Friedrich, making emphasis on the idea that our little adventurer is traversing imposing natural environments, surrounded with life and mistery.
Besides this we've been influenced by some of the greatest indie games. Limbo provided us a reference on playing with silhouettes and oppressive ambiance. Journey was awesome at creating visual emotion moments.
Each environment is unique and every detail is going to be present only once if you happen to see it.
The Forest of the Deep Blue Sky is an amazing fantasy world full of creatures, stories and gorgeous landscapes.
Below are some of the early concepts that Juan created to start giving shape to this magical world.
We're all big fans of indie games. We love when they reach a great balance between quality, innovation and artistic expression. These three features are the pivot points of how we see game development should be done.
Among several indie games that we love, these three had special influence on us:
- LIMBO's ambience, lights and layered design gave us a lot to think about in the artistic side.
- Journey's conceptual and em and emotional nature, mood and deepness got us thinking about making our games more meaningful both to us and the players.
- Braid's clever game design was a major player in helping us create and combine Cloud's mechanics.
We like to think of Nubarron as a combination of what we found interesting in these games with a new setting and our own look at what videogames should be.
We're a young full stack independent game development team from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Our most profound wish is to create deep experiences that not only connect with players through gameplay but also in an emotional and more artistic way.
All of us worked individually in several games projects in the past, but we consolidated as a team about a year ago.
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