Wonderful work! The city clustered atop the rocks looks really good, especially with it's deep saturated hues.
I saw someone mention favelas and it ceratinly looks like that!

Does the complete game follow the same color pallet, and will there be interior spaces as well, like being able to go into the houses? And how large is the city?

Hi! It's really great to see your art evolve across several iterations. The Kinsky palace background looks particularly good with all it's detail.

Will the game simply be a biographical account, or will the dialogue choices lead to narrative branches in the story, and perhaps include some of Kafka's absurdist constructions?

An article about Timruk, our new build on Rock Paper Shotgun! Take a look.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/12/15/timruk-oleomingus-free/

As others here have already mentioned before, these are some beautiful visuals. The colors are particularly exquisite!

Eagerly looking forward to more updates.

Some specific things that we've learned and want to bring over to the game:

• The economic profile of skyscrapers - how the cost of building goes up as you keep going higher, and can make the building economically unfeasible beyond a certain size
• The physical profile - how local laws impose caps and limitations, such as
  
  • Envelope requirements (like height caps, or setback requirements)
  • Air rights transfers (when there's a height cap, you might be able to buy height allowance from your low-rise neighbors)
  • Square footage caps (eg. that a building's total square footage can be at max 15x larger than the lot size - but if you build a public plaza, you could get an exemption and build a larger one)

That should make for a pretty juicy economic simulation

That said, I would *really* have loved to also add the simulation of effects of building depth, and things like how distance from windows and light wells affects rentability - but that's getting a little hard in a 2D view

Wow! That sounds superb.
An intricate economic simulation of skyscrapers and the laws and systems governing them would make for a wonderful simulation, but when illustrated with beautiful encyclopedia-like cut-aways - makes it a must play!

Good luck with further development.

Hey guys, very cool! I'll have to download the latest build - can't really tell what the gameplay is supposed to be like. Are you simple exploring the stories/settings and interacting with them? Or are there certain goals that need to be accomplished, etc?

@Hello Pixel Noise.
The new build is actually a storybook from within the larger game, so it simply has you reading through a few interwoven stories, that are strangely connected. The complete game itself, has you exploring and navigation, talking to characters and changing characters during the game - or moving through the story as different people and causing it to change. You can see a little bit of the same in our older build (Rituals, on our itchio page).

The idea is to narrate several stories associated with the search for the Mythical city of Kayamgadh, and use the trellis of their narratives to explore colonial India of the mid 1800s.

@M4uesviecr Thank you! I hope you enjoy our stories about mythical cities and fictional tribes of miniature artists!

PS: Is the curse of ImunShah a reference to forever working on a game and never being able to quite finish?

@TobiasW

Haha ! Yes I suppose we suffer from Imun shah's curse as well,
I knew stealing videogames from the god of death was a mistake!

I am really glad  you enjoyed the game (in accompaniment with flavorful Indian food!). It is a small excerpt from our larger game - but since we were separating it for display at a few exhibitions, we decided to sort of finish and release it as a complete build or storybook.

With any luck our next build should take lesser time to complete, as the curse wears off a little bit.
Thanks again for playing!

@SnakeCoiler, @sidbarnhoorn and @TheWanderingBen
Thank you! We really appreciate your kind words regarding our work.


Yes we have spent a long while building and detailing the intricacies of the world for our game.

Somewhere is set between the 1830s and the late 1800s,
covering about seventy years and the start of the independence movement in the country.

Thankfully there is no dearth of writing from that time period and our influences which are both varied
and verdant provide us with enough historical insight to be able to mangle our own narratives
into the overriding concerns of Colonialism and Storytelling.

Here are some of our overt influences.

Nonsense literature, experimental theatre and the
deconstruction of narrative form - in folk, magical realist and vernacular literature.

Sukumar Ray.
Girish Karnard.
Italo Calvino.
Jorge Luis Borges.
Orhan Pamuk     
My Name is Red in particular is refered to rather directly in our new build Timruk.

Colonial and post Colonial authors.
Who created a formal yet intimate record of, regional life in the subcontinent.

Rudiard Kipling.   
In particular " The Man who would be King " and " Kim ".
RK Narayan.
EM Forster.   
The characters in Rituals are a homage to characters from " A Passage to India "
JG Farell. 
Empire Triology.
Satayjit Ray.   
Feluda.


A little wile ago we conducted a small presentation for Sketchup at the Denver ComiCon demonstrating some methods of organizing space and form that we use to create our environments. Here are a few screens from the same.





That is Kevin looking absurdly delighted!













































The presentation eventually lead to an article that you can find here : SketchupBlog

Hello, I have been following your game on the makega.me forum for a while.
Glad to see a devblog here as well.

The art is spectacular! Especially the painted concept art with it's Victorian steampunk and strange characters.
And following your progress with the level editor and the details of your process is a real treat!

Good luck with further development.

Here are a couple of screenshots from our new build/storybook for Somewhere : called Timruk.
More details on the game's devblog : https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=38193.0

The build itself can be found here : http://oleomingus.itch.io/timruk

With Timruk the sapces are crafted more to illustrate the story than to narrate it.
Thus each location is almost a stage. Here are some gifs demonstrating a little bit of the detail we have
tried to add to the dialogues and the intercuts with  their miniature paintings and the new hand
animations we are working on. 

[Update Ten]

Update Ten


An overdue update after a long long hiatus!


We just completed a small breakaway build from Somewhere called Timruk.
It is a storybook with an entwined narration of a folk story from the mythical city of Kayamgadh.




The idea is to proliferate the complete game with several such small journeys that loop and wind
independent of the story but illustrate the world from and it's surreal Colonial setting in great detail.

With Timruk, the narration is broken into three basic nesting stories, wherein each story narrates the one within.
All these stories then are ensconced within our own enactment of them across several small stage like spaces.

There is little interaction and the story itself plays out almost linearly, but this gave a chance to test
some details we have been meaning to try, like the intercuts and small refinements to the way dialogues
operate and are shown.

The build was originally crafted for display for an exhibition at Indie Game Shindig (Kerela)
and a modified version of the same will be shown at Level 1 : an exhibition at Khoj (Delhi).


You can find Windows and Mac builds for Timruk on our itchio page.
Click on the image below.



 



'The parable of Timruk and other Stories'
is a collection of folklore believed to have originated in Kayamgadh.

These stories were found carved upon temple walls across BhulaDesh.
And the imprints from the carvings were first compiled into written form by a traveling poet at the
court of Rajah Brimanath at the Kotananku presidency in 1821.

This edition was later transcribed into a large folio, possibly crafted by the fabled calligraphist Maguru.
The edition was accompanied by a set of miniature paintings that were scavenged from the various
Persian and Mongolian manuscripts collected at the Maharajah's library.

The historian Prof. James P Fielding translated the folio edition while working at Bhutagunj,
a British cartographic outpost near the Kotananku Ghats.

His translation, was published as a companion to his controversial book,
'The several histories Kayamgadh',
after his death in 1903.

Our game is an adaptation of Fielding's book,
a reprinted copy of which is to be found in the archives at the Calcutta state library.







































. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The game looks wonderful and being able to look into the corners of a living city, at the multitudes of it's inhabitants and their lives, sounds like a beautiful way to play.

Will the city in the game have the sort of first person narration, that is present at the start of the thread?

Looking forward to more updates. Good Luck!

ps. while the art for the city and the characters looks really great, the yellow/golden frames around the images seem a little discordant.

Some screenshots from a new environment I am trying out. Still very much a work in progress.
( Built in Sketchup and Unity ).

Starting work on an environment for the second act of figments. Still very much a work in progress.

Thank you ! Really glad you like the new environments. 

You are quiet right the pixel-y grass is rather incongruous. It is supposed to be solid and 'grass-like'! But this being our first attempt at building grass in Unity, it seems to have turned out a little perforated! Guess I need to learn how to paint grass properly.

also Figments ( the new build ) on Rock Paper Shotgun

Posting after a long hiatus! Here are a bunch of images from various incomplete bits of environments we have been working on.

Congratulations on the Unity Showcase! The art is certainly splendid.
Oh ! and the psychedelically-geometric-daily-loops look amazing.

happy New year everyone !