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[io3 creations]

You could always ask how the developers of Oxenfree how they did it.

Even though the background looks 2d, my first impression is that they used a 3d mesh for the ground.  This is likely the case when the path changes direction and you can see the characters turning around as they are walking. Probably there is a navmesh were all characters walk along the same path but some specific animations where specific - e.g. when individual characters had to walk to different locations on a flat looking surface.

[gabrielcarioca]

You could always ask how the developers of Oxenfree how they did it.

Yeah, I send them an email, maybe they will answer me, will see in the next days. Don't know how much emails they receive, sometimes is hard to get attention from studios, not necessary because they don't want to answer your question, but sometimes they don't even see it, depending on the email flow they have. It would be easier if I knew someone who could introduce me to them.

But anyway, thanks for the insights
I had the same impression when I played the game, but I read in some place that it was 2D, but was not something the devs wrote, so I started wondering how it was made, if it was 2D or 3D.

[maruki]

We have some more concepts we are using to set the mood, ambiance, characters and environments of our game




Those are not our final art, only concepts we have to look to see the mood of our game and get inspiration to keep drawing it. It's kind of a guide to show us what feeling we have to pass while the game progress.

I read the entire devlog, and I really like where this project is going, especially having these ^ kind of concepts. The art is  consistence and it sets the mood and ambiance for the game really well. Will be following.

[gabrielcarioca]

I read the entire devlog, and I really like where this project is going, especially having these ^ kind of concepts. The art is  consistence and it sets the mood and ambiance for the game really well. Will be following.

Thank you

We had some hard time before getting to a process consistent to our team and project. After specifying better what to do in pre production and talking to more experienced developers we could get to the point were we made this kind of concept and now it's working way better than before for the team. We are still finishing pre production and it's taking more time than we predicted but it's giving us good results and overall we think it's being a well spent time, it's more motivating when we see this results coming and create expectations to translate it in the final game.

[rj]

I'M DIGGING THIS

[gabrielcarioca]

I'M DIGGING THIS

Thank You

--

We have some more art from the pre production of White Lie, those to help us define the mood of the game, know some key scenes in advance and will help us a lot as input when we start the production of the game

[MereMonkey]

Loving the origami bird!

[gabrielcarioca]

Loving the origami bird!

Thank you

[gabrielcarioca]

We are working with a script for White Lie and it's being super hard because none of us have ever worked with that. We watched a lot of talks in GDC and read some examples on the internet to see how people work with it and we defined what we think works best for us, based on our production flow and how we deal with game development.

We tried a way to integrate a storyboard and a script to help developing the actual scene, I don't have an image of our storyboard because it's is only a draft in the present moment, but for the script we are mapping the actions from the player's point of view, how he should feel and what he should think during that action. We are also writing how the flow progress through the level. Besides that the sheet is useful for us to see the actions with texts and we can map all the translations we have. Below are a sample from the sheet we are working (WIP).

Does anyone knows about script, what problems should we prepare when we enter the production of some level? How to iterate it? Any tips or knowledge would be appreciated

[gabrielcarioca]

We are working with some particle effects, testing and refining it to finish the design of our game. One of this effects is a text one. We will use it in some situations and we are finishing setting a lot of constants so it will work the way we want. The actual version is to fast and crowded, we are iterating to find the best way to fits our game.

[gabrielcarioca]

We are also testing things with parallax in a way to work with our backgrounds, specific things we are using in the engine and some technical aspects of our game. Here are some preliminary tests:

We are also structuring the world of our game (conceptually). We are getting some levels, scenes and important places we have, giving them more meaning and putting them together in a consistent way. We are having some problems to create this world structure since we never worked with this before and hopefully by the next week we will have it done. After that the plan is to start making storyboards for the levels and giving them a good gameplay flow so we know where to start implementing.

[gabrielcarioca]

Hello TIG Community!

In this log I'll share one of the things we've been doing last weeks. The map of the game. We don't have it in a digital media, but the sketch is clear enough to understand what it is about.

The game will be played in a universe that is actually a dream from a plush rabbit, everything is a reflection of his experiences and the life with his owner. There are three main areas: the Garden, all this spaces in the outside world, the Tower and the Core, an area that is not showed in this map, it's on the underground.

The Garden is a place with a lot of references to the "The Secret Garden". It's made from the most superficial and conscious mind of Greg and composed by his happiest memories. There is a dinner table with a lot of foods, a memory from Christmas. The piano is a little music box his owner has. The lake, fountain and bench make the place more cozy. And the well is something that talks and gives advice, a memory from a time Emma asked questions to a real well, in the real world. And the house is the place where Greg lives with Emma in this world, in resemblance to their real house.

The Tower is a place that appears to have nothing, but it hides many secrets. It was created from his subconscious mind to hide memories from Greg, so this dream would have the desired ambiance for them to live. Every floor keeps a different memory with it's particular meaning. Behind the Tower exists a place, the Core of the world, a visceral place representing the feelings that can't be explained through words. it also hides the most dark and obscures memories, a knowledge that if accessed would change the entire dream world.

I'll share some concepts of those areas when we finish creating them, today I can only share the general layout of the game world. As a bonus, here is the map with inverted colors, with a blood lake and a murderous duck, way cooler but unfortunately not what will be in the game 

 

Don't forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook!.

[gabrielcarioca]

Narrative Actions System

We are developing White Lie as a game with a narrative focus, one of the things we care most about is the story and we are caring for it to be one of the main values of the game. Because of that sometimes we need some actions running during the gameplay, like a dialogue, an unusual animation, sound effects, or a different camera movement. While thinking on the artistic side of those actions we are also thinking the best way to technically implement it. We didn't want to create a specific script for each action individually, so we created a plugin to automate that.

Now we have a system to encapsulate the actions in a box (image below). We can easily configure all the generic actions and a custom order to play them. This box will be called in the gameplay when a specific condition is triggered.

Below we have two examples, showing a text while the player walks through a specific location or revealing a memory Greg was searching in the environment. In each block created we can call texts, images, sounds, camera actions and any combination of them.

The last thing we did was a switch variable, only used when the player can take actions or choose between options during the execution of this scene.

The Logic Behind

This system has a simple logic behind it, consisting of an array with different actions scripted in a generic way. When executing the block we "hit play" on that array. Each node is instantiated on our custom editor, developed to give a more user friendly look when creating this nodes.

We've faced some problems serializing scriptable objects and assets using scene elements, and this is what we are still developing to enhance the system.

Conclusion

This plugin started as a tool to help in another game project and was brought to be used and refined in White Lie. We'd like to give credits to Ricardo Charf and André Tsuyoshi which started this with Caio, one of our programmers for White Lie.

We will refine and develop more nodes if needed and we want to release this tool on GitHub for any other team to use it freely, it helped us and can surely help other developers.

[gabrielcarioca]

Hello TIG Community! Today I'll introduce the two main characters of the game, Emma and Gregorio, a little girl and her favorite toy.

Gregorio

Gregorio is the main character, a plush cottony rabbit with an yellow scarf. He has a simple design that was inspired by the British Beatrix Potter illustrations. It was made by Emma’s grandma to be her birth gift. Since Greg was made after Emma, “he never existed in a world without her before” and “she was everything for him”. The world of the game is a dream constructed by Greg for the two of them to happily exist together. Additionally, the narrative will be in first person told by Greg’s point of view.

Emma

Emma in the game is a image of the real Emma, the 10 years little girl who is Greg’s owner and best friend. In the dreamworld she was created by Greg to sustain him in a place he could live by his own rules. She is not only her image but also the yearnings and secretes she only shared with her plush friend. She starts the game asking for the most beautiful flower in the garden.

They are our two main characters and we will keep adding more information about them and others characters in future devlogs. Thank you for reading this blog and don’t forget to follow us in our others social medias!

Twitter/Facebook/Newsletter

[gabrielcarioca]

Lamp Lighter

The Lamp Lighter is an ally who follows Greg in his journey to uncover his yearnings and secrets. The Lamp Lighter has a misshapen and organic shape (representing it’s origin at the Center of the World, a visceral place that kept feelings and sensations that can’t be described with words). He is a NPC who doesn’t speak, he follows Greg representing the shadow of what was buried in the Underworld.

Above are some of the concepts we are creating to this NPC. Thank you for reading this and don’t forget to follow us in our others social medias!

Twitter/Facebook/Newsletter

[jordanchin]

I think this guy translated very well! Reminds me a touch of Bloodborne and Ghibli. Love the idea of him being a silent NPC!

Lamp Lighter

The Lamp Lighter is an ally who follows Greg in his journey to uncover his yearnings and secrets. The Lamp Lighter has a misshapen and organic shape (representing it’s origin at the Center of the World, a visceral place that kept feelings and sensations that can’t be described with words). He is a NPC who doesn’t speak, he follows Greg representing the shadow of what was buried in the Underworld.

Above are some of the concepts we are creating to this NPC. Thank you for reading this and don’t forget to follow us in our others social medias!

Twitter/Facebook/Newsletter

[gabrielcarioca]

I think this guy translated very well! Reminds me a touch of Bloodborne and Ghibli. Love the idea of him being a silent NPC!

Thank You! He was actually inspired by Kaonashi (No-Face) from Ghibli

[gabrielcarioca]

We've released our development newsletter for November. Check in the link below:
http://us14.campaign-archive1.com/?u=e25eab817347ace2846b6ad0f&id=1e45cc24f6

[gabrielcarioca]

Perspective and Camera

So, now we are working with the camera composition in game, trying to work with the perspective we want and at the same time use elements of a orthogonal camera, like the foreground and background layers with parallax.

Below are some of the concepts for what we are trying to achieve.

This is the perspective we want for our game. The areas will be a 3x3 matrix and each cell will have the size of a screen. So every scene has 9 times screen size to walk around. We are testing and developing a system in Unity to proper create a path for the player to move the character and a smooth way for the camera to follow Gregorio throughout the level.

Besides that, we are also using some orthogonal camera elements, like the foreground and background layers in the camera, for either the parallax effect and to get a better visual for the scene. Every scene in the game should feel like a good composition and that is something very hard to do, specially putting together these two kind of distinct perspective and camera elements. Finally for the camera, some actions will have a zoom in a specific space, making easier for the player to interact with the game and that is another thing we have to design in each level, all the interactions and their corresponding zoom should be planned to feel like a natural part of the gameplay and have the same artistic feeling as the scene without the zoom.

Finally, we would like to thanks this article in Gamasutra for a lot of insights and for giving us a way to start working in Unity with our art style.

As a bonus, a cute sketch of Greg.

Thank you for reading this, feel free to send any suggestion or feedback to help us and if you don't want to miss an update follow us in our other social medias or subscribe to our Newsletter.

[gabrielcarioca]

To do something different in the end of the year, we’ll share some of the details and memories about the beginning of this project and how our idea evolved to what White Lie is today, the story of a plush rabbit looking for it’s missing owner.

Before starting developing an idea we created pillars to guide the project in it’s initial stage. We’ve always had our internal values, motivations and inspirations, factors that reflect in what we do and values we keep with us until today.

We’ve always wished to make a game with high artistic value, bringing something aesthetically new. This is a value so intrinsic in the team that we use it as our mission. It’s not something we want to do only on White Lie, but also in our future games too. For White Lie we wanted an immersive experience that sparked emotions inside the players and since the beginning we knew the story and narrative progression were essential to the value of the game.

As important as the values we wanted to deliver with the game are our inspirations. The first games we looked at to define a path to follow were Year Walk, Monument Valley, Yume Nikki, Child of Light and Alto’s Adventure, games we consider good artistically and in narrative terms, besides inspiring us withe their innovations. When the idea changed to the adventure game it’s today we looked for new references in Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP, Broken Age and Oxenfree.

Then we started defining the general premise of the story. Our inspirations were illustrated books from authors like Shaun Tan and John Bauer, experimental Japanese musicians like Fullkawa Honpo and narrative games developers like Simogo. We’ve compiled elements and values from different medias and with that we created an aggregate of what we wanted to develop.

In the firsts days we had some elements in our theme. The wizard, the goose and the princess. The first idea was something around a goose that wished to dance ballet with a princess, but it rapidly changed to a ballerina locked in a city lost in time. The objective was to get out of the tower where she was held locked and to restore the time and life to the place.

We wanted something with a music box and paper theater theme. We talked with an actress and theater director to learn details about the medium and we iterated with them. We were testing different art and mechanics to see what we liked or not, until the idea changed to a rabbit.

The first version of the game with a rabbit was in watercolor and we rapidly changed our minds, since it will not be possible for our team to develop an entire game in the style. We kept testing and looking for inspirations until we got in the current style. And this evolution went together with the idea going to the relationship between a plush rabbit and it’s owner, a 10 year old little girl, when our art director was watching some Japanese musician videos looking for inspirations.

And that is how we get to the theme we have today and with it we developed all the structure we have to support the development of this story, always thinking in the values we want to deliver and what motivates us as developers.

To end this we would like to wish you all a Happy New Year, that 2017 be a good year and that we all grow and reach good results in our lives and thank you for following us until here!