Before giving you updates about the game, I thought it was a better idea to tell you first a bit more about the current state of the game and its history.
Here are a few gifs showing you an early prototype of Nanotale, when we didn't know how it would look like and were focusing on gameplay.
Here's how we use the Cellular automaton in the game. If you are not familiar with it, it’s a way of simulating a world using a divide and conquer strategy. Instead of having a massive “World Simulator™” it’s often easier to simulate each object when making a game, This strategy goes further by dividing the world into uniform cells. Each cell has a state and a set of rules to change, if possible, into another state. Cellular automata are used in a very wide range of scientific domains, including computer science, mathematics, physics, and many others. The most famous is probably Conway's Game of Life[en.wikipedia.org], it has only four rules and two states and you can already see a lot of patterns emerging from its simple concept.
While prototyping a few nice mechanics for the game, we worked on parallel on the Art Style of the game.
It all started with a concept
This is not the first concept art of Nanotale, but when our 2D artist, Amandine, presented it to us we thought: "this is Nanotale. This is what we want for the game". The concept was a clear representation of the project we had in mind in therm of ambiance, mood, and storytelling. That same concept inspired the first author of Nanotale. This is what he wrote about it:
The people of the forest do not eat or drink. They do not sleep, they do not dream. Their lives are spent in the shadow of an ancient tree, listening to the Final Song, tending the lands of their immortal Queen.
To this place Rosalind wanders, a spirit at her side...The second concept that influenced a lot the Game Design and Story is the following one. It represents Rosalind and the Fox on top of the Tree of Life.
The grieving King begged the witch to let him be with his son again, to accomplish that which had never been achieved: a miracle of resurrection.
The witch asked for a single favour. Dominion over the forest for as long as she lived, reigning as its Queen.
A bargain was struck.3D modelingThe modeling phase started quite early in development, allowing our Game Designer to test each element and see how it works with his level design.
The sheep issue is a good example of why it's important to try your assets early in development. The Sheep is meant to be a blocker. Too heavy to be pushed, you have to solve puzzles in order to attract them and clear the path.
Our first shape wasn't understandable at a big scale. We needed a workaround.
The shape was more understandable when smaller so we tried to have groups of sheep but it turned out to be really chaotic. We needed to find something else...
Problem solved; We changed the shape of the sheep to make it more recognizable from an iso view.
Current state of the gameNanotale is well advanced speaking about level design and programming. The main aspects we are focusing on right now are the Story and the Art.
Nanotale is composed of 4 biomes. We only have the first one, the Ancestral Forest nearly finished so far.
While polishing that first biome, we started to work on the second biome called the Sunken Caves.
I hope this post helped you to understand a bit more our project.
Don't hesitate to comment if you have questions.
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