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!
