It all started like this
"Nightly Bot Studios, Inc" started with a dream, just a couple of friends from college willing to do games for a living. It was hard but since then we have been together for almost 2 years.
Project "N"
Project “N" or The “N" project, whatever way you wanna call it, started pre production with the idea to create a side scroller (platformer) game. Our team was initially attracted to the retro style from the 80s and 90s. We knew each other very well, so we quickly started playing with ideas and concepts, creating drawings, random characters, monsters, landscapes, etc., without thinking of a main story line (witch was a problem later on). The original main idea began with a Chinese landscape, but suddenly after a couple of months the game changed to something completely different but that kept almost the same style.
Chinese concepts
Giant "Penjing / Bonsai" trees
Mountains / landscapes
And then we started to get into details, giving life to all sorts of monsters and characters.
Here is an early concept video that was done for us, not for the public. I think we are talking about the development, so there you go.
And then a STOP… we changed everything! It went from being a Chinese themed game to something else, which was not that bad. But everything changed for good; we even kept the same style of art so it was not a big deal.
Project “N" changed to its current mood, we call it “seasons of the year", and to a story centering on a little girl with a long hair who has some pretty special abilities and lives between our reality and a dreamscape where every season is a different world. We don’t want to get into details right now because we have a lot more to show, so here, more art about this change.
Here another concept video about this other ideas.
As you can see, we did a lot of research; we experimented a lot with various ideas, color palettes, moods. It was not until the second change of the game that we decided to base everything on a story line, that is where we started to give shape to our concept so now we have a more concrete idea of what we really want. This project has become our baby, we have put so much effort on it that we don’t want to stop. Some times it’s really difficult because all of us have a full time job and we only spend the weekends on this, so it’s a sacrifice that sometimes feels overwhelming and is very time consuming.
Now, lets talk a little bit about our company and the logo.
"Nightly Bot Studios, Inc"
It all started with this little robot. I know we have more sketches around here done in paper but for the moment, here some of the first photoshop and pencil sketches of Nightly Bot Studios. Molding the company was really fun, we are still dealing with some legal papers -,- but yea… it’s about time.
Until we got here: simple, clean and beautiful, thanks to our friend Alexandra Borrero who gave it the finishing touches.
In the next blog post we are going to show other concepts, discuss the art in more detail and talk about how we ended up downsizing the story and also adapting the art style so it could fit better in a side scroller (we are developing the game also for html5 which requires a lot of optimization since it runs fully on web).
Here is a preview of the next post and don’t forget to follow our tumblr.
We have a lot to show in this development blog, so stay tuned.