#ambizestudio

[cynthia-liz]

White Lie Crowdfunding

[ambize-studio-blog]

Book Memory

So, in the past few months, we've been trying to put together one of White Lie mechanics: while exploring the world in search of your owner whereabouts, you will find some mementos of the time you two lived together. Interacting with these mementos will get you to live the memory kept inside of it again, knowing what you felt the experience you lived with your best friend, through the lens of a plush toy. The first memory we are creating is from a time Emma read a book to Greg. She was not satisfied with the book's ending and decided to play and change its ending. Below are some images of what we are creating around this theme and how the game will look during this particular story. 

A lot of the game will revolve around these memories, so our next step is create some experiences and try to pass a feeling to the player through their stories. We are trying to create ways to tell our character stories, so the player will feel connected and immersed on the plush rabbit loneliness. See you next time!

[ambize-studio-blog]

Happy Holidays!

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!

[ambize-studio-blog]

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

[ambize-studio-blog]

Characters - Part 2

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 blog and don't forget to follow us in our others social medias!

Twitter/Facebook/TIG

[ambize-studio-blog]

Characters - Part 1

 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/TIG

[ambize-studio-blog]

Parallax

We are testing some parallax effects for our game, seeing how it will works in our backgrounds and how to keep track of other things in the engine. Here are some preliminary test: