Mission: Design a Cute Little Game
Nihan İşler
Feb 19, 2023
Requirements:
Easy to code
Easy to animate
Everyone can play
Can be turned into a series
Fits to a genre but has a unique thing
Step 1. Choose a genre
This part was a piece of cake actually. I love hidden object games since the days when we had to play them with a pen and book and it meets all the requirements. How hard can it be to adapt a pencil-and-paper game into a video game, right? I guess we’ll see :)
Step 2. Give it a background story that is easy to convey
I don't feel the lack of story when I play hidden object games, but when it is there, it makes them unique. That’s why we wanted to give a little story and a lovable character for players to engage.
I wrote down 7 different concepts and read them to the team. Everyone immediately choose the same one and that was my days of thinking gone down the drain because it was my first idea and it was also my favorite too, I don't know why I bothered to write the others. We were not a teenager mutant who couldn’t control his power and made weird things happen to the city for us to find and fix. Or we were not an old witch who tries to find and hide everything related to magic before the inquisitors arrive to the village. We were a brave, silly time agent who collects modern-day objects in some ancient city because of the mess his hot arch-nemesis created. I mean, imagine a Roman emperor in his blue-jeans! That’s hilarious.
Step 3. Determine the setting
We decided to choose a real ancient site so we could use it as a reference, like the Roman Forum in Rome. So I started to dive into it, found its maps, lists of buildings and their purposes, documentaries, 3d reconstruction models, its chronology, population over time, families, what they eat, how they pee, which colors do they use… Then at some point, being able to find so much information with so little effort made me think that it was over-used. Then it hit me, why was I using a place that everyone knows and has been covered many times, when there are plenty of places we are quite familiar with but less well known? Then I turned to one of my favorite archeological sites in our country: Patara!
Patara was the port city of the Lykian civilization and the archeological site was a relatively new discovery. This was a good thing, but it quickly turned into a problem: very little had been written about it. I couldn't find what I was looking for on the internet, so I went on a book hunt -no complaints at all.
After studying the books (and smelling the pages) written by the excavation team, we were able to build a basic 3D model of the city as it was in the 2nd century. Then I studied their architecture, fauna, clothing, food, art, daily life, and examined the excavation inventories of the university that carried out the excavation, found examples of their pottery, daily tools, statues…
And the adventure continues…
This was Creative Director Nian speaking, in the next DevLog our lead artist Batu will talk about the concept and character design processes.
Thank you so much for following our development quest and being a part of it, hope to see you soon! <3