We are thrilled to announce that NEVA has been honored with the Games for Impact award at The Game Awards 2024! This prestigious accolade recognizes games that provoke thought and convey pro-social messages. In celebration of this achievement, NEVA is now available at a 20% disco
We are thrilled to announce that NEVA has been honored with the Games for Impact award at The Game Awards 2024! This prestigious accolade recognizes games that provoke thought and convey pro-social messages.
In celebration of this achievement, NEVA is now available at a 20% discount!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2420660/Neva/
For a glimpse of the award announcement, you can watch the following video:
From the very beginning at Nomada, our mission has been to create games with stories that inspire, move, and resonate with players. To see both GRIS and NEVA win the Games for Impact Award is an incredible honor and a reflection of the success of our vision. This recognition fuels our passion to continue creating the games we love and that our players cherish. Thank you so much to everyone involved in this marvelous journey. We're incredibly proud and happy!
We’re thrilled to share some incredible news: NEVA has been nominated in three categories at The Game Awards! 🎉 🏆 Best Art Direction 🏆 Best Independent Game 🏆 Games for Impact We’re beyond grateful for this recognition and deeply humbled by your support. This milestone wouldn
We’re thrilled to share some incredible news: NEVA has been nominated in three categories at The Game Awards! 🎉
🏆 Best Art Direction 🏆 Best Independent Game 🏆 Games for Impact
We’re beyond grateful for this recognition and deeply humbled by your support. This milestone wouldn’t have been possible without our amazing community and our incredible team! Just being nominated is already a reward for four years of hard work by the entire team.
If you enjoyed NEVA, we’d greatly appreciate your support! You can cast your vote for NEVA here: thegameawards.com/nominees
Plus, NEVA is now 20% OFF as part of Steam Autumn Sale! Grab your copy while it lasts!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2420660/Neva/
We also want to take this opportunity to share with you the live concert video of Neva, which took place in Barcelona back in September. Four exclusive arrangements were performed by a talented trio of musicians on cello, piano, and violin for an audience of friends, family, fans, and media. We hope you enjoy it🤍
Hi everyone! Since NEVA’s launch last Tuesday, it feels like we’ve been living in a dream. You can’t imagine how much it means to us to receive so much love from the players and such positive reviews from the critics. The final stretch of development was a rollercoaster of emotio
Hi everyone!
Since NEVA’s launch last Tuesday, it feels like we’ve been living in a dream. You can’t imagine how much it means to us to receive so much love from the players and such positive reviews from the critics. The final stretch of development was a rollercoaster of emotions, and we truly didn’t know if NEVA would capture people’s attention and earn their praise, especially after the huge success and impact of GRIS.
Now, NEVA is standing at 96% positive reviews on Steam, and all our fears and doubts have vanished. Seeing you all enjoy the game and share your love with us makes us feel incredibly happy and grateful.
Thank you so much, from all of us at Nomada Studio, for playing our game and for your support throughout this journey.
Now that NEVA is out, we’d love to share a glimpse of how it was made, exploring its creative journey and the weight of expectations at launch, with insights from team members. We hope you can see the love, passion, and hard work that went into it.
On top of that, we’re thrilled to share that official NEVA merchandise is now on sale! Designed in-house with love🤍, you can purchase it at the Devolver Shop: http://merch.devolverdigital.com
We’re incredibly excited to announce that Neva, our second game, is out now. This has been a journey of almost four years, starting during the pandemic, when the idea for the game was first conceived. Neva tells the story of Alba and her lifelong bond with a magnificent wolf, Nev
We’re incredibly excited to announce that Neva, our second game, is out now. This has been a journey of almost four years, starting during the pandemic, when the idea for the game was first conceived.
Neva tells the story of Alba and her lifelong bond with a magnificent wolf, Neva, as they embark on a thrilling adventure through a dying world.
Neva will grow and mature over time—just as Alba's relationship with it deepens as they traverse this cursed, decaying world together.
Building on what we achieved with Gris, Neva features platforming, puzzles, and combat against monstrous enemies, along with a minimal UI, delicate art, high-quality traditional animation, and a haunting musical score by Berlinist.
You can purchase Neva Deluxe Edition, which includes the game, a digital artbook, and the soundtrack.
Thank you all for your support throughout this journey, from the release of GRIS back in 2018 to today’s launch of NEVA. We once thought GRIS would be our one and only small video game, and here we are. We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished and deeply grateful to all the players who made this possible. We truly hope you enjoy this game, into which we’ve poured our hearts over the past four years.
Hi everyone! We’re thrilled to share that GRIS has sold over 3 million copies worldwide across all platforms! We couldn’t have asked for a better reception for our first project — not even in our wildest dreams did we imagine GRIS would resonate with so many people. To celebrate
Hi everyone!
We’re thrilled to share that GRIS has sold over 3 million copies worldwide across all platforms! We couldn’t have asked for a better reception for our first project — not even in our wildest dreams did we imagine GRIS would resonate with so many people.
To celebrate this incredible milestone, we’re excited to introduce something that players have been requesting for a long time — Steam community items!
To unlock these items, you may just need to launch the game briefly so the system can register, though it might not even be necessary. Either way, you’ll retroactively receive the items if you’ve already played enough to earn them, so there’s no need to replay everything.
We hope you enjoy them!
As for us, we’re fully focused on our next game, Neva, coming on October 15. Neva tells the story of Alba, a young woman bound to a curious wolf cub following a traumatic encounter with dark forces. Together, they embark on a perilous journey through a once-beautiful world as it slowly decays around them. Neva is, of course, heavily influenced by GRIS. It seamlessly blends platforming, puzzles, exploration, and features an interactive wolf companion. For the first time, we are also introducing combat elements. And once again, Berlinist brings their incredible talent to the original soundtrack.
Thank you so much to everyone who has made this possible. All of us at Nomada Studio are grateful for your support and hope you’ll stick with us in our next adventure 🤍
Hi everyone! The wait is over! We’re pleased to announce that Neva, our second game, will arrive on October 15 ! Neva chronicles the moving tale of a young woman, Alba, and her lifelong bond with a magnificent wolf as they embark on a thrilling adventure through a dying world. Fo
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2420660/Neva/
Hi everyone!
The wait is over! We’re pleased to announce that Neva, our second game, will arrive on October 15!
Neva chronicles the moving tale of a young woman, Alba, and her lifelong bond with a magnificent wolf as they embark on a thrilling adventure through a dying world.
Following a traumatic encounter with dark forces, Alba finds herself bound to a curious, mischievous wolf cub. Working together, the pair will help each other overcome increasingly dangerous situations.
The wolf will grow and mature over time - as will Alba's relationship with it - as they traverse this cursed, decaying world, and make a new home together.
Players will explore a beautifully crafted world brought to life with delicate art, detailed animation, and a mesmerizing original score from the acclaimed GRIS composers, Berlinist. Unlike our first game, GRIS, Neva also features light, intuitive combat where players employ both a sword and their wolf companion against hordes of monstrous creatures.
We hope you join Alba and Neva in their adventure on October 15! If you haven't done it yet, remember to add Neva to your wishlist!
Please enjoy this first look at the gameplay of Neva, a story of motherhood following Alba and her wolf cub Neva. In it, you'll see an early glimpse of our game's world, combat and the bond between a woman and her wolf. We are so excited to share this experience with you, later t
Please enjoy this first look at the gameplay of Neva, a story of motherhood following Alba and her wolf cub Neva. In it, you'll see an early glimpse of our game's world, combat and the bond between a woman and her wolf.
We are so excited to share this experience with you, later this year. There will be more development updates soon, so please follow our Steam page to hear from us, and let us know what you think of Neva.
After many long years, we are so happy to reveal our next game, Neva . In Neva, you’ll chronicle the tale of Alba as she finds herself bound to a curious, mischievous wolf cub. The wolf will grow and mature over time—as will Alba's relationship with it as they traverse a haunting
After many long years, we are so happy to reveal our next game, Neva.
In Neva, you’ll chronicle the tale of Alba as she finds herself bound to a curious, mischievous wolf cub. The wolf will grow and mature over time—as will Alba's relationship with it as they traverse a hauntingly beautiful, cursed and decaying world.
We can’t wait to show you how we are building upon and pushing beyond what we made in GRIS. Neva will feature traditional animation and puzzle platforming, but also combat against monstrous enemies.
Delicate art, minimal UI, haunting music—everything that made GRIS special has gone into this and more.
As we continue to work on this new game, we’d like to thank all of you who have played and supported GRIS. It’s still hard to believe that our game continues to impact so many people today.
After all this time, we hope that Neva will do the same. If you’d like to continue supporting us, you can wishlist Neva right now.
Next on Music Week , a look at how a specific movement in art and music might be an especially good fit for games. Despite being considered the most important composer in the impressionist movement, Claude Debussy was not fond of the label. "I am trying to do something different,
Next on Music Week, a look at how a specific movement in art and music might be an especially good fit for games.
Despite being considered the most important composer in the impressionist movement, Claude Debussy was not fond of the label. "I am trying to do something different, an effect of reality... what the imbeciles call impressionism," Debussy wrote in 1908."A term which is as poorly used as possible, particularly by the critics, since they do not hesitate to apply it to [J.M.W.] Turner, the finest creator of mysterious effects in all the world of art."
Debussy was probably wary of the term due to its dubious art world origins: coined by critic Louis Leroy, it was initially used in a derogatory manner to review an exhibition by painters including Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. "Impressionism" was used to ridicule the painters' loose brush-strokes and casual composition, which Leroy (and many others at the time) considered unfinished. The term was then applied to Debussy's music, with critics finding similarities between the painters' use of contrasting colours, light and blurred backgrounds, and Debussy's use of orchestral colour and harmony to make listeners focus on an overall "impression".
For a limited time*, Steam owners of GRIS, My Friend Pedro, Katana Zero, or The Messenger will save 15% on the just released Olija ! Check out the animated launch trailer below: *Offer ends February 11th at 10AM Pacific
For a limited time*, Steam owners of GRIS, My Friend Pedro, Katana Zero, or The Messenger will save 15% on the just released Olija!
Three new games will join the Xbox Game Pass for PC roster soon, growing an already large catalogue of more than 150 games . Gris, A Plague Tale: Innocence and Children of Morta are the new additions, and while it's likely they'll roll out some time this month, Microsoft wasn't f
Three new games will join the Xbox Game Pass for PC roster soon, growing an already large catalogue of more than 150 games. Gris, A Plague Tale: Innocence and Children of Morta are the new additions, and while it's likely they'll roll out some time this month, Microsoft wasn't forthcoming with a date.
All three are a decent time: A Plague Tale: Innocence fared best under scrutiny, with our reviewer writing that it's "visually beautiful and emotionally affecting" even while it suffers from "missing gameplay variety and tonal inconsistencies". Meanwhile, Gris and Children of Morta scored 66 and 68 percent respectively.
If none of those take your fancy, it might be worth giving the subscription service a shot while it's still in beta: sign-ups are $1 for three months, which is long enough to play dozens of indies, or half of one Yakuza game. Check out the full list of featured games.
If you've been wondering what's next for Xbox Game Pass on PC, Microsoft has the answer in the form of three new titles heading to the subscription service soon - and they're all good 'uns, taking the form of A Plague Tale: Innocence, Gris, and Children of Morta. First up is deve
If you've been wondering what's next for Xbox Game Pass on PC, Microsoft has the answer in the form of three new titles heading to the subscription service soon - and they're all good 'uns, taking the form of A Plague Tale: Innocence, Gris, and Children of Morta.
First up is developer Asobo Studios' stealthy third-person action-adventure, A Plague Tale. Released last year to positive reviews, it offers a bleak, but frequently gorgeous, jaunt through 14th century France, as players - in the role of nobleman's daughter Amicia de Rune - attempt to protect sickly younger sibling Hugo from the grip of the Inquisition.
Its stealth might be a little so-so, but the inventive puzzling - often based around manipulating the hordes of diseased rats ravaging the countryside - is much smarter, and considerably more enjoyable. All in all, it's a strong (if sometimes silly) story-driven adventure, with a cast of engaging, wonderfully realised characters and some frequently breathtaking historical sights. It'd frankly be rude not to give it a go when it comes to Game Pass.
Fabulous is a mobile app for Android and iOS devices that promises to help users "build healthy habits in 30 days." That's not the sort of thing that usually lands on our radar, but it did yesterday when publisher Devolver Digital accused it of ripping off the artsy 2018 platform
Fabulous is a mobile app for Android and iOS devices that promises to help users "build healthy habits in 30 days." That's not the sort of thing that usually lands on our radar, but it did yesterday when publisher Devolver Digital accused it of ripping off the artsy 2018 platformer Gris in an intro video.
It's not a frame-by-frame lift, but the similarities are pretty obvious. To its credit, Fabulous didn't try to deny it: Shortly after Devolver posted its tweet, Fabulous replied, saying that it had removed the video and was investigating the connection. "We've privately contacted Devolver Digital to resolve this," it wrote. "Any wrongdoing on our part was certainly not intentional."
Today Fabulous co-founder and CEO Sami Ben Hassine shared the results of that investigation in a Medium blog post, saying that the company considers the matter "a mistake" on the part of one of its designers, who it is keeping anonymous to protect them from any undue blowback.
The designer issued a statement as part of Fabulous' explanation, however, explaining that they looked to Gris for inspiration for the new animation, but then "took the word 'inspired' way too far."
"I fully realize that I ripped off the game now, but in the animation process that wasn’t my intention at all. AT ALL. I was so amazed by the game animation, especially of the character’s cape that looks so much like Amber’s cape and I had no idea back then how to animate her cape (cloth animation is one of the hardest things to do), so I played the game cinematic over and over and over again to grasp the cape mechanics," they said.
"For the [Fabulous] opening scene (Amber in the big hand) that looks like [the] Gris opening scene, I liked the scene so much and thought it would fit perfectly into the Hero Journey animation so I did something similar to it with no intention to do so. Then, the cape movements, I did something similar with the same mistake in mind: I was only referring to the cape mechanics. I took things way too far and what I thought I was managing got slipped out of my control without me even noticing."
The similarities went unnoticed by the lead designer of Fabulous because they weren't familiar with Gris, and so had no reason to suspect that anything was amiss.
The animation has been removed from the app and a Devolver rep declined to comment on the matter further, which is probably about as good an ending as this situation was going to have. It's also a lesson for content creators everywhere: Be careful where you let "inspiration" take you, because people are going to notice.
Today's Deal: Save 50% on GRIS !* Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are! *Offer ends Sunday 10/20 at 10AM Pacific Time
Today's Deal: Save 50% on GRIS!*
Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!
The studios behind five gorgeous games kindly opened up their sketchbooks and discussed inspirations, how each game's art style was formulated. This article was originally published in PC Gamer UK issue 327 . For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe
The studios behind five gorgeous games kindly opened up their sketchbooks and discussed inspirations, how each game's art style was formulated. This article was originally published in PC Gamer UK issue 327. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in theUKand theUS.The games featured are Apotheon, Haiku Adventure, Gris, The Collage Atlas and Luna (pictured above)Click to see the images at a larger size.
Apotheon
Alientrap’s Apotheon illustrates its ancient Greek story with imagery influenced by black figure pottery. But before becoming a 2D platformer clad in the motifs of ancient Greece, Apotheon was an open world sci-fi project set on a space station; a story of godlike beings manipulating humans from on high.
“Eventually we cut away the space parts and just decided on making a game about Greek mythology itself,” says Alientrap cofounder and creative director, Jesse McGibney. “By that point, it seemed like a no-brainer to use the art style that was most associated with those myths; black figure pottery.” For a while McGibney was torn between black figure style (black figures on a red background) and red figure style (a later style with red figures on a black background). “In the end we settled on black figure for readability, but I took a lot of design cues from the more complex styles of the red figure art,” McGibney says.
The team actually experimented with rendering the game on a pot “with curving rotating edges and all that”, says McGibney. “This was obviously needlessly complicated, but there’s still some visual effects we held onto.” One of these is the vignetting at the corners of the screen. “Another was the subtle normal mapping applied to the screen, which dynamically moves with the in-game light sources to give a clay-like texture to everything and helps reinforce the style a bit more.”
Although characters were abundant in the pottery, he struggled to find references to use for environments. “At most, there might be a tree or a small part of a building,” McGibney explains. “I ended up combining the geometric patterning and interpreting real-world plants, statues, landscapes and architecture to get the effect across. It was a much bigger design challenge than the characters were by a long shot.”
The finished game's art style is instantly recognisable even though it needed some tweaks to be player-friendly.
Colour was another challenge. Expanding the colour palette to include blues, yellows and greens helped differentiate areas, and little pops of colour could help highlight objects and other characters. Apotheon also diverges from the pottery in that its scenes have some visual depth—a foreground and a background separated by tinted fog—which helps with legibility.
I ask why games don’t use the style more often—it would seem a natural fit for 2D platforming projects. “My only speculation is that many games want to create their own vision of things (as we did when we first started the project),” says McGibney. “Sometimes they might overlook the perfect solution right at the root of their inspiration.”
The earlier idea was futuristic space soldiers meets antiquity.
Haiku Adventure
Haiku Adventure is the work of James Morgan and Ceri Williams. It channels their conversations about growing up on islands and their shared connection with nature into a game. The art style draws heavily on the Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock print tradition and, although still in development, will be featured in an exhibition at the William Morris Gallery.
The exhibition, which runs from Feb 26 to May 26, is fitting since it was an earlier show at the gallery that brought ukiyo-e prints into the equation. “The prints seem to acknowledge that capturing a truly accurate representation of nature is an impossibility,” says Williams, “and instead shows a stylised view that gives a fleeting impression of how the natural environment is experienced.” He adds that the absence of a single point of perspective also means the image can be explored by the viewer’s eye as if they were moving around the scene instead of at a fixed point. At the same time, Williams and Morgan had started to look at haiku poetry and how it aims to capture an experience of the natural world. “Stylised ukiyo-e prints offer postcard snapshots of nature, while haiku poetry attempts to remove the ‘self’ entirely to try and get closer to the truth [of] nature. Alongside this, Shinto worships the forces of nature by imbuing every part of nature from animals, trees, plants and even mountains with its spirit, the kami.”
The developers used collages as well as their own printing methods, while creating the game.
Research included visits to ukiyo-e displays and a printing workshop during Williams’ honeymoon to Japan. Other valuable resources were the V&A’s collection, the British Museum’s Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave exhibition, and the website www.ukiyo-e.org, which collects hundreds of thousands of prints in a database. “Primarily we want to faithfully get across the feeling of what it’s like to look at the natural world through the framing of ukiyo-e,” explains Williams.
One of the biggest challenges is figuring out the composition of a scene. “The original prints we reference have really precise framing, which is less easy to capture when parallax and animation causes constant changes as players explore scenes,” says Williams. To resolve this, the pair is focusing on how players are encouraged to pause in specific places so they experience particular framings.
Another consideration was how to add a sense of ukiyo-e printing’s physicality to a digital product. Adding visible woodgrain patterns to larger areas of colour is one way of doing this. Williams used to work at a joinery so he’s been back to raid their wood offcut pile, scanning these offcuts to create a texture library, which can then be used in the game.
“Where we have cliffs, a straight grain overlaid horizontally can represent strata in the rock without needing to add extra linework or additional tones and colours.”
A sketch of a river scene helps with composition.
But tapping into the traditional artforms of another country carries the risk of appropriation or exoticism. I ask how Williams and Morgan are handling this.
“In deciding to use Japanese artistic and cultural traditions as the key references for the game we’re well aware that proper research, understanding and testing are needed,” says Williams. “We’ve been careful to represent ukiyo-e as not just a visual medium but a tradition with a culture and history attached. Above all, a key principle for us has been to make sure that including or referencing any element in the game should never be solely aesthetic—embellishments must ‘belong’ in the game world we’re building.”
The studio is also in early talks with a Japanese publisher who has offered to provide cultural advice during development. “We think working with people who deeply understand aspects of the cultural context this artform exists within is really important. And as two British developers we had to admit to ourselves that it’s easy to misinterpret things when working outside our native culture.”
Williams gives an example from working with a translator on the Japanese text for the demo: “We thought we had everything covered until learning that we had used the Japanese font equivalent of Arial… not exactly fitting for the style of the game! Working with Japanese calligraphers and other cultural consultants will help lend our game an authenticity that we might not otherwise achieve on our own.”
Williams adds: “We’ll continue to seek feedback but the positive reception we’ve had when speaking with Japanese friends and companies we’ve been in discussions with so far has been really encouraging.”
Gris
Conrad Roset’s main focus for the poetic platformer Gris was on creating an illustration that players could get lost in. Roset is an artist and illustrator whose work has been exhibited in galleries, featured in magazines and books, and commissioned by brands like Adidas and Zara. Gris was his opportunity to create a world, swapping the static for the fluid.
The game unfurls as a tale of loss and sorrow—a dreamy experience that’s more about evoking a kind of wordless enchanted bittersweet mood than offering up a thesis. As such, the imagery is the star of the show. Shapes cluster into plants, buildings form out of collections of columns, platforms and staircases. A gigantic bird shifts between a recognisable silhouette and an animated fluid mass.
Flowers and trees need to work for platforming as well as the look of the scene.
Gris picks up motifs from Roset’s existing work. There are blooms of watercolour pigment, neat ink outlines, and a fascination with the bodies of lithe women. His style is spare, using a lot of white space to balance punches of colour. In translating that to a digital environment, he worked with his partners Adrián Cuevas and Roger Mendoza at Nomada Studio to make sure the filters, textures, watercolour effects and so on would produce the right look.
Bringing Roset’s work to life began with hand-drawn sketches, including watercolours. Once he and Nomada started the game, the art and animation moved to Photoshop but with an emphasis on maintaining the organic look and feel.
For example, there’s an animation whereby a cloud of colour blooms across the screen. For this the team used a video of paint falling into a bowl of water and then adjusted it in Unity so it looked like it was blooming from the right part of the screen. Those floods of colour are narratively important, too. They happen when a player gains access to a new part of the colour palette.
Sketches allow an artist to capture the main shapes of a scene.
As well as Roset’s own work, Eyvind Earle’s Disney artwork is a reference point, particularly his concept art for Sleeping Beauty. Those images use layers to create the illusion of depth without linear perspective—a technique that translates well to a 2D platformer.
Earle’s influence is most evident in Gris’ forest sections where squared-off topiary is held aloft by tree trunks so slender they’re just vertical lines, with other vertical lines as branches.
Curiously for a game about grief, Gris seems to avoid anger, harshness and ugliness. But this too is an aesthetic choice. “There are some rougher scenes,” says Roset. “I liked the idea of talking about harsh topics from a gorgeous, aesthetically pleasing viewpoint.”
Colllage Atlas
The Collage Atlas is a game that I tend to think of more as a digital papercraft theatre. Cut-outs of bushes and lampposts—each drawn in black ink using 0.03mm fineliner pens—emerge from the rough white watercolour paper ground. Arranged in layers around a central gap, these cutouts create a garden walkway, leading towards an intricate, wrought iron-style pen-and-paper gazebo.
“I draw everything on paper then scan each element,” explains the game’s creator, John Evelyn. He then cuts them out in Photoshop and removes the paper texture, which the scanner struggles to capture. “I then take the bare line art and back it with a high res photo of a blank sheet of my paper.”
3D elements work more like paper construction projects. “I print the flat UV map outlines (like flattening the foil wrap off a chocolate Santa), then I draw all the detail in, scan that back into the computer and wrap the model in the new hand-drawn texture.”
Old fashioned lampposts and wrought-iron gates are recurring motifs.
As well as trees, pinwheels and boats, The Collage Atlas uses text as a physical object in the game. For example, sometimes letters appear jumbled unless you stand at the exact right viewpoint. Physical text has been integral to the game since Evelyn decided it should be a game in a 3D space and not a picture book, as was the initial idea.
“It just made sense for the text to live within that space, too—rather than as an overlay. Before long I realised that if the text were to share the space with the player then it logically follows that it responds to, and acknowledges, the player much as the environment does.”
Agency and hope are key themes for Evelyn in this project. In pursuing those themes, The Collage Atlas is overtly reactive in ways developers usually try to hide. For example, assets rotate to face you as you move around, or move only when you look at them.
The effect is beautifully delicate.
“Initially people find it strange that the game world essentially doesn’t exist until they act, until they breathe life into it,” says Evelyn. “But I’ve endeavoured to pack the game with regular payoffs, to encourage people on their way and make that seem like a less daunting task.”
Drawing is a liberating experience for the self-taught Evelyn. “I tend to think exhaustively about everything, but when I draw, I don’t. I just let it turn out how it will,” he explains. “The more you learn, the less you realise you know, so I love keeping drawing as my one deliberately naive endeavour, it’s fun to do something entirely free from expectation.”
Luna
It’s odd to think that Luna—a game with such rich textures and which plays out its gentle story in a variety of interactive terrarium-style spaces—was ever intended as a solely 2D game. Porting it to VR happened about halfway through development after the team experimented with taking a version of Luna to the Oculus platform.
“The tactile quality of the art lent itself perfectly to VR,” says Luna’s art director, Glenn Hernandez. “But this meant that we could no longer simply replicate my concept paintings in the VR realm since the 2D camera was very curated.”
Instead, Hernandez would greybox (block out) the basic forms of the environments and the team would see how different arrangements felt in the headset. Modeler Allena Hail would then add definition to the greybox using Hernandez’ paintovers (images where an artist has painted over an image of the space to show how it should look) for reference.
Hernandez stresses the collaborative nature of the work at Funomena. “My drawings and paintings serve as blueprints, and the real design comes to life when other artists insert their unique senses of style to the finishing touches.”
Luna’s own blueprints take inspiration from the illustrations of Mary Blair, the woodblock prints of Umetaro Azechi, the animations of Jirí Trnka, and the sculptures of Lee Bontecou and Harry Bertoia. Funomena also looked at the folkloric style of the 1975 Yuri Norstein film Hedgehog in the Fog. “Eventually, we set those influences aside and allowed all of the inspiration we absorbed to filter through our own vision,” says Hernandez.
Reference images help inform the look of these plants, as do other artists' work and the game tech itself.
Learning to work in the medium of VR presented more than a few challenges, so the team needed to be flexible. “For example, my initial designs for plant life were rather delicate on the page, but showed up as pixelated when interpreted in VR,” says Hernandez. “At first we tried to make the delicate designs work, since the beefier the assets were the more they felt like Playmobil toys, but we realised this was actually well in line with our vision for the game.”
Although he emphasises everyone’s contribution, it’s working with engineer Greg Lemon to curate a shift in lighting during Luna’s intro which is a particular source of joy for Hernandez. “We open on the Golden Gate Park Terrarium as the sun goes down and the lighting shifts from golden hour to early evening. When the lighting for this scene finally came together, we were ecstatic! We had nailed the sense of mystery and wonder we were going for.”
The earliest concept art for Luna has a beautiful patchwork quality.
Emotions are complicated. This isn't something you need to be told by a psychologist, it's something that as a human being you intrinsically understand to be true. The advantage of complicated things is that you get to explore them, really dive into them and dissect them. Maybe y
Emotions are complicated. This isn't something you need to be told by a psychologist, it's something that as a human being you intrinsically understand to be true. The advantage of complicated things is that you get to explore them, really dive into them and dissect them. Maybe you'll never understand the exact science behind it, but getting to see the potential for each individual feeling is something that gaming does very well. After all, with an interactive medium such as this we can become another person and inhabit their heart, see what they see and feel what they feel - to a certain degree, anyway. Inevitably your own experience will influence just how much you can empathise with any story, but sometimes even if you haven't experienced something first-hand, maybe going through it in a game helps give you an idea of the real-world emotions that come with it.
There are plenty of instances of anger, love, fear, and joy in video games, but there are far fewer instances of grief. Grief is complicated. It is simultaneously all-consuming and life-altering. No one goes through it and is the same at the end as they were before it. Grief can be black and heavy, dragging you down into its depths and trying to drown you. Grief can be grey and apathetic, sucking your soul out of you and refusing to give it back. Grief can also be white and blinding, sparking within you a rage that can be targeted at anyone, an anger that will try and immolate you from the inside out. I've felt so many different kinds of grief. Unfortunately I have lost a few people I care about. But none hit harder than losing my brother.
Replicating that in a game is almost impossible. Joy is relatively easy to replicate because finally beating a boss after countless attempts is euphoric. Anger can be generated in the same way: after the 17th loss to any monstrosity you're going to feel angry. Grief just isn't like that. Losing some progress in a game sucks and seeing a character you love butchered is rough, but at the end of the day it's only a game. To really be able to relate to a feeling of loss you need to see the character working through the grief, see the fallout, not just whatever caused it.
The pornography in question. There are apparently some things Facebook isn’t OK with advertising on its platform, and that now includes an ad for a Gris , seen above, that was deemed “sexually suggestive”. Now, I don’t want to kink-shame Facebook employees or whatever algorithm d
The pornography in question.
There are apparently some things Facebook isn’t OK with advertising on its platform, and that now includes an ad for a Gris, seen above, that was deemed “sexually suggestive”. Now, I don’t want to kink-shame Facebook employees or whatever algorithm determined this, but it’s hard to imagine what about the moon or a silhouette suggests that it’s time to get hot and sweaty.
In Facebook’s advertising policies page, it states that ads must not contain adult content, including “nudity, depictions of people in explicit or suggestive positions or activities that are overly suggestive or sexually provocative.”
It doesn’t need to be overt nudity, either, and even the implication of nudity is banned. The ad doesn’t contain any of these elements, however, but at a push I guess someone could mistake the silhouette for a naked silhouette. It's still a stretch.
I got rid of Facebook last year, so I’m not sure what kinds of ads pop up now, but I certainly used to see plenty that blatantly violated Facebook’s rules. They made it a lot easier for me to cut it out of my life, but mostly I did it so I could be insufferably smug about not being on Facebook.
Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail undoubtedly has it right.
While obviously not sexually suggestive, Gris is certainly a striking game, though its visual flair sometimes gets in the way of its exploration of grief. Take a gander at Pip's Gris review.
"It’s too self-conscious, and too wrapped up in being aesthetically pleasing. It’s too tied to the idea of a neat conclusion. It’s so caught up in the language of recurring motifs and visual continuity that it doesn’t seem to notice when the emotional arc loses clarity and continuity.
The overall effect for me ends up being elegant but detached. A slightly muddled compendium of the picturesque sides of grief."
Facebook has banned an advert for arty platformer Gris for being too sexually suggestive. Publisher Devolver Digital noted the rejection on Twitter last night, and scoffed at Facebook's dubious logic. Cover your eyes, if you wish to avoid this illicit nudity: Read more…
Facebook has banned an advert for arty platformer Gris for being too sexually suggestive.
Publisher Devolver Digital noted the rejection on Twitter last night, and scoffed at Facebook's dubious logic.
Cover your eyes, if you wish to avoid this illicit nudity:
The GRIS vinyl figure is available for pre-order on the Devolver Digital Merch Shop:
The GRIS vinyl figure is available for pre-order on the Devolver Digital Merch Shop: http://merch.devolverdigital.com/products/632872-gris-vinyl-figure-pre-order
