Hello, everyone!
I’m Dimas, the art director of A Space for the Unbound.
My team and I recently did an interview for Indie Obscura, we talked about behind the scenes of A Space for the Unbound there. You can check out the video here and give it a like!
https://youtu.be/ZvnTWJ5lrH8
The Inspiration
After the interview, I feel like I want to share the story behind A Space for the Unbound here, too. So here it goes!
A Space of the Unbound started off as an internal game jam in 2015. Back then, there’s no really a clear vision on what the gameplay would be, and then I just made a very experimental one and a concept trailer. After it garnered some attention we decided to continue this project. You can see the initial build of A Space for the Unbound - The Bridge we made back in 2015 here:
https://mojiken.itch.io/a-space
Back to the topic. As for the overall experience, initially, I just want to tell a story about a girl who has a deep secret while she is seemingly living her happy daily life. The inspiration comes from a lot of movies, manga, and anime. Some of them are based on a slice of life genre and there’s also magical realism genre, too. I was inspired by a lot of movies such as Inception (Christopher Nolan) and The Truman Show (Peter Weir), and then manga by Oshimi Shuuzo-sensei also a novel The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami-sensei. And I want to combine all those inspirations with Indonesian culture and setting.
90s Indonesia
Why 90s Indonesia rural setting?
Actually, the 90s wasn’t really the initial plan. As someone who grew up watching anime and born in the 90s, I just really want to preserve all the good times I had back in the day.
When I was in high school, I was blown away by Makoto Shinkai-sensei’s work and I discovered that he uses a lot of real-life locations, and at that time I realized that a lot of anime also does that too. Back in the day I also discovered an activity named anime pilgrimage. A group of people doing a tour to real-life locations and compare the location with the animation scenes counterpart, and it inspires me a lot. I mean, if we can visualize and transform our environment, our hometown in a new, different way, in this case, pixel art, maybe we can appreciate the place we live in more, and we can add some new value to it.
It’s a really fun process! After narrowing down all the ideas, we came up with the keyword “90s” because as I mentioned before, we want to give a tribute to the time when we grew up.
I think that’s all for now! I will come back again with more stories on A Space for the Unbound next time! Thank you to everyone who has played the prologue and wishlist the game! We will do our best to work on the game and enjoy the process.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1201270/A_Space_For_The_Unbound/
Terima kasih!
Dimas and Mojiken team
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