Hello everybody!
Igal here, co-producer on the project. Inua's game design is the product of long iterative reflection, carried out mainly by Armel Gibson, a talented French designer from Brittany!
Armel is the creator of Vignettes, a successful iOS game released in 2017. It was a special project, without a character, without a story, and visually very elegant. Its main attraction is the “game feel”: you can manipulate and rotate objects with your finger. Try it out, you'll see it's a gem ...
That’s where Armel’s design excels: an initial approach through the simplicity of player sensations and abstraction. While some designers may start by considering the design of a game's "system", Armel prefers to think in terms of gestures and user experience. How should the universe on display offer itself to the manipulations of the player? How can we reinforce the narrative vision of the game through its interactions alone?
However, Inua as a project is obviously anything but abstract; it's a tangible universe, stuffed with narration and characters. Was it the right choice to implement a game feel-oriented design in this way?
Our intuition was as follows: The deeply spiritual story of the project should provide the player a special role in it, omniscient, which we wanted to make them feel instead of revealing head-on. We hoped that Armel’s approach would convey this idea in a sensory way.
There were a lot of uncertainties, but Armel got down to work and one by one he broke through the barriers. From the prototype, the idea of scenes in isometric view was essential, like dollhouses to be rotated to gradually reveal characters and settings. The feel was already there, and our ability to unfold a dense narrative remained intact via levels meticulously crafted according to the story.
The omniscient role of the player was made concrete via a classic aerial view but with real meaning in the universe of the game and fixed camera angles to navigate between.
A shader reproducing a white fog around the scenes gave the sensation of observing reality through space and time, which we liked very much.
Another challenge was to find a way to update the principle of an inventory, an essential ingredient of point & click games. Here again, how do we signify this omniscient role of the player but via their own interactions? Through iterations came the idea of tokens replacing the objects of a classic inventory: Abstract ideas found in scenes and then breathed into the head of any character to trigger a reflection or action in response. Thus the system perfectly matched the game's narrative and allowed the collection and exchange of abstract information between characters, each of whom ultimately having their own inventory. In addition, the possibilities for storytelling were increased tenfold with access to the inner, intimate life of each character.
Armel also suggested the idea of interacting at the crossroads of the abstract and the tangible, offering several levels of interpretation and which opened up a boulevard of gameplay possibilities. And thanks to his game feel skills, tokens are very simple and a joy to handle.
That and a thousand other design choices gradually brought all of its feel to the project. Who doesn't want a story that is discovered as much by the mind as by the senses? We hope you do!
🐻❄️ 🧊⏳
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