Hey, people!
We have some news for you guys! Hope you had a good day.
What we’ve been up to?
After spending time giving some love to both Echoes and End of Lines, we were able to go back to work on our (still unannounced) next game. We're very excited to see it come together, with an Alpha version almost completed.
Following our latest update, the new demo of End of Lines has been downloaded more than 1,000 times. However, we are ten positive reviews short of the 50 we need to be more visible in the Steam store. So, if you have played End of Lines and enjoyed the game, don’t hesitate to leave a review!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1658960/End_of_Lines/
We’re thrilled to announce that a demo for Echoes is out! We wanted to give players a chance to experience the game and bring more attention to this project. The demo features the entire first episode (out of five), allowing you to dive into the world of Echoes and get a feel for the story, gameplay, and atmosphere. Best of all, if you decide to continue your journey after playing the demo, your progress will be saved, so you can pick up right where you left off in the full game. Thanks to the demo, we are already starting to see a little more traction toward it. Almost 1000 downloads!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1775220/Echoes/
Spring Sales
Spring is here, and so are the deals! You still have a few hours to take advantage of the Steam Spring Sale. It’s the perfect time to explore new adventures and expand your collection. Don’t miss out, it will be our last sale for a while! If you want to support us a bit more, you can also buy the bundle! You will have 37% off and don’t worry, the bundle automatically detects games you have already purchased.
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/15195/Novabox_Collection/
Spawn Festival
We are excited to announce that we will attend the Spawn Festival’s third edition on Saturday, April 5th in Angoulême!
The festival will feature about 30 indie studios with projects ranging from experimental games to games with a social or political message, along with a collection of curated games from our friend Camille.
You will also be able to enjoy panels, conferences, and even video game-themed performances.
And don’t worry if you can’t make it—we’ll be sharing a full debrief, complete with photos, in our next newsletter. We can’t wait to see you there!
Ask the Devs!
In this section, we answer your most frequently asked questions about our games, development process, and upcoming projects. Have something you’d like to ask? Send us your questions on Discord, and we might feature them in the next newsletter.
“I would like to know what were your inspirations for Along the Edge story? Geoffroy mentioned in the web page that he was raised in France, rural country.”
Well there’s a lot to say about that. Along the Edge was the first story I created on my own and I didn’t know if I would have the privilège of writing more, so I stuffed a lot of the things I loved in there. I guess the main thing is that when we started working on this project, I was 36 years old and it was becoming more and more probable that I wouldn’t have kids. The idea of transmission, heritage and what we leave behind when you don’t have children was something that was on my mind a lot at this point in my life. Along the Edge helped me explore that. I also wanted to make a classic “fantastique” story. We have this sub-genre of literature in France, which is neither fantasy nor horror, but something in between, I never knew how to translate it accurately in English. It dates back to the 19th century. The main theme is that you have an unreliable narrator who experiences strange events, but you never know if there really was something supernatural going on or if it’s just the imagination of the narrator at work. It gave us an interesting way to frame the choices in the game, letting the player decide whether Daphné believes in the supernatural or not at all. I could talk at length about all of this, I hope this quick answer satisfies your curiosity. For the second part of your question, well, I indeed come from a very rural area in the center of France, “la Creuse”, which I am very attached to and that’s not very well known, even in France. In fact, it’s one of the places that gets mentioned when a fellow French person needs an euphemism to say “the middle of nowhere”. That was the perfect setting for the story we wanted to tell, so I went there and took a lot of reference pictures for Nico. If you want a fun fact, the setting is never named directly in Along the Edge itself, but if you make the right choices in Across the Grooves, Frank tells Alice that Daphné is in fact in Creuse.
“And how long does it take for Nico to create a drawing?”
Thank you for your questions. This is an easy one though: it depends! I think the fastest one took me 15 minutes and the longest ones would take me a full week to polish. Of course, that’s extreme examples, most of the time I can safely rely on 3 pictures/day on average during the game production (that is when I’m done with concept arts, research and references collection). Fun fact: the longest one was probably a key art for Seers Isle that we didn’t use in the end because it was not good enough. Somehow, spending more time on a picture does not always make it better.
That's all for now!
If you want to subscribe to our mailing list, you can register here:
http://www.nova-box.com/signup
You'll get extra-fresh updates about our projects and our whereabouts once a month, nestled in the coziness of your own inbox (we'll never send spam, and you can unsubscribe anytime).
I hope you guys are doing well. Thank you for following us on this adventure.
Best,
Ophélie,
on behalf of the team.