Hello! ːsteamhappyː
First of all, we welcome with a warm heart to all the people waiting for the game and all of you that came through the steam nextfest! This is ‘Ogu and the Secret Forest’.
We’re currently working on the build for launching the early access in March. We can’t share many details yet. So instead, for the people that are wondering how ‘Ogu and the Secret Forest’ came about, we wanted to share some thought processes that’s been considered before all this journey started. A little glimpse at the mind of developers if you will. Hope you like it!
The World Building and the Structure of the Game
‘Ogu and the Secret Forest’ has always had a main theme of an adventure of a child who is very curious and pure.
‘Baby Ogu’ the main protagonist who is a ‘selfless curious platypus venturing into a new unknown world guided by a mysterious powerful being’ was our starting point. To create a story around this theme, we drew a lot of motifs from the famous ‘Alice in wonderland’, Studio Ghibli's ‘Spirited away’ and ‘My neighbour Totoro’.
We didn’t want the path to be linear so that the player may choose their own way of progression. This is why we decided to create a world with several differently themed regions and let the players choose which region they may want to visit. It is because of this reason we’ve decided to create the ‘Go find the Sigils’ system.
Due to the lack of development manpower with only 4 people in the whole project, of course creating something that is completely nonlinear is without a doubt a great challenge.
However, until the complete official release we’ll try our best to create something that is as unique of an experience as it can be for every other player. That is our goal.
Character Concept
Every character design and animation has been hand drawn by the original artist ‘Jong-Beom Moon’ of the ‘Moonlab Studio’. Since the artist has a liking towards animals and bugs, you may find the unique yet somewhat familiar style of the artwork quite charming.
In the current demo version you can meet our hero ‘Baby Ogu’ and the monkeys of the ‘Village of the Sun’. However, We assure you there are a variety of animal friends such as birds, shrews, insects, hippo and many more that are eager to meet you as well!
That’s it for now! We’ll tell you more about our journey with the creation process of ‘Jungle region’, ‘Moon Forest’, ‘Desert region’ and so on. Thank you and see you again!