(this is a crosspost of a blog entry originally posted by Ian Dallas over at Giant Sparrow's website)
Edith Finch was released one year ago!
To celebrate our anniversary we’re sharing some never-before-seen early concepts for the game in the form of a trailer, a doc, and a mood board. All of these are from early 2013, a few months into what became 4 and a half years of development.
Greenlight Trailer
First up is what we called our “greenlight trailer.” This was an internal trailer we made at the request of our publisher to help us identify and communicate what we thought the finished game might feel like. None of the prototypes shown here made it into the final game, but tonally it’s not far off.
Fun fact: the sunken house that appears in the trailer was an idea we discussed at the start of development and then forgot about completely for 3 years until it found its way back into the game in a completely different form.
Concept Doc
Around the same time we made the trailer we also wrote a Concept Document that tried to summarize what, at the time, were the best ideas we had. Again, almost none of the specific ideas survived but the tone is pretty close.
Mood Board
Last up is the original mood board we made for the game, a collection of reference photos that felt suggestive of the tone we were going for. This was hanging up in our office for a couple of years, the last remnant of the game’s original title, “The Nightmares of Edith Finch.”
Now that we’re in the very early stages of our next game, it’s comforting to look back at the last game and see how wrong we were about so many things, but also how eventually the bits of good ideas coalesced in unexpected ways that ended up looking eerily like what we set out to make in the first place.
And speaking of that next game, we’re looking for an Animation Programmer and a Lead Animator so if that sounds like you, and if the idea of spending a few years making prototypes to explore a vast range of promising but ultimately misguided ideas seems appealing, let us know.
