Hello, indieDB Community!
We are the Brainless Bunch, a Portuguese game developer team.
Welcome to our first article about the game we are developing, Essence of the Past.
Essence of the Past is a game about a woman going back to her abandoned childhood home, initially with the intent of selling it.
Our game explores the perspective of someone struggling to reconnect with her past and going back in time through memories captured by Polaroids scattered around time and space.
We, as a team, have been working on this project for a little over a month, and we're finally ready to share with you some of our progress! A month is a long time and during it, we've made an extensive amount of advances, today we will guide you superficially through some of them.
Research
Focusing both on our inspirations and visions for the art, mechanics, and narrative, we did some research about other games that fit our specifications. Among them, we had the following:
- EDDA Cafe, by Mushroomallow (2021)
This cute, slice-of-life visual novel about a girl trying to move on from her past was one of our inspirations for both the general vibe and core idea of time traveling!
Figure 1 - Moment from EDDA Cafe
- The Past Within, by Rusty Lake (2022)
Presenting the player with a mystery rooted in troubling family connections, this multiplayer puzzle game was an example of different ways to present the player with a narrative through puzzles.
Figure 2 - Clock puzzle present in The Past Within
- When the Past was Around, by Chorus Worldwide Games (2020)
This adventure point-and-click puzzle game has a very earthy and familiar feel to it, something that we wished to achieve with our own project.
Figure 3 - Gameplay moment from When the Past was Around
These 3 games, among others, give us an idea of how our own plans fit within the rest of the game market, and as such were great inspirations!
Moodboards
To get a clearer view of the overall aesthetic we intended, we required the creation of multiple moodboards that went over each part of the visual aspects of our game. Among them, these 4 were made:
Figure 4 - Artsyle Moodboard
Figure 5 - Environment/Level Design Moodboard
Figure 6 - Character.Protagonist Moodboard
Figure 7 - Character.Mother Moodboard
These 4 are key components during the process of creating both the levels and the characters since they help the artist keep a clear sense of artistic direction.
We'll leave the documentation of this past month's progress here for today, we still have lots to go over but we're glad we finally got to share some of it with you. Next week we'll be bringing you more information about our progress on, Essence of the Past, like narrative plans, insight into the mechanics, and some early sketches!
Thank you for checking out this first article of ours!
See you next week!
Brainless Bunch
