Speedrunning Nemo
over 3 years ago – Tue, Mar 23, 2021 at 11:08:39 AM

Hey, it’s Ben!  I wanted to drop a quick update about what we’re planning as far as overall game structure, and how it might affect things like Speedrunning.  I personally love watching speed runs and am super excited to see how players might tackle Nemo.  We’re trying to build in features and an overall game structure that allows this along with, of course, a more laid-back mode of play where you can soak in the story, environments, and art.  But that’s not what I’m here to talk about...

First off, thank you everyone for your support!  It really means the world to us.  We’re nearly ¾ of the way funded and though we still have a long way to go there’s a light at the end of the tunnel!  We opened up some add-ons if you’re interested in a particular item.  And make sure to help spread the word about this game.  We don’t have a large marketing budget so we’re relying on our supporters to help spread the Nemo love!

Metroidvania?

While Nemo isn’t exactly a Metroidvania game, it takes its cues from the genre.  We have likened the game more to Demon’s Crest in its structure (in my opinion, an underrepresented genre).  You start with Nemo and his basic set of skills, and you will meet your friends as you play through the game. Like Demon’s Crest, this will give you access to new areas of the game where you’ll find upgrades and items that allow you to progress. At its very basics, Flip and Peony give you vertical traversal and Princess and Nemo allow horizontal traversal.

Each level has a branching set of goals, and you can revisit levels with the skills you’ve unlocked to find new areas. We expect most players will go through the regular item and skill gates, but we anticipate and encourage speedrunning the game as well.

Emergent Behavior

The game uses a physics system that has a lot of room for emergent behavior.  Most of the character’s primary skills involve expanding the player’s traversal of their environment (Flip swings, Peony climbs,  Princess floats, and Nemo glides) and because all of these skills can be chained together, we’re expecting especially skilled players to be able to skip items and find alternate routes through the game.

Because these skills affect the physics of the characters, stack, and are designed to do so, we expect players to find sequence breaks in clever ways we don’t expect.

Speed Running Features

We are adding features that make speed-running the game easy, beyond basic sequence breaking.  We have a quick travel system in the game in Bosco, who will let you quickly travel around levels.  We will have an in-game timer, and of course, will allow you to skip story sequences.

We also want to make the game’s goals flexible enough to offer several different types of runs. Our first stretch goal is the Kitchen goal, which allows Nemo to eat different food before bedtime to set your game up to be easier or more difficult.  If you want to try an especially difficult run you can set it up

We actually had some discussions around this recently and are looking at ways to easily set up practice runs, and do things like replay bosses.  If you like speedrunning and have any suggestions, let us know how we can make your life easier and things like streams more fun to watch!

Thanks again!

- Ben and Team Nemo

Streaming Saturday and new add-ons!
over 3 years ago – Sat, Mar 20, 2021 at 09:32:35 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

The making of Peony by guest writer Taja Emmanus
over 3 years ago – Fri, Mar 19, 2021 at 11:44:21 PM

Taja Emmanus is a freelance artist and illustrator with specialties in animation and character design. We approached her to help us create a new addition to the main cast not featured in Winsor McCay's previous work. The idea came from an article reviewing a previous adaptation of Little Nemo, where McCay's character of the Jungle Imp (or "Impie") was replaced with a furry creature. The article argued that while the creatures was cute and amusing, the character was a missed opportunity to have better representation in Slumberland. We decided that this would be a goal of our project and approached Taja, who created Peony as a high-ranking member of Slumberland's royal guard. We love Peony and hope you'll love her to, so we asked Taja to tell you about how she created this wonderful character. Taja's work can be found on her website. 

Here's Taja: 

In our game’s story, Peony is a leader in Slumberland’s royal guard and is the character sent to retrieve Nemo so he can help fend off the Nightmare Fiends. Peony’s role in Slumberland has a major contribution to the design of her character. Having a young girl take on the traditionally masculine role of a general made me want to mesh different aspects of masculinity and femininity as presented through the fashion of clowns. After a few rounds of designs that either focused on hyper-masculine or hyper-feminine designs, I thought about how meshing them would work on the character.

I thought it might be important that she maintain her femininity more while still being a respected leader to the Candy kids as it is very common to see black women and girls portrayed as inherently more masculine in the media.I wanted to try focusing her design on balance, thus her asymmetry. In addition, I wanted to bring in acrobatic leggings and clothing to tie to her abilities. Another aspect of her design was her hair, I thought of how often dark-skinned characters are portrayed with straight-white hair. While very cool and an iconic look, it isn’t often that we get dark-skinned characters with colorfully textured hair. Though I myself have curly rather than coily hair.

We can’t talk about the design of Peony without addressing the elephant in the room: Winsor McCay’s character, Impie. Impie and his tribe are caricatures of Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) that were unfortunately common during McCay’s time. Though these portrayals were common, they were and remain incredibly harmful. With Peony, we wanted to address the presence of Impie not through total replacement like other adaptations of Little Nemo did, but use this as an opportunity for representation. Slumberland is for everyone.

Backer Discord access update
over 3 years ago – Thu, Mar 18, 2021 at 10:03:14 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Artwork Update: The Creatures of Little Nemo and the Nightmare Fiends
over 3 years ago – Thu, Mar 18, 2021 at 05:45:00 PM

Happy Thursday morning!

Normally, we'd do an update like this on Wednesday as "Artwork Wednesdays", but in case you missed it, we had some big soundtrack news yesterday introducing composer Wayne Strange and guest artist Mega Ran! 

But today we're going to tell you all about the creatures of Slumberland, and how we're drawing from Winsor McCay's original works: not only Little Nemo, but his full catalog of comics and animation. 

"He's just tracing"

Winsor McCay was fascinated by drawing monsters and creatures of all kinds. He was drawing from a very young age. His first drawing was a recording of the scene the night that his family's house burned down, drawn with a nail in the frost on a window. From there he drew compulsively. He would later say that his artistic skill was much more practice than raw talent. 

In his comic strips, McCay showed great skill with animals, particularly showing them in motion. McCay was likely familiar with Eadweard Muybridge's photographic studies of motion, which featured both humans and animals, as they were sold widely as cabinet cards. 

This skill eventually led to doubters accusing McCay of tracing his characters, which greatly offended McCay. As a result, he drew increasingly fantastical and outlandish animals in his comics and eventually began drawing dinosaurs (with the logic that he can't trace something that's extinct). All of these giant creatures stomping around have led some, like author Ulrich Merkl, to even credit McCay with directly inspiring King Kong and inventing the concept giant city-destroying monsters (kaiju). 

McCay's creatures in Nightmare Fiends

You're already familiar with our version of Bosco the Dragon, which appeared in Little Nemo, but we're diving deep into the McCay pantheon to fill out the world of Nightmare Fiends. It was important to us that we capture this element of McCay's work in our game, as McCay's work features a massive amount of weird critters. 

Monsters even give us opportunities to include other main characters by McCay like Sammy Sneeze, who might not otherwise fit into the plot of the game.

Then of course there are the animals from the NES game. As we've said before, we cannot legally recreate the NES game's animal costume/ride-based gameplay because Capcom has the copyright on that work. However, we can include animals that reference the cast of that game as a nod to fans and which honor McCay's love of giant monsters. In this case, we've given them a promotion from rides to powerful magic beings who aid Nemo and friends in exchange for the game's currency, candy (it is the dream of a 7-year-old after all.) 

You've seen all these of course, so we have some new surprises for you! As a result of a poll taken at the beginning of the campaign, we've also drawn the giant Salamander character! You'll encounter her in the Ice Palace level, among the foundations of the castle. 

In a more conceptual state is another special guest character from McCay's menagerie. 

As of right now, we're imagining that Nemo and friends might meet Gertie on a return trip through the Mushroom Forest when they need help crossing a bed of spikes. This gives us an opportunity to have Gertie lift Nemo up like she did Winsor McCay in the vaudeville act. This is of course all in concept and subject to change.

We hope you enjoyed this look at some of the creatures from our game and into our thought process for ones that we're still in the process of creating! We'll keep you updated as these features evolve and develop. 

Final 2 week push

We're within the final 2 weeks of the campaign! While we're doing really well and are still on-pace to meet our funding goal, we can't let our foot off the pedal. For that reason, we're asking our backers to please continue the great work you've been doing spreading the word about the campaign. We also have some announcements in the works for next week that we hope you'll enjoy :-) 

Cheers, and many thanks for believing in our dream project!

Chris and Team Nemo