50% funded and other updates!
about 3 years ago – Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 11:51:09 PM

Good evening dreamers!!!!

Today was an excellent day that started off strong when we crossed the 50% threshold and continued to gain throughout the day! At this point we're past 50%, but we thought we'd make some brand new artwork to celebrate the milestone regardless, featuring a better look at our villains, the Nightmare Fiends (and of course our friend the King Frog enjoying some candy!) 

What's coming up...

This is going to be a busy week. We're going to have the usual fanfare - podcast tomorrow, Artwork Wednesday, etc. We'll also have an update on the design of Peony from her creator, Taja Emmanus. 

We'll also have some things to announce in the coming days about music! We have a brilliant composer that we can't wait to introduce you to. We might also have other musical surprises in store, so stay tuned...

Not funded yet...

Now obviously this is great, but we're not funded yet, and Kickstarter is still all or nothing! We still need to charge ahead (like Little Nemo and friends on the bed up there!) If you can, please please continue spreading the word about the campaign anywhere you can! We've had a lot of luck getting in front of new backers in the last few days (hello new folks!) so we need to keep it up to make the game a reality! Sharing tweets like this one (https://twitter.com/PFBStudios/status/1371500405885177857) really help us a lot! We can do it! 

Oh...one more thing...

We're unlocking gold costumes for all playable characters and Steam Early Access for all backers with the game as thanks for helping us reach 50%! We'll make announcements after the campaign as to the timeline of that rollout, but please look forward to doing your early access streams in STYLE! 

Cheers and many many thanks for believing in our game!

Team Nemo

Sunday Funnies: The Architecture of Little Nemo
about 3 years ago – Sun, Mar 14, 2021 at 11:36:49 PM

Happy Sunday everyone! 

Today I thought I'd talk about one of the aspects of Little Nemo that's near and dear to my heart: the architecture of Slumberland. I've mentioned this in other posts, before I was a game developer I studied architecture. I discovered Winsor McCay's Little Nemo comics when I was looking up "that game that I really liked as a kid" and found these comics with amazingly rendered environments. 

Inspirations

Winsor McCay's Slumberland is a land of dreams, but also a showcase of popular architecture of the time. At the time, one of the most recent projects in the popular consciousness was the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, overseen by architects John Wellborn Root, Daniel Burnham,  and Charles B. Atwood, and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. 

The Exposition (also known as the Chicago World's Fair) was a huge complex of buildings built in the Beaux Arts style, emphasizing neoclassical elements (columns, Greek-style temple elements, etc.), symmetry, and built to give off a sense of splendor. The fair was a major event in popular culture: among the inventions and innovations first seen there were squashed (stretched) pennies, Cream of Wheat, a device for printing books in Braille, Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer (the blue ribbon is the one it earned at the Fair), and the Ferris Wheel, among many others. It even saw a performances by Harry Houdini. The Exposition ran for 6 months and was attended by 27 million people. The Fair's sights reached even farther, with photos and engravings being sold widely on souvenir cards. Whether McCay himself attended the fair is not clear, but he would have likely known about it from popular media of the time. 

Another architectural influence on McCay was closer to home: Coney Island's Luna Park (the original 1903 version). Like the Columbian Exposition, Luna Park featured fantasy architecture collected around a large canal. It informed many of the buildings in McCay's comics and has been credited with influencing the skylines of Slumberland. 

What if?

So far throughout the project, we've taken a lot of cues from McCay himself, utilizing Beaux Arts influences in the architectural and visual style of Little Nemo and the Nightmare Fiends. Some of our earliest concept art, for example, includes images from both the comic and the Columbian Exposition. 

The architecture that influenced McCay was not the only architecture being built at the time, though. In our approach to Slumberland, we try to imagine what Nemo's dream world might have been like if McCay (or Nemo himself - he's the dreamer!) were exposed to other architectural works from his era. One such influence is a favorite of mine, Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926). Gaudi's work includes Basilica de la Sagrada Familia, Park Güell, and Casa Batlló in Barcelona, Spain (among others.) Gaudi's architecture was heavily inspired by nature. Though Gaudi's style is all his own, it has been linked to the Art Nouveau movement influential to McCay's own style. For this reason, we tried to imagine several elements of our Slumberland using elements from Gaudi's works, such as his organic-shaped columns. 

As we continue to develop the game's environments, we'll dig even further into our bag of architectural references to give the various worlds of Slumberland their own visual character and an even dreamier, surreal look. 

That's it for this edition of Sunday Funnies! We hope you enjoyed this look at the architecture of Little Nemo! 

We'll see you in the funny papers! 

Chris and Team Nemo

Development Stream Saturday
about 3 years ago – Sun, Mar 14, 2021 at 01:47:04 AM

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

Backers Only: The tools of Little Nemo's non-linear level design
about 3 years ago – Fri, Mar 12, 2021 at 11:04:25 PM

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

Game Inspiration & Mechanics
about 3 years ago – Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 07:25:37 PM

When we initially started planning Little Nemo And The Nightmare Fiends, of course we looked to some classic games for inspiration, though maybe not the ones you might be thinking of.

We knew early on we wanted players to be able to control characters other than Nemo; after all, Nemo isn’t alone in his adventures through Slumberland in the comics, why should he be in the game? And of course we wanted those characters to be unique, so we looked at games that had a lot of variety in their move sets, such as Capcom's Mickey’s Magical Quest where the titular mouse could change his costume and become a firefighter who can put out fire and create ice blocks in certain levels.

We also looked closely at a game that also had multiple characters with a lot of variety between them; Little Samson, a niche (and very expensive in the after market) NES game from developer Takera. In that game, players can freely swap between four characters, each with different abilities and trade offs: Samson, who is able to shoot a Mega Man-esque projectile and can climb any wall or ceiling; Kirika the Dragon, who is able to hover in the air for a short distance while also breathing fire that spreads in different directions; Gamm the Golem, who moves slowly but has more health than any of the other characters, is invulnerable to hazards such as spikes and can extend his arm for a strong melee attack; and K.O. the Mouse, who like Samson can climb walls and ceilings but is also able to get into narrow passages that Samson cannot and is able to plant bombs that can devastate enemies. This provided us a great model for our characters and their abilities.

Of course we wanted our game to not just be a clone of another game, and while Little Samson is an excellent platformer for its time, it is limited in some ways. Probably the most notable is that, as a linear level by level platformer, different parts of the game’s level design are really meant to accommodate one character over the others. This makes some levels’ structure feel repetitive over time as well as downright unfair if one of those character’s has died and is no longer available for the player to use.

Naturally we wanted to avoid those issues, so as Nemo’s friends join him on this adventure, they will always be usable; this helps avoid the issue of not having an ability when you really need it. And in that way, we started thinking of each character’s unique abilities as an extension of one another; a toolset that expands for the player every time Nemo meets a new friend. This opened the game up to two exciting possibilities.

The first was allowing the game to be non-linear. New abilities the player always has at their disposal means they can revisit past levels and use their abilities to explore areas they were previously unable to reach. This brings the structure more in line with games like Monster Boy and Demon’s Crest, and so we’re taking inspiration from those games as well, as both the world and the narrative will expand as you discover new secrets in previously explored spaces.

The other was allowing players to freely switch between characters at any time - including in mid-air and during their other abilities. This opens up a lot of new and exciting design possibilities for us, such as understanding how each character works with one another, and how we can best fit that into the level design to create new and exciting challenges. We’re still fine tuning the game to make this feature as fun as possible, but you can see in the game’s trailer a couple of examples of character swapping in action!

Of course, we fully expect players to find new possibilities for these characters that we haven’t even thought of. The plan is to allow for a lot of freeform experimentation and we imagine the streaming and speedrun community are going to have a lot of fun with this one! If you’re a fan of technical, skill based platformers such as Celeste, Guacamelee! or Hollow Knight, we think you’ll be right at home here.

That’s all for this update. Hopefully this was insightful, and stay tuned for other updates in the future! And thanks again for all of your support!

- Adrian