An indie game based on Winsor McCay's groundbreaking comic strip.
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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.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
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.
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).
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.
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
Good morning Dreamers!
From the beginning of this project, we knew that great music would be vital to the success of Little Nemo and the Nightmare Fiends. The game has a lot of elements from the early 1900's, when Winsor McCay's Little Nemo comics were first published, but we wanted to make sure that the music first and foremost inspired the player to explore. Likewise, the world of a dream invites us to experiment and create a lucid soundscape that bends genres.
To help us achieve this, we've found some really great collaborators that we're excited to announce!
The soundtrack for Little Nemo and the Nightmare Fiends will be composed by Wayne Strange, a video game composer, vocalist, and orchestrator whose previous work includes score prep work on game soundtracks like Star Trek: The Video Game and God of War: Ascension, as well as arrangements for Materia Collective and Video Games Live.
In our discussions with Wayne, he painted a picture of a soundtrack that would have a "surface level" soundscape that players would expect from a video game adventure, but which will bend and twist as Nemo's dreams and nightmares gain a life of their own.
We've also enlisted the help of prolific hip-hop artist (and Little Nemo superfan) Mega Ran for a guest track! His music blends education, hip-hop, and gaming, and he has covered and remixed numerous classic game soundtracks, including Capcom’s Little Nemo the Dream Master. Mega Ran’s recently released a memoir, Dream Master, that details his personal journey and is named after Little Nemo.
Mega Ran was one of the project's early cheerleaders and we could not be more excited to collaborate with him. We've been listening to his music for years (MAGFest alums unite!) and his Little Nemo The Dream Master track especially holds a place in our hearts.
The team is still in the early stages of composing, but the talent and heart that the team is putting into the game will make it worth the wait. We'll be putting out samples in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for more and tell your friends about the game and excellent soundtrack!
Cheers,
Team Nemo