An indie game based on Winsor McCay's groundbreaking comic strip.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
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!)
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...
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!
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
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.
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.
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
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.