An indie game based on Winsor McCay's groundbreaking comic strip.
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Hello dear Dreamers!
Thank you for your patience with this month's update. We are in the process of finalizing a new backer demo that we will be rolling out in stages to everyone. The first backers who will see it in the next few days are those in the higher tiers that include game testing, then in the next few weeks, to everyone. All of this is building up to a season of festival submissions, and more important for you all, finally entering Steam Early Access!
To give you a sense of everything we've been working on, here are just a few new things you'll see and that we have been working on this month:
This is a big one for us: previous demos included some levels that you can choose between, notably the Night Sky and Mushroom Forest. Since those are the most "camera ready" levels, we will still have those primarily included as the explorable Slumberland areas of the demo, but now instead of selecting them from a menu accessed by hopping into bed, you must solve puzzles between levels and access the levels from portals around the house. After consulting with some narrative designer friends of ours, we thought this would both keep the house an interesting part of the overall gameplay and be more narratively interesting than using the bed for absolutely everything.
Featured in the demo is an early version of a puzzle where Nemo has to collect seeds from plants around the house and put them into the proper place in the garden. We'll likely continue refining it as we go along. Please note that art for some of the puzzle areas is still being added, so folks interested in what games look like during development can enjoy looking at the in-progress artwork in the meantime.
This is still in an early state, but we currently have an early working version of Bosco the Dragon as a quick travel system. First, you find the Slumberland court magician and civil engineer, Mysto, and she asks for a candy donation to fund building a platform in a location. Afterward, this platform can be a place that you can quick travel to (and eventually start the level from.) Mysto is a character that we included in art from the Kickstarter campaign, and are excited to get working in the project.
Another big push the past few weeks has been bringing together the game intro and cutscenes to tie the whole game together. With these, you'll really be able to get a sense of Nemo and friends' world.
We don't want to spoil everything, but the world is imbued with much more story than before, and a sense of danger as you see the damage that nightmares are starting to do.
We've also refined the intro level on the city rooftops, which will be playable in the demo. Notably, it includes our version of Winsor McCay's walking bed comic from 1908, having players (and Peony) chase the bed through Nemo's town.
That's just a bit of what we've been doing, but we want to let folks see things in the demo as we roll it out to the different tiers. But before we go, we wanted to share this awesome animatic for our upcoming trailer/animated intro to the game, by the awesome Studio StarCharm:
We're really excited about this one, and having yet another avenue to share more of the game's world.
That's it for now. Stay tuned for the incoming demo updates - within the next day or so for testing-tier backers, and later this month for everyone else.
Cheers and many thanks,
Chris and Team Nemo
Hello dear Dreamers!
It's been a busy few months. We've just about fully assembled the first draft and skeleton of the main gameplay and different levels, but a big effort beyond that has been bringing it all together via the game's story. For this update, we wanted to share the intro to the game, which we will release to backers soon (first the higher-tier playtest backers then more generally) so you can experience it for yourselves.
Our goal above all else is to make it feel like a playable Winsor McCay comic, so we tried to bring together familiar story bits (it's all about the walking bed!), along with the tone and characterization for our heroes. Here's the preview of everything up through the beginning of the Night Sky level:
While it's 6 or so minutes of gameplay, this is the result of months of work, so we wanted to give you a peek into the different tools and systems making this run.
We've talked a little about this before, but to help drive the cutscenes and interaction in the game we put together a mini scripting language. You can can see these exact lines in the video above and can see the actors we refer to in these sequences. 
The animated sequences have been a combination of setting an actor's state (walking, jumping, etc) and driven by timeline animation.
The process of stitching all of this together is incredibly time consuming. Max in particular has been combining these in some pretty awesome ways, and really hitting it out of the park with these cinema sequences.
We've been working on the game into pretty late in development for a couple of key reasons: as a teaching experience (this part of the game teaches you how to play the rest), we need to figure out what we should teach players by setting up and playing all of the later levels. It's also where the resources used to make the cool stuff in the rest of the game come together to create a great experience in the first few minutes.
All of this is to say that a lot of the systems we're using to string together the beginning are also being used to connect scenes throughout the game, such as this example of how players will come and go from the challenge levels in Befuddle Hall:
That's it for now! We'll be reaching out soon with more info on those demos.
Cheers,
Chris and Team Nemo
Hey Dreamers! Adrian here.
May was a busy month for us over at Team Nemo! We've been toiling away at story sequences in our pre-existing levels, building more Befuddle Hall challenge levels that we mentioned in our previous update, adding new play mechanics and decorations to our Slumberland level, beginning to polish up the game's user interface, and so much more!
But over the past couple of weeks, we've been putting together a very important part of our game; the opening cutscenes. This is part of our push to start polishing up the beginning of the game for our next backer release which we'll have more information on soon!
Part of our goal with the introduction is to build a sense of mystery and intrigue for Nemo's latest adventure, and we start our story set up with a conversation with two celestial figures, our homage to the introduction to the classic film 'It's a Wonderful Life'.
Speaking of influences, if other elements of our interpretation of Little Nemo's outer space looks familiar, there's a good reason for that! We also took some visual inspiration from Georges Méliès' 1902 film 'A Trip to the Moon' and John Craig's illustrations for the Smashing Pumpkins 1995 album 'Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness'.
After asserting the increased number of nightmares children are having as being a threat, we then cut to our hero Nemo, caught in his own nightmare. We wanted to make sure our intro got players into the game relatively quickly, so this sequence will be entirely playable.
We've shown pieces of this Nightmare sequence in previous updates, but with Chris' awesome background art and assistance from designer Max Kunze, the sequence is now in a playable state!
There's still some additional polish to add, as well as a bit of dialogue and context for the sequence, and other surprises as well. Before we move on to the next section, however, let's highlight some of the background elements that we're put together by Chris!
While we're patching together the opening to the game, we still want to make sure we're working on new areas of the game as well. Which is why Max has been hard at work on new mechanics, hazards and biomes that you'll see in Slumberland toward the end of act 1 of our game as well!
At one point, Nemo and his party will have to explore the Barracks, a dangerous part of Slumberland where that is well defended by the (perhaps overzealous) Slumberland guard. This early look showcases a work in progress where Nemo must contend with said guards dropping heavy weights on all who try to slip past them!
Max has also spent some time reworking the overall map of Slumberland, adding new twists and variety to each biome. Here's a look at the new layout for Slumberland's Kitchen area, which will also feature its own unique mechanics and hazards!
Finally, we're working on locked doors that can only be unlocked by hitting switches and solving puzzles with one of the four playable characters in our game, starting with the Princess, who players will get access to for the first time in Slumberland. Here are some concepts drawn up by Chris of some of the switches you may come across:
This is only a small showcase of all of the progress we made this month! Our goal for June is to continue to polish up the game's introduction, adding new mechanics such as the game's shop for buying abilities, upgrades and collectables, polishing our cutscene UI and getting every story sequence from the beginning through to our game's second level. From there, we plan to have a fully featured release for backers very soon, and to have regular updates to those playable builds on a consistent basis from that point. So stay tuned to this space for all this and more in the coming weeks!
Until next time, Dreamers!
~ Adrian
Hello dear backers!
It's been a hectic but productive April at Team Nemo HQ. It's seen us shoring up the beginning areas of the game to prepare for an Early Access release (distinct from the full Act I release, so even a bit sooner!) This update is going to share some output from those efforts, alongside some previews and eye-candy.
First of all, that city intro level. To give you some context, this is going to happen RIGHT AFTER Nemo wakes up from a nightmare and finds Peony waiting to sweep him off to Slumberland. Nemo and Peony hop on Nemo's bed, which grows legs just like the classic July 27, 1908 comic:
Our version will see Nemo's bed get spooked by a nightmare creature, which causes it to run through the town, and eventually dump Nemo and Peony on the rooftops, after which Nemo must chase the bed so it can take him up into the Night Sky. The result is a zany action sequence where Nemo leaps from roof to roof and fights some dream monsters (to teach the player the basic jump and attack commands), while the other floating beds of the town act like platforms for Nemo to jump on.
This is still a work-in-progress, so you'll notice some of our developer notes still in the level as we animate the bed encounters that you'll have throughout the level (please also pardon some of the background chatter in the audio - for whatever reason it recorded ambient stuff.) Here are some sketches of what we have in mind:
You may notice a few fun Easter Eggs in this video, like Nemo's new ability to throw candy to cause small amounts of damage to enemies (something we thought our retro gaming fans would like!), as well as a view of the New York Herald building in one of the backgrounds - the newspaper where Little Nemo in Slumberland was originally published! Since a lot of the team is based in Cleveland though, we may have put in a few of our own local touches (check out those statues on the clock tower!)
Here are some other shots of this area:
We've also had a ton of level design happen in some of the aforementioned challenge levels. Level Designer Max Kunze has done an awesome job mixing and matching different game mechanics to create challenge levels. You'll enter these levels by talking to different NPCs in the game - some who like to arrange fights, some who like to build obstacle courses, and some that dream of design! Some of these are playable by any character, but some are challenges for individual characters, or even combinations of characters (so players can see how their powers might work together.)
(All of these video previews are works in progress and subject to change - unless you really like the moonwalking enemies in the one video...)
These have gotten enough of their own identity (and became quite surreal in some cases), that we decided to theme them after Befuddle Hall - a section of Slumberland that Nemo and friends explore in the original comics and which feature different optical illusions. We thought it would be fun to not only use McCay's art, but create some inspired by later surreal artists like M.C. Escher and Rene Magritte.
Here's some of what we have so far (again, all rough/in-progress and subject to change/have further refinement):
Here's a taste of these designs and some of this artwork working together (with a little inspiration from Castlevania IV's rotating room!):
That's about it for the stuff we can show you from this month's work, but there's plenty more where this all came from. Once again, we appreciate the patience with the work - it's taken longer and been bumpier than we thought it would be in the context of the games industry from just a few years ago, but we're able to keep moving forward with this game when a lot of studios haven't been. For those who've never done it, video games take a long time to make, and the past few years have made them take even longer! We're really happy with the results so far (including on stuff we can't show quite yet!) and are looking forward to having it in your hands soon!
Cheers and many thanks,
Chris and Team Nemo