#ambize studio

So, in the past few months, we've been trying to put together one of White Lie mechanics: while exploring the world in search of your owner whereabouts, you will find some mementos of the time you two lived together. Interacting with these mementos will get you to live the memory kept inside of it again, knowing what you felt the experience you lived with your best friend, through the lens of a plush toy. The first memory we are creating is from a time Emma read a book to Greg. She was not satisfied with the book's ending and decided to play and change its ending. Below are some images of what we are creating around this theme and how the game will look during this particular story. 

Hello, how are you all doing? It’s been a while since we last posted here because we’ve been work on a demo to take to Brasil Game Show on October, a demo that we will soon show to all of you too.

But in this post I would like to introduce you the new animator of the team, Patrícia Miyazima. She will be the one giving life to the world of our game, deciding how the animation will look like, and every effect associated with that. Here are some examples of animations we are testing for Greg:

So, now we are working with the camera composition in game, trying to work with the perspective we want and at the same time use elements of a orthogonal camera, like the foreground and background layers with parallax. Below are some of the concepts for what we are trying to achieve.

This is the perspective we want for our game. The areas will be a 3x3 matrix and each cell will have the size of a screen. So every scene has 9 times screen size to walk around. We are testing and developing a system in Unity to proper create a path for the player to move the character and a smooth way for the camera to follow Gregorio throughout the level.

Besides that, we are also using some orthogonal camera elements, like the foreground and background layers in the camera, for either the parallax effect and to get a better visual for the scene. Every scene in the game should feel like a good composition and that is something very hard to do, specially putting together these two kind of distinct perspective and camera elements. Finally for the camera, some actions will have a zoom in a specific space, making easier for the player to interact with the game and that is another thing we have to design in each level, all the interactions and their corresponding zoom should be planned to feel like a natural part of the gameplay and have the same artistic feeling as the scene without the zoom. Finally, we would like to thanks this article in Gamasutra for a lot of insights and for giving us a way to start working in Unity with our art style. As a bonus, a cute sketch of Greg.

Here are more art to help us define the mood of White Lie. We are almost finishing the pre production of our game and I’m really excited with all this results we are having, it will really help us a lot when we start the production phase of the game.

We all have memories locked in some deep place of our minds. Things we want to be forgotten. Actions we wish we had not taken. Relationship we didn't want to have spoiled.

But a time comes when we must face the truth. When you look into this cages will you want this memories to stay there or will you set the free to become part of what you are?

In the core of your mind exists a monument where your most precious memories are kept, where your secrets are held. This is the place where you must confront the truth, where you must face your true self.

Maybe in the most remote corridor you will find some darkness you will have to accept before going further into the essence of your existence. Is Emma in the top? Is Emma in the bottom? Maybe she in the underground. The Tower is huge and to find a way in it’s labyrinth is to find a way into yourself.

So after the last post we did a lot of things. We did some tests and identified some problems in the interactions we were using in the game and we were a little lost about what to change or what it would impact in the whole development process. So we talked to identify what the problem was for our team we we did some work to map what our process is, what deliverables and documentation do we need, how should be our work flow and how every one of this aspects affects in the chain of the creation of our game.

With this we can know look to the process and see what our problems are, how every change will impact in our timeline (I'll write an article in Gamasutra explaining our process, how did we get to it and how it is helping us, so if someone finds a similar problem it could help solving it). We could identify a lot of concepts, guidelines and documentation we were missing that were driving our game to a different value we want for it. So we are spending some time fixing our pre production and in doing so we created some concepts that will work as guidelines for us, about creatures, ambiance, world, mood and some subjects aspects. Below are some of our new concepts.

We were trying some things with a cover for our game and some promotional images and here are some examples :)