Hello, it's the Feral Cat Den team here!
It’s been a little while since we first announced Nirvana Noir, and we want to share with you an update on how the game is progressing.
For those of you who are new here, Nirvana Noir is a detective adventure split across two parallel realities - the noir Black Rapture and psychedelic Constant Testament. You’ll need to play across realities in an effort to save them both.
Building a living city wrapped in a psychedelic, non-linear conspiracy has proven even more ambitious than we expected, both in complexity and cost.
Focusing on Building and Refactoring the Core Systems
Mostly in the last six months of development, we’ve been focusing on building and refactoring the core systems of the game, as we learned about their limitations and how we want to use them. It’s taken much longer than expected, and to this day, we continue to tweak them.
Two Timelines, Double the Trouble.
Our goal with Nirvana Noir is to create an unfurling conspiracy. That means, anytime we improve a scene, it ends up touching every part of the rest of the game. As each scene develops, we’ve depended on the imagination of our playtesters to fill in placeholder art. But, as each scene is at a slightly different state of development (narrative, gameplay, and art), any small bump or inconsistency can overload mental focus when playing through an already delicate scene of mystery, intrigue, and psychedelic weirdness!
This clip from Malcolm in the Middle really captures the process of fixing even a small detail!
Creating an experience with systems and stories that build on top of each other is really so difficult! Often the flashier animations or interactions are the easiest thing to create. The small details and mundane systems, with all their quirks, have required more attention than we anticipated.
Our Creative Lead has been focusing on removing all our placeholder cards and text descriptions, replacing them with a rough draft for each cutscene. By sequencing the concepts of each scene, giving them a visual and some time for pacing, we’re feeling much more confident in the narrative hierarchy. Less cognitive load is spent on imagination, and we can focus more on the storytelling which is delivered in small digestible bites.
Here’s an example of a cutscene that could use some extra polish, but where a first pass on staging/pacing is feeling good.
Yup, it’s an Akira slide (which has become the Wilhelm scream of animation)! This is the first time creating a version of this iconic shot, and it feels like a big milestone. Our Technical Lead has been fleshing out lots of Nirvana Noir’s interactions. One of his favorites features No Man gathering a big crowd around the city. The challenge with this interaction was to build it in a way where thousands of crowd members could follow the player while avoiding obstacles, without destroying the game’s performance.
We’ve also been building out environments, adding lots of beautiful detail, now that we have cutscenes and narrative coming together.
Here’s a look at an epic entrance to city hall:
and No Man’s completed clocktower:
Thank you for your support and patience. We look forward to sharing more with you about Nirvana Noir in the coming months. Don't forget to Wishlist Nirvana Noir below so that we can keep you up to date on what's happening:
And if you haven't already, pick up No Man's first adventure:
Feral Cat Den and Fellow Traveller