TMTE DEVLOG

Early August 2023

Its hard to write a DevLog, considering Im not really used to it. In the past, I updated my followers through Kickstarter, since Ive developed all three of my previous games thanks to crowdfunding. But Three Minutes To Eight is the first game Im developing without the support of a Kickstarter campaign, and due to the mysterious nature of the game, I kept the development very secret, until the announcement we made in early June.
Glitched Three Minutes To Eight teaser So now its about time to tell you more about this project, and its particular nature. I had the original idea in late 2021, I cant remember exactly the month, but it was cold. It was during the moment before you fall asleep when your brain is a bit foggy, and you cant really distinguish dreams from reality. Usually, I forget the morning after what I thought before falling asleep, and most of those ideas are trash anyway. But I was lucky enough to write a few notes on my phone, right before closing my eyes. And when I woke up the morning after I was pleasantly surprised. So much so that I decided to keep using that method for the first part of the game development process, which is working on the idea, concept, and gameplay.
Im not writing about this because I think Im cool or anything like that. But because its exactly what happened and how this game was created initially. Im not even sure if this will do any good to the final product, but I hope at least itll make the game experience a bit original. For about a month during that time in late 2021, I kept writing notes on my phone or on a notebook with a pen, forcing myself to stay awake even if I was super tired and my eyes were half closed. Once I had put all those ideas and concepts on paper, I started the actual development of the game, during normal working hours. I first hired a few pixel artists (Andrea, Yasin and Normal Neighbor), to start designing and animating the characters then I brainstormed my ideas with a writer, Irina, to better define the multiple narratives that co-exist in this mind-bending game. In the meantime, I also started designing the environments where the game is set, which are created in voxel art. At a later stage, since I was too busy with coding, I also hired a voxel artist, Ksenia, to complete the rest of the scenes. While for the dialogue, I asked for help from another writer, Peter.
Talking about the visual style of Three Minutes To Eight, its a mix of 2D pixel art for the characters and 3D voxel art for the environments. Everything keeps more or less the same scale, so the player has the feeling of being inside a 3D pixel world. The characters and their animations are made in a truly traditional way, frame by frame. Furthermore, having the whole environment created in 3D allows us to use sophisticated lighting and create an appealing look that is modern and classic at the same time. The gameplay has its roots in the classic point-and-click games which, thanks to the new Monkey Island, gained worldwide attention lately despite the fact that they never disappeared and they always had a pretty strong niche. However, since the game is also releasing on consoles, it supports a gamepad controller. So rather than pointing and clicking, players can move the protagonist directly and interact with the environment without moving a cursor. Also, the game is mostly a 2D side-scroller and somehow works even better with a controller than with a mouse.
But what makes Three Minutes To Eight truly original, is its gameplay. Contrary to what happens to most adventure games out there (especially the classic LucasArts ones), in this game, the player will die. To be precise it will always die at 19:57 (hence the title). But after the Game Over death screen, the player can choose to wake up again, and restart the game, with enhanced elements (I cant reveal much to avoid spoilers), which will help players to understand more and more about whats going on.
The protagonist is locked in a loop, where he always dies at 19:57, and players must find a way to escape death, choosing (or finding themselves) in one of the ten different narratives, which lead to different endings and yet co-exist at the same time. Each run is unique, with randomized elements or pre-arranged ones, which change all the time. The more you play the game the more things youll discover while bizarre things will start to happen. Therefore its a game with a high level of replayability. I dont want to spoil much about the storyline(s), but overall the game is set in the near future, 20 years from now, in a city close to the players current location.
In terms of the technical aspects, besides the already mentioned mix of pixelart and voxelart, I can say that its developed with Unity engine and it uses, as a bare core, the Adventure Creator asset and Dialogue System by Pixel Crusher, but more than a hundred custom scripts have been written by myself to handle the intricate amount of variables and extraordinary events that happen in the game. Sounds are done by Anecoia Collective, and the music is by Yann Latour, who also wrote the acclaimed soundtrack of ENCODYA, my previous game. Three Minutes To Eight is also entirely voiced in English, by a group of professional and highly skilled voice actors. We are now at the final stages of development. The release is planned for a few months from now. Three Minutes To Eight is developed multiplatform, for PC (Windows, Linux, MacOS, Steam Deck), Consoles (Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series), and even Mobile (iOS, Android), in eleven languages (English, Italian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese), and at this stage we are testing that everything is working nicely for all the languages and all the platforms, polishing the last details.


Im truly looking forward to releasing the game and getting players feedback! I wish you all the best, Nicola

[ 2023-08-03 15:06:08 CET ] [ Original post ]