Aurion LKO Game & Graphic Novel Comparison: How the story starts

The Zama Palace garden, It was the first scene mapped in the game (the 1st version was done 35 days after the official opening of our studio). I remember how the layers were bugged at the time (butterfly flying under the water, etc).😅

Our first idea was to start the game like a Zelda. Enzo was supposed to wake up in his bed, and he would had some doubts about his duty as the future king of Zama. We wanted to make a connction with the "hard morning" we all have in our real life when we feel discouraged to get out of the bed.

But The idea gave us challenge to animate Enzo getting out the bed. We didn't knew that we could use the classic "Mask screen+ sound" technique (haa rookie time).

So we switched for the garden view. Our objective was to offer a real nice first look in the game to the player (we succeeded? you tell us).

In the graphic Novel, the visual are less magical, it was also our first jump into the Graphic Novel Design. But we were more free to change angle of view.

The graphic novel offered us a way to show diffenent angle of the hero and also to enhance his body language in the scene. It was more difficult to dothis in the game.

And also in our first design of the garden scene, Enzo was supposed to jump down to the village, we even wanted to add a "sliding on the hills" gameplay. Buuuuuut we could not.

The engine was not ready to do it, and we also had to let the player walk and discover the Zama city more freely (tutorial, etc).

Both scenes were our "testing" ground for the game and the graphic Novel. My personnal feeling is that the game is more beautiful on this one. What do you think?

You can join the Aurionverse and get 3 free digital volumes of the Graphic Novel here.