Saving, Loading and Arting

Hi from the Feral Cat Den team!

This month, we’ve got some news on some more behind-the-scenes goings-on of Nirvana Noir. We’ve been hard at work on more of the game, and we’d like to share some updates on things both visual and technical. So let’s dive in!

Art and Animation Design

Revisiting the beginning of the game, we decided to make our initial glimpse of the Constant at the bottom of No Man’s Clocktower a little more special. This is our first real look at the Constant in the Black Rapture timeline so there is great opportunity and value in getting this first impression right.

We layered these abstracted skylines to give a sense of depth and grandness, while subtle gradients give the impression of lights and life coming from beneath. It’s all still the same asset though, just repeated in a clever way; so as you can see, you can achieve a lot with very little.

Later in the act is an interaction with electronic devices. We decided to go 2D animation on this rather than 3D, figuring we could get more control of and whimsy out of the artwork this way. Here is a near-finished loop of a toaster.

We ultimately went with this simpler animation as a proof of concept for the other items but it was fun to rough out some silly animation ideas and here is one for the toaster that didn’t make the proverbial cut.

As you can see, there’s even a lot of work going into something little!

In other art areas,we’ve been focused on fleshing out scenes. As the pacing, tone, and plot all solidify, we’re in the process of taking cutscenes that were described by text boxes and blocking them in.

With the scene choreography feeling good, we’re also adding sound effect events for Skillbard to drop in some audio! The audio in Genesis Noir was much simpler than what’s required for Nirvana Noir. Previously Skillbard combined the sound effects and score into one piece of audio for us to play. With the dialogue of Nirvana Noir, however, we need to break up most sound effects to be triggered as the player reads through the text boxes. We have many more events that require a lot of attention to detail, but the feedback of animation, script, and sound all progressing a story feels so good the extra effort is worth the labor!

Saving and Loading - The Unseen World of a Game

We’d also like to share some of our recent work on the less-glamorous bits of gamedev. Specifically, we’re talking about the fascinating world of game save data and loading!

There’s a lot of things you need to consider when designing how the player will save their game:

• How often does the game save?

• Can the player manually save whenever they want?

• How is the save data presented in the game’s menus?

• How many save files is the player allowed to make?

• What happens if the game fails to save, or a save file is corrupted?

When developing Genesis Noir, we learned these considerations and updated accordingly. However, with Nirvana Noir, we’ve been able to take these lessons learned and create a more robust save system, with four save slots! Each slot will also store backups, so if you encounter a problem, you can roll back to a previous save. Handy and helpful, too!

To answer the other questions, Nirvana Noir generally automatically saves after cutscenes, NPC conversations, and whenever you exit a building and return to the