Behind the Scenes: Developing the Inventor

Oi, mates!

Niels here – the game director of Chronology.

Today, I’ll talk a bit about the development of one of our main characters, the Inventor.



A lot of work has gone into this guy and I could probably rant on forever so I’ll try to keep it short – feel free to leave comment below if you want to know more about something else...





Anyway, the only thing we knew when we started developing the prototype for the game some time during 2012 was that our main character should be a time traveler so an old scientist guy seemed pretty fitting. So we kind of just ran with that idea without giving much more thought to his character.









This image goes back a little earlier than that (it's dated January 25th, 2011); it is the very first drawing of the Inventor and the snail. It’s just a quick doodle that I did (and for some reason I wrote ‘Chronology’ under it) – I think it might have been an idea for a painting or something.



At the time that I did the doodle, I had an idea in the back of my head to do a game that somehow used the time travel logic of Day of the Tentacle but at a much faster pace - so you could do something in the past and then instantly travel to the future to see the effect. This drawing must have somehow triggered my brain and the two merged into an idea of a side-scrolling platform game. So I started thinking about it a lot more and was finally able to start fleshing out the concept.

Back then I didn’t even know there was going to be a snail in the game but somehow the snail character stuck around because of this doodle.







First mock-up by our artist Juan (come to think about it, it’s actually kind weird the snail is there).



Early in the process, we were going for a very dark and Limbo-ish style for Chronology but luckily (for the game) I was down for a week, sick in bed, re-watching Studio Ghibli movies while also being quite obsessed with the children books by Shaun Tan (particularly The Arrival and The Lost Thing) which I read as bedtime stories for my daughter. I thought the much brighter, cartoonier (is that even a word?) and more imaginative styles from those would serve the game much better. So we starting moving the game in a very different direction.



Leaping a bit forward in time again to when we started on the prototype (yep, that's the second time travel in this post), here’s a quick description of the Inventor from the Game Design Document:

"The player character, an endearing old man (think the inventor from the movie UP! mixed with Dr. Emmet Brown from the Back to the Future movies) – simply referred to as The Inventor. The Inventor is stuck un-stuck in time and is able to travel between the past and the future and manipulate both – e.g. change something in the past and travel to the future to see its effect.

The Inventor inherits a few old man stereotypical traits such as calm, cozy and a bit slow. He is a man of science and he is clever.



The inventor is not affected by time, so he can travel back and forth in time without it affecting him. The inventor is able to pick up and carry certain game objects. If the inventor is holding an object while traveling in time, the object is not affected by time either – so the player can bring objects between the times without the object aging or ‘un-aging’. However, the player can only hold one object at the time so the player will need to think ahead (across times) when solving the puzzles."







Mock-up by our artist Juan. The look of the Inventor has evolved and is now much closer to his final form (and the snail is kicked out of the game - not to return again before much later in the process). This was the initial style that we settled on before starting the prototype.



Another new idea we had was that the game should be set in an anachronistic universe containing futuristic vapor driven Victorian machines as Jules Verne may have envisioned them alongside more modern sci-fi elements (inspired by Steampunk) while mixing up the cultural traits of our world (e.g. East meets West). This seemed quite appropriate considering the core game play is also mixes up time and place quite a bit.

So we put some steampunk glasses, a World War II flight jacket and a fez on the guy and just ran with it.







3D model of the Inventor.



At one point during the development of our prototype we considered doing the whole thing in 3d (while still keeping the 2d game play). But after heavy discussions we decided that despite all the advantages of 3d, a more hand-painted 2d style would depict the universe and the imaginative feel that we wanted to capture in a better way.







Screenshot from the prototype. Back then the Inventor had a cane and was much less of the agile type than he ended up being.



After creating the prototype we could approve that we liked the style and that the time travel game play concept was working (even though it was more or less just one big hack programming-wise). But we could start working on the real build.

We could re-use some of the assets from the prototype but it was clear that one thing had to change: The look of the Inventor.







During our pre-production we tried to completely re-think the Inventor’s look. Here are some early concepts by our artist Juan.







And a few by our animator Rasmus.







And more by the Juan and only.



At one point after going through a lot of different styles (even some very Zelda inspired stuff) we settled on something that we liked in terms of drawing style and coloring. And this is more or less what we ended up with in the final game - The last two guys in the image.



It was also around this time that the snail was brought back into play. But that’s another story altogether that I’ll try to cover later in another announcement (when I get some spare time).







And finally, a screenshot from the current build.





That’s my rant for now. I hope that gave you a bit more insight about the main character in our game.

Until next time!





All the best,

Niels // Game Director and Music Composer

Osao Games