Naming places for our fantasy game

How to name things in fantasy is always a tough one. On the one hand, you don’t want to sound too mundane, and on the other, crazy hyphenated and apostrophated names like Gi’zzor the Terrible and Duke Belerofont are done to death. Tolkien did it in a nice way – as a linguist, he made up entire languages and then emulgated the names for things he needed from these languages. For example, Gandalf means elf-friend in elvish, but humans call him Mithrandir, meaning Grey Pilgrim, and his original name is Olorin, which translates to “dreamer” in the Quenya tongue.

However, we’re not Tolkien, and also we’re leaning heavily on not inventing languages but just treating the game as translated from the animal languages to modern English for the player. So when they use a latinised word like Superb!, we don’t imply that there was a Latin language that the Animals spoke, it’s just our translation of their animal word for this language.

On the other hand, personal names and city names need some thought. Our idea was to make the locations correspond to the group nouns for the animals that live there. For example:

– A group of lions is called a Pride of Lions, so the city of lions is called Pride

– A group of squirrels is a Scurries of Squirrels, so the city of squirrels is called Scurries.

The same with Flocks, Skulks, Packs et cetera. Most of these cities are not going to be accessible to the player in the game as they are far away and not related to the plot, but we’d like the name itself to explain the city. So, for example, when you hear of the count Urlich von Packs, you should immediately summon forth an image of a wolf nobleman, as Packs is a group name for wolves.

We use group names for other things as well, because they fit so well in the context of the animal kingdom. For example, in the case of the Scurries, their elected “mayor” is called The Dreymaster, because another group noun for squirrels is “a drey of squirrels”, so a ruler of squirrels could be called a dreymaster.

Of course not all cities are called by these group names. There are cities whose names bear historical significance in the game, such as Valencia, the colonial city built by King Valent.

We believe such things will resonate well with the players. What do you think – let us know in the comments below, or on our Facebook, Twitter, and Discord!

This is the second in a series of art talks with our painters. As you might have read, our game will feature paintings from acclaimed Croatian young artists. For example, when you enter Orville’s mansion, he has pictures hanging on his walls, from some of our finest fine artists (pun very much intended) as seen here:

Today we interview Luka Kusevic, the painter behind the pictures you see in Badger Orville’s hallway in the gif above. Luka was born in 1993 in Zagreb where he finished the School of Applied Arts and after that the Academy of Fine Arts in the class of prof. Zoltan Novak. His work was exhibited in the Gallery of Matica Hrvatska (Matrix Croatica) as well as the 5th Biennale of Painting in HDLU last year, and may more.

So, Luka, what attracts you to art?

The reason why I paint is because I am Fascinated by how dead matter (in this case – color) can produce something alive – a visual sensation. The contemplation done over a particular picture or other work can awaken unexpected horizons which throws a man out of his ordinary everyday life.

How about games, do you think they can also be art?

I’d agree with an older painter colleague that today’s view of art needs redefining because practically every witch doctor shaman today can proclaim themselves an artist. Art in general has lost the power of transcending its own pitiful “ego” – in other words, the ability to change the perception of a man from his sluggish viewpoint.

As for games, I think they transcend art – because the virtual perception of the video-game mixes with the everyday perceptions we bring ourselves. Games could be the future of the cyborg-man but it is clear that total assimilation into virtuality will not be attained, due to the arrogant way we treat our lives and bioms.

So how did you go about making the paintings for our game? What do you think of the game aesthetics in general?

The biggest challenge was to translate my current ductus (or: my style of painting) to fit the form of a squirrel, beaver, and so on. What fascinated me with the Ark characters was their lucidity, the intelligence of dialogues. As for the visuals, everything is clear. The animals have the ability to create and move in spacetime – this is a world of the surreal, of fantasy… Visual elements should therefore be more dispersed. Not abstract, but definitely more fleeting. Man should be in a constant state of feeling that things are continually changing. If I were creating visuals for the entire game, I’d play with the light of the vegetation, the structures (mills and fortresses), I’d create visuals of bugs and bats to complicate things further. It is, for me, too simple – easy. I would personally take hints from the aesthetics of Monet or Rousseau.

And for the last question – what are you doing aside from this?

I’m working on a series of large format paintings where I’m continuing to develop landscapes as a mental space. I want pictures to burn the inside of the man who watches them. So they extinguish themselves i let go to the sensation. Not neccessarily enjoy but at least for a moment to jump out of their own skin.

And currently where can we experience your art?

Currently, I’m exhibiting on a group exhibition “U ljetnom kodu” (In the Summer Code) in the Kranjčar Gallery in Zagreb.

Great! Everyone from Zagreb – feel free to check it out!

We’ve been working full-time on Trip the Ark Fantastic for almost a year now! It’s a large undertaking for a small indie developer such as us so we decided very early on we’d like to find a publisher to help us out. For this reason, we’ve been sending our Trip the Ark Fantastic brochure to a lot of publishers these past months.

The good news here is that literally everybody loves the idea of the game. We sent the brochure to almost 30 publishers and everybody was enticed by the atmosphere, themes and gameplay decisions!

How we made a plan for development: GDDs, techdocs, charts and more…

Hi, it’s me again, Alex. Last week I wrote about the short history of our company and our other cool stuff we’re cooking that’s not Trip the Ark Fantastic.

This week I’m going to explain the process of planning we had prior to starting on the development of Trip the Ark Fantastic. There’s a lot of game developers who just dive in (myself included on numerous occasions) but for this project, we decided to really figure everything out prior to starting, including making GDDs, Tech Docs, Gantt charts, etc. That’s not to say we carved everything in stone, we’re still having a lot of discussions, even very fundamental ones, but at least we have a good starting cornerstone.

And since we’ve had great success with previous blogs that deal with gamedev methodology, such as the one where we discuss our asset pipeline or how we write dialogues for the game, this time we’ll write up a blog about our project methodology, how we made a plan, and hopefully some people will find it interesting! So, let’s start.

Before the flood, there was a GDD!

First off, even before we started working on the project, we made a huge GDD with all our ideas, and it was over 50 pages long and created collaboratively by Piet and me:

This was important so that we can figure out more-or-less exactly the scope of the project even before starting it.

The next step was deciding on the art style we want. Of course, an art director would be great for this, but having none yet, we decided that we’re going to have to decide this ourselves for now. So we made another document, quite huge and pin-pointed a lot of different styles that could work, and finally decided on one to start off with.

We then settled on a fantasy-ish 2D cartoon-animated art style and found someone to make a few key artworks which we added into the new and shortened GDD, available here:

This GDD was what we sent to the Creative Europe grant (which we received) and also to our investors, prior to their investment. And then, it was time to decide on the scope of the team. Do we need a specialised composer full time or will a freelancer work? Do we need 2, 3 or 4 artists working on the visuals? How about programmers? Et cetera. So, for this, we started creating specialised documents that nail down each of these things.

Making a plan: Creating a Technical Design Document

There was the Technical Design Document where we decided on how to approach certain technical issues arising from our new mechanics (will we use SQLite for storing data, or our own search with data in JSON, what format we’ll store the game script in, et cetera). It looked a bit like this:

There was also a lot of other documents, including a “music design document”. Of course, this document was revised once we found the right composer, but it helped to show the potential composers what we want in terms of musical style and complexity.

And then, after all that was done (cca mid 2019), we started gathering the team to work on the game. It took us most of 2019 but we finally found some great artists, the last of which was our character artist Serena whose first blog was about the awesome tool Krita that she uses for character design.

After the whole team was finalised, we reworked a lot of the documents (now with more realistic timesheets and expectations, especially regarding music and art), and then created a nice big 2 year plan for the development of the game, in the form of a timesheet:

This way we figured the earliest possible release-date for the game to be in 2022 (that’s why it’s called a 2 year plan!) and then when we knew everything about the game and had the whole team on board we proceeded to create a teaser trailer to showcase the atmosphere of the game and drive people to our website where they can read more about the game and follow our work (including reading these blog posts of course).

And then we started working full time on the game proper, starting with making a playable demo of the first city in the game – art, story, music et cetera. The city quest was reworked a bit to feature the main mechanic already (we wanted to introduce it later but decided that for showcasing purposes earlier is better). And that’s where we’re at now.

The various documents have been replaced by more awesome tools (like Nuclino for world building) and/or more detailed charts and sheets for art and music deliverables.

Hopefully, we won’t miss our internal deadline too much (or maybe hopefully we will and the game will be 10x better for it?) but in any case, this is the long and winding road we took to ensure we know what we’re doing and we don’t enter some kind of unforeseen development hell, as none of us are really senior experts in gamedev.

And that’s it. Hopefully some of these ideas have inspired you to plan ahead for your own game! If you have any questions or would like to see some of these documents irl, ping us via social media or join our Discord!