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Wilmot Works It Out
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Boy Are Our Arms Tired
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Wilmot's Warehouse is Now a Board Game!
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An Ode to Plushies
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Merry FMas Everyone!
MERRY FMAS EVERYONE!! FMAS is our favorite holiday, the time of year that we celebrate the sudden appearance of Finji the Royal Weasel, who has given us so much over the years. Blessed Be Thou Weasel, for They Art Mighty. Help us celebrate by getting some of our nearest, dearest projects at a temporarily lower price:
merry fmas everyone fmas is our favorite
MERRY FMAS EVERYONE!! FMAS is our favorite holiday, the time of year that we celebrate the sudden appearance of Finji the Royal Weasel, who has given us so much over the years. Blessed Be Thou Weasel, for They Art Mighty. Help us celebrate by getting some of our nearest, dearest projects at a temporarily lower price:
finji friday inspirations and influences welcome
Tarkovsky’s Stalker, based on Roadside Picnic
Kentucky Route Zero
Firaxis’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Squenix Montreal’s Hitman GO
Edward Hopper, mid-century American painter
868-HACK by Michael Brough
Oregon Trail
National Parks system official iconography
FINJI FRIDAY: INSPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES Welcome to the first Finji Friday dev blog! I’m Adam Saltsman, Finji co-founder, and the creator, lead designer, and lead programmer of our new strategy game Overland (though as you’ll see in the coming weeks, our art director @happydorid has had as much or more of an impact on this project as I have). We’ve produced a couple of videos about the game already, which you can view here and here. We have a bunch more like that in the pipe, but if this is the first you’ve heard of the game, those aren’t a bad place to start. This week I wanted to talk about our influences and inspirations for Overland. This list will be incomplete in many ways, giving especially (unfairly?) short shrift to the audio-visual elements of our game, but it does leave room for Heather and Jocelyn to explore their own inspirations in more detail later. Like any other sentient human, I read a lot, and watch a lot of movies, and I guess mainly before we had kids I played a lot of games, digital and otherwise. I’ve also been fortunate enough to go on a small adventure or two. All of these things play into the design of Overland, but I wanted to call out some particularly major influences in a specific way, because I think … I think it is good to temper the notion of the … lonely genius who somehow invents everything out of thin air. They might exist - I think I met one before, maybe. The rest of us are what we eat, so to speak, and what follows is the brain food that had the biggest impact on Overland. Again, this list is almost certainly incomplete in many ways, but I’m looking forward to exploring it more in the future. ROADSIDE PICNIC by the Strugatsky brothers The Strugatsky brothers were the most prolific and most celebrated Soviet science fiction authors of their time, which made their work almost a taboo in the West for much of their careers. Ursula K. Le Guin made a bit of a splash and was temporarily placed on Communist watch lists when she reviewed their classic novel Roadside Picnic. Eventually adapted into an equally troubled and haunting film by Andrei Tarkovsky, and later a series of strange first person shooter games, Roadside Picnic has a way of getting into readers’ heads. I won’t summarize the plot here, as it’s likely familiar already anyways, but I do want to point out that the source material is similar but also fundamentally different to its successors in many ways. It is simple, small, dirty, and deeply human. It’s about capitalism gobbling up wonder, but also… hopeful in a weird way (and equally sad), a vision of humans adapting to huge changes without changing at all. I really can’t recommend it enough. It’s very special I think. Overland may flirt with some of the ideas present, but the main connection is the way Roadside Picnic looks at a cataclysm through a keyhole. You never really know what happened - the lore is far less important than the way people deal with its second-order effects. I think we have managed to achieve some of that in Overland, and I’m eager to explore it a lot more in the second half of the game, where things start to get much, much weirder. KENTUCKY ROUTE ZERO by Cardboard Computer I’m not sure there’s anything I can add here to the mountains of praise heaped on this marvelous videogame. A strange and hypnotic mood-piece, a poem about a road trip that never really goes anywhere, one magical vignette after another, constantly interrogating what is on the screen and what isn’t. And an office full of bears. KRZ often feels like it was made by time traveling wizards who came back through time to show us a different and better way to do what we’re doing. It’s really good haha. XCOM: Enemy Unknown by Firaxis Like any diligent nerd, I was aware of the huge influence of the british-war-games-inspired XCOM, but I struggled to penetrate the UI of the original and ultimately gave up. Firaxis and lead designer Jake Solomon’s ambitious reboot brought the design into the modern grammar whilst retaining most of the things that made the original such a huge inspiration for so many other designers for such a long time. I have a gripe or two about bits of the design, but I don’t think there’s anything in modern strategy that can equal it. We’re all eagerly anticipating the sequel next year! Hitman GO by Square-Enix Montréal (Dan Lutz, Antoine Routon) When they originally announced there would be a Hitman-franchise-themed game coming to mobile devices, I … I am struggling to remember if anyone even noticed, to be honest. Until they played it of course - minimalist, elegant, clean, intellectual, challenging… a memorable puzzle game in every regard, especially in the way they contain a 3D environment on a single screen, where everything is easy to see and understand. A marvel of compactness and legibility, and a big inspiration for how we present information in Overland. Edward Hopper mid-century American painter I am not an art scientist but I think it’s important to include Hopper here because it was one of the first and strongest influences that @happydorid introduced when she joined the team. In retrospect, the connection seems obvious - almost like the 19th century British neo-classical fad of painting new buildings as ruins, Hopper painted a post-modern America that was mostly empty. In so many paintings, just one or two people remain, the vastness of the great plains spread out before and behind them. Mundane subjects presented in a haunting way and a palette dominated by surprisingly dark shadows are ideas that found their way into our game with ease. 868-HACK by Michael Brough The perfect compact “rogue-like” or “rogue-lite” or… whatever phrase makes purists least angry. An interwoven collection of brilliant reductions and tightly-coupled elements, producing a surprisingly easy to parse multidimensional grid where both the risk and reward are almost entirely up to the player. Simple is not really the right word, but the earliest Overland prototypes especially were very inspired by almost everything in this game. In fact, the original whiteboard doodle that inadvertently spawned this project was just a mashup of 868 and XCOM. THE OREGON TRAIL by Rawitsch, Heinemann, and Dillenberger (1971) To be fair, very little of this iconic road trip game carries over into Overland beyond the basic premise of traveling West across the US. No, you can’t get dysentery in Overland. But it still feels… incorrect to not at least mention it. National Parks System iconography and symbols We’re still putting a lot of work into Overland’s UI, but one of the weirder (or maybe not so weird?) touchstones for a lot of the look and feel of the flat elements in Overland comes from the icons used in state and national parks all over the US. We often reference road signs and other things, but … something about this icon set has … they’re somewhat… it’s like they don’t have a context of their own or a style of their own, in some ways, but as a collection, and a collection that is part of our experience as US residents, somehow they’ve acquired context and connotation. They’re neat. Ok I have to get to a meeting but if you’re into Overland, and you haven’t checked out some of the things here, maybe you’ll dig those things too. Thanks!
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A warm welcome please for our new animator @yurika-you-found-me! She joins our art director @happydorid in Los Angeles, CA and will be producing all of our character animations (like the new one above!) as we ramp up for our 2016 release.