Year Walk – The Early Days

We’ve got tons of making-of type of things for Year Walk, and our plan is to start off to show some of these things on the blog now in a couple of posts.

In this one we’ll focus on the absolute earliest stuff.

The game was supposed to be a lot smaller and have only a few scenes that you could move about in, as demonstrated here:

These are the first art tests:

Year Walk was supposed to be a 3rd person game, viewed like the DS Zelda games. This is the first visual test, inspired by German Expressionism.

…Then we tried to make things a lot flatter:

You can definitely see where it’s heading in this pic! As you can see, we had no design for a character yet…
And it turned out we didn’t need one as we decided to switch to a very old idea we had about making a game in two dimensions from a first person view.

Here’s the first first-person-view concept:

We were going for something Mignola/Hellboy-inspired here. This would probably have been pretty nifty, we could have made a lot of “fun” stuff hiding shadows with this siluette style.

Early style-tests:

We went for a flatter look, but it was a little too “arty” too start with (and not very snowy at all!)

Some super early doodles:

Myling doodles:

A rather nasty-looking Church Grim doodle:

In later March 2012, we made a super small prototype in one week to try out the control scheme. You could move between two scenes, and it had a little ambience playing and the song played on the electric organ (which is still in the final game!).
Here’s a screen grab directly from from that prototype:

That’s probably it for now. We’ll see what we’ll find lying around next time! Perhaps some more Work-In-Progress from the mid-phase of the production along with scrapped puzzles and things?

Oh, by the way this showed up at our doorstep today:

Does anyone know how to open it?