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?

11 thoughts on “Year Walk – The Early Days”

  1. Please tell me you guys are going to sell the box!

  2. Put it back in the forest! Or… The the watchers will come ._.’

  3. I want more Year Walk from you guys! This has been my favorite simogo game so far. And that box would look nifty in my desk!

  4. If you make a follow up, I suspect an evolution would be better than just a new chapter. Perhaps changing between layers as well as just scenes, as in changing to alternate dimensions, spirit world with alternate physics and rules and look for example.

  5. Is year walking a legit thing? Do you have a link for me to read up in it more? It’s super interesting!

  6. I really want to buy a replica of that box too, I really hope you guys will consider making this an option for us. I loved the game, and it would be amazing to have something a little extra and personal from it.

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