Hi there!
It’s Antonio ‘Antares88‘ Scacchetti here, writing you from the cold lands of Estonia. That’s where in 2013 I and my dearest friend Massimiliano ‘Haematinon‘ Nigro started our tiny game studio, Dev9k, under the wings of the accelerator GameFounders.
This DevLog is about, Nirvana Pilot Yume, an upcoming anime-style Visual Novel about space races. We’ll talk about many aspects of the development, from angles that should interest both players and fellow developers: risks and challenges, our processes, how we do art and narration.
We previously worked on other Visual Novels, first with some prototypes in 2015, and then in 2016-2017 we lent ourselves to another studio for a yet to be announced project.
It came natural, at the end of that, to proceed on the same path.
This time, however, we wanted to spice things up and mix the traditional visual novel recipe (read the story, make choices) with skill-based gameplay sections.
Nirvana Pilot Yume is about the dreams of a young girl, Yume (which actually is “dream” in Japanese), and her quest to become a Nirvana Pilot. In this distant future, spaceships can go faster than light and interplanetary disputes are settled through space races.
The other key element of the story is redemption: Yume seeks for help from the legendary Eye Aldaine, now retired and fallen in disgrace after a tragic accident.
Between the story events, the player will run the actual races in a retro-themed, low poly environment, with a gameplay inspired from a 1993 classic: Skyroads. I used to play it a lot in my childhood, and what a surprise it was when I recently discovered that it was made in Estonia, the very same place where we established our team.
One last ingredient was missing to complete the recipe: a cool soundtrack. That’s when an emerging Hungarian band, Retröxx, jumped on board with amazing metalwave pieces.
The Game is built with Unity3d and targets PC. The goal is to release it soon on Steam Early Access with support for Windows, OSX and Linux.
If we sparked your curiosity and you’d like to try the game we have a good news for you: we have a Free Web Demo online, aimed at testing our assumptions about gameplay, art style and narration. We included the first two races and the first two story events, and you can play it here.
‘Till next time!
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