Behind The Scenes
I thought I'd provide a little "documentary" of the development of I I R O.
This account focuses more on the artistic side of the project and some background.
I've always participated by myself in the COMPO before, but this time was my first team-effort.
Our creative process was quite interesting you could say.
This is my team-mate @ankea and me in the studio we set up in my living room.
We kinda insisted early on that we're going to do this project IRL, so setting up a studio was a necessity.
And so we did! @ankea managed to cram all his gear into a "portable unit" and travel to my place for three days. I call that a major feat in itself.
Even though modern technology makes remote-working amazingly easy and efficient, being physically in the same place still has its benefits.
Some of the things we produced would have been quite difficult to accomplish remotely.
One such example is the intro-segment of the game.
I've utilized stop-motion photography in my previous entries too, but this time I could include an on-screen "actor" since there was two of us. This would surely be possible by yourself using a stand and a timer, but it would obviously be less efficient.
At first my intention was to shoot the stop motion-intro/epilogue in the beginning, but it ended up to be one of the last things we did. Our scheduling was admittedly a bit poor during the final day, so it's one of the reasons we didn't finish in time, and had to scrap some content. The intro-segment also ended up being somewhat clunky and visually incomplete due to this.
This is a whiteboard we used for brainstorming ideas and taking notes. It proved quite efficient especially later on.
(The board was scribbled full and wiped clean at least three times in the span of the project).
Highly recommendable for projects like this!
One thing I like to bring up is the background of the mask featured prominently in the game.
It's a real physical mask sculpted by @ankea, originally to be used as a prop in a student-film our friend was working on, where I also featured as an actor. That particular project apparently ended up being scrapped due to poorly shot material.
Sometime later, we cooked up an idea to shoot an amateur-film ourselves in a span of a weekend, and use the mask as a central element. There were only three of us, and we planned & shot the thing in only two days (not much unlike Ludum Dare!)
This was almost 9 years ago.
It was also somewhat of a horroresqué story, involving an abusive father, a misfigured son and a priest.
The film has never been published, and could probably use a re-edit, but we had fun working on it way back then.
Also, some of the material we shot is really amazing. There was a plan to recycle some of it in the game to a larger degree, but the only things we ended up using were few clips in the Level-HUB.
This is a mock-up poster I made of the short-film few years ago when revisiting it.
As you can see, the game shares (partly) the same name.
Recently I've come to like the idea of re-using old material in new ways. I have so much creative output and drafts that have never been properly used lying around. The more time passes, breathing new life to them seems almost like an obligation.
And speaking of that, here's a fun detail in our entry.
It features a weird mini-game involving an egg. That you must rub.
Yes, you heard right.
Pretty strange already as is.
But I think most might find it surprising that we actually used an old photo of someone we know as an asset.
More particularly his head. Talk about hiding an easter-egg in your game. (Ha!)
He wasn't feeling all that well at the time, so that's the reason for the eccentric posture.
But there you have it.
I guess the underlying point of my story here is that you can find new value in your old creations after they've been kept in the dark for long enough.