Re: Laura Bow and the Mechanical Codex
Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2019 4:50 pm
Email wrote: Happy Holiday Season to all of you amazing Laura Bow fans out there! This month we'd like to show off a few more images of our progress [above] and talk a bit more about the characters and interactions in the game.
To view the above wallpaper images in their full size, just click on them (Gmail) or right click and select Save Image As or Download Image to copy it to your computer. If you are on a mobile device, you can touch and hold to save the image to your device. And, as always, visit the website if you'd like to view some of our previously released images: www.ninezyme.com
Also, the team will be taking some time off at the end of the year - so we will be skipping our January newsletter all together. We will be back with more progress updates in February!
What, Where, When, Who?
For the setting of The Mechanical Codex, we are picking up many months after the events from The Dagger of Amon Ra - everything pivoting around a real-life historical event (no spoilers!). Laura has continued working at the New York Daily News Tribune and is a bit more established in her career. She has become slightly more accepted at her role as their first and only female reporter - and she is starting to gain a bit more confidence with her life in the big city.
Our aim is to advance with Laura, and make her a more relatable and lovable character - while still maintaining that small town southern innocence and charm from the original games. We have already cast a super talented voice actress to play her role, and she is doing an amazing job so far!
The Mechanical Codex will also feature a couple of other familiar faces (one of whom you might recognize above). However, the majority of our extremely diverse cast will be all new and very specific to this story. Currently we plan to have 20 primary characters, plus some filler ones for more generic events... oh, and a cat (she plays a very important role actually). Several of the characters are based on real life people from the time period - although we have changed names in cases where it could possibly be defamatory. After all, a Laura Bow story needs a good villain!
The first chapter of the game (which is our focus at the moment) contains 5 of these primary characters and a couple of filler ones. These are all completely designed, modeled, and textured - with animations in progress. We will continue to reveal them to you over the next few months.
The Little Genre That Could
Point-and-click games... we love them, we hate them, we make them, we play them, we sometimes forget them. It has indeed been a troubled genre after the golden age of the 80's and 90's. There is always a small and passionate audience who will continue to support them - however, in reality, they just don't tend to sell well enough to build a stable foundation on (or to garner major support from publishers, investors, license holders, etc).
We recognize this and are attempting to adapt with the times in an effort to attract both classic and new audiences. Hard core fans will shudder at the thought of messing with their tried and true formula - however, we see it as an opportunity to enhance the gameplay in ways which will do right by our beloved heroine. With our full 3D environments and richly detailed characters, we will be able to create a clue finding experience well beyond what was possible in the previous games of the series.
At its heart, it is still a story driven point-and-click adventure! However, you can expect to also see some additional mechanics adapted from modern games and gaming devices - and much more meaningful character interactions than what was possible before. We hope that all of you are looking forward to seeing what we come up with, and will keep an open mind about what a Laura Bow adventure could be - using the plethora of tools at our fingertips today.
I'll shut up now...