Remaking Nirvana

Nirvana was a game that I worked on with two more people. After the game was launched, we followed our separated ways, and the game stagnated. Until past month, when after some negotiations, the full rights came back to me, and now I can work on the game again.
Nirvana: The First Travel, was unfortunately victim of my inexperience as a developer, and looking back at it now, I see where my flaws are, and how much I grew from that time until now.
During the past year, since the game was launched, I have been working on my first solo project, a platformer called "Quatro Luzes". The game had its success, and I learned a lot with it, about ways to tell a story, about presentation, and more importantly, about the importance of playtesting and how well rounded a game becomes once you have a trustworthy team of playtesters. By that I mean "people that tell you exactly what they think, no matter what."
Nirvana came back into my schedule. I've been remaking the game now, working on the graphics, in my outdated code, in my puzzles. I don't know when the game will be ready, or when the update on Steam will arrive, and be available for everyone to download it. I decided to take my time and make the game I wanted to make in the first place. A game where a tragedy happened and all the hope is in a hopeless person. Maybe, for a while, I was a hopeless person.
But I hope... I hope I can bring the players of my game the experience to visit the world of Doctor Lestrade, Roman and Mr. Thomas Walker, and be part of it. Now I can.

Sorry for the waiting. It will be well worth it.

Jardel Elias, former Creative Director of Genius Games.

Perfectionism

Working on Nirvana thought me a valuable lesson: nothing you do will ever be as good as you can do it. The time to publish the game is getting closer, and sometimes I find myself polishing small things, while the big bad bugs are giving me the eye.
You can't be an Indie and make a polish, realistic game, most of the time. You have to play with the cards you have, and like I said multiple times before, the design of Nirvana was chosen with only that in mind: time-efficient puzzle building. In the early stages, the heavily modular geometry of my levels ran the risk of being monotone, and all the rooms looked the same, really. Until I played Mirror's Edge, and it gave me the idea of painting the wall with different colors - colors that the player could use to navigate, and to know if they are standing on a wall, or on the ceiling.
This design decision was important in the early stages, and since I would use the same texture for all the puzzle walls, the least I could do is make it look perfect. The wall texture, in the end, was the one to take me the most time to make, although it's the more simple.
Working on Nirvana, I learned the difference between realism and perfect simplicity.

The wall texture.

Unity 5 and what it means.

So, I have been working on this game for along time. I remember when I started playing with some gravity concepts, I was using Unity 3. The software was nice, easy to use, and as many people say, the path between the idea and the execution in Unity is really well paved. When Unity 4 was released, and introduced some more features (mainly a new animation system), Nirvana didn't suffer much. The basic idea of the game, and most of its mechanics remained unchanged, and my transition from 3 to 4 was so smooth.
Of course I learned Mecanim, the new introduced feature, you never know when you're gonna need a good animation pipeline, right? But one thing my game have in common with the Half-Life series, is that I don't have a character model to be animated, so I was satisfied with the bug fixes, and all the minor new features I could use.
Until early march, this year, when Unity 5 was finally released.
Democratization of game creation. This was the policy for Unity from the beginning. Everyone can be a game designer, if you have the talent, and if you have the dedication to work for it. The new standard shader, the new global illumination, the new physics engine, the new audio mixing system... the new Unity that changed my game from something personal and minimalist, to something personal and beautiful.
Thank you, Unity Technologies, for making this engine, for making dreams come true around the world. But its not about "what they create", is about "what we create". Time to go back to work.

Nirvana: The First Travel in Unity 5.

TFT, TST, TTT, TLT

The thing with pre-producing Nirvana was, I could never anticipate all the perils, and all the falls after it was over, once I started the actual production. When you are deciding how your game is going to be played, how the guns will work, how the story will generally develop, you are also completely oblivious of the ideas that will appear during its careful manufacture.

The craziest day on the production of Nirvana, by far, was the day when I decided to change the title, and add the subtitle "The First Travel". At first, I thought it was dangerous to assume that I would be able to make more of those. The first thought that came into my mind was that, the fact that I put this one together was already a miracle, given my slight tendency to throw out projects directly into the trash can, and never talk about them again.

That feeling was present at some point in the pre-production, when I decided for the minimalist design for the rooms, inspired partially on the vibrant colors of Mirror's Edge, plus the cold environment of Portal. Back then, the design decision was completely based on the fact that, if I was going to play one-man-army, and do all the graphics by myself, it should be at least easy to pull off. In time, though, seeing the rooms taking shape, the melancholy of the story hit me. I created a world that needed saving, that desperately needed some light, but what I was doing was driving it even more into the darkness. That realization became a fundamental part of the story, and the day came to changed the title, to change the fate of my small civilization of two people.

Nirvana: The First Travel. We will visit their world four times, and we will see gaming with other eyes when we are finished. I hope.

Philosophy

At some point I was interested in what philosophy my game was going to use. Will it be like The Matrix, where everything is just part of a simulation? Will it be like Portal, where all you want is to escape of a bad situation, but still not knowing where you are escaping to?
The original Nirvana game was taking place in a Space Station (hence the gravity shifts), and it was pretty much an FPS. The player would have guns at his disposal, and brainless enemies to shoot at. You couldn't control the change in gravity, although it would happen in some stages. No puzzles, not really a lot of thinking, and no philosophy: just a story to be told.
When I changed the overall concept for the game, from FPS to Puzzle, well, everything changed. Because at the end of all puzzles, I needed a more significant goal, other than killing the last boss, and getting to the end of the story. I needed the player to know why, and how, he got to that end.
So I decided to make the game exactly as it is, a game, and at the end, I hope the player feels exactly what he (or she) is to the world I created: The philosopher, the thinker, the essential mechanism that put all the solutions together.
I can only hope to anchieve that.

Old Nirvana scene.

Walker: Concept art

Why his name is Walker?
Funny story. The C# script I use for the character movement is called GravityFPSWalker.cs. So, everytime I had to make a reference to this script, I used the reference name "walker". After a couple weeks saying: "walker now will do this" and "walker should do that", I began to feel confortable with the name, so, why not name the actual character Walker too?

Is Nirvana really a first person shooter?

So, I've been working on Nirvana for almost three months now, and it all started with a basic idea: "A dude with a gun that doesn't work". As I begin thinking more and more about that idea, the concept of the puzzle gun came to me, and it is not, at first glance, a gun that does not work, but it's just a gun that affects more the player than its environment. I mean, you can do pretty crazy stuff: move incredibly heavy objects, turn off gravity and teleport yourself around, but the gun don't know the environment, the gun doesn't care if you don't reach the next room, the player do. As the narrative goes on - as you, Doctor Lestrade and Walker explore the darkness and light of the Nirvana evacuated facility - what the gun can and cannot do become less important, and what the player can and cannot do become more important. The game is not anymore about shoting a gun around, and starts being about a being human around, and look for a way out. I hope, when the final result is out there, and you know exactly what I mean, you realize that Nirvana was never a first person shooter, but a personal experience.