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.