Essence of the Past Windows game

Essence of the Past

Brainless_Bunch | Coming Jul 2024

Find hidden objects in collectable polaroids and learn about your roots.

Coming back to her childhood home after her mom’s passing, Laura decided it was time to finally sell the decrepit house. Observing an old Polaroid left out of its place in the photo album, she notices that not only is the album now empty, but the remaining photos feature nothing but the furniture in the background.

Locate the photos spread around space and time to restore the photo album and find in each one what made that moment worth immortalizing in dusty zink paper. Each memory is valuable, the moments spent with loved ones precious, but the ticking of the clock waves away the sands of time, covering them in a haze, forever forgotten.

Essence of the Past is a 2D puzzle, point-and-click game that heavily relies on its narrative. Simple and satisfying, a hidden object game that is sure to warm your heart with its tale of family, memories, and love.

Credits

Oriana Medina - Game Designer / Project Manager (LinkedIn/Instagram)
Iara Dias - Game Artist (LinkedIn/Instagram)
Mariana Honorato - Game Programmer (LinkedIn/Instagram)

RTX Remix

RTX Remix is a modding platform by NVIDIA, which allows modders to create stunning HD remasters of classic games (see all supported), with ray tracing and DLSS. Playing RTX mods requires a RT capable GPU. Learn more here.

Essence of the Past's compatibility with RTX Remix is:

Status: Not Compatible
RTX Remix Runtime Version: N/A
Conf File: N/A
Captures: 0 captures - add new
Assets: 0 assets - add new
Mods: 0 mods - add new
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#7 Essence of the Past Devlog - Character Sketches and Poses

18hours ago News

Hey there, indieDB Community!

We are the Brainless Bunch, a Portuguese game developer team.

Welcome to our third article about the game we are developing, Essence of the Past.

Essence of the Past is a game about a woman going back to her abandoned childhood home, initially with the intent of selling it.

Our game explores the perspective of someone struggling to reconnect with her past and going back in time through memories captured by Polaroids scattered around time and space.

Here we are once again, ready to share with you all some of the newest updates regarding the progress of our game! Today we'll be going over the creation of the sketches for Laura (our protagonist) and Margarida (her mother) as well as some poses for their in-game art!

Character Sketches

On the last devlog, we showed you some of the thumbnails done for the appearance of both Laura and Margarida, as well as some of the research done to reach those results. Based on those, we proceeded with the creation of sketches for those two characters, finally reaching what would be their final design.

Laura

For Laura's design, we had a good amount of ideas, and as such a total of 24 sketches were made, all of them different from each other in various ways. On the first set of sketches, we thought that Laura wasn't looking exactly like the 10-year-old she was meant to be, still a couple of their design ideas were later used to create the next sketches.

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Figure 1 - Sketches for young Laura (1)

Next, a couple of more childish-looking Lauras were created, but they were looking a bit too happy compared to what we intended, so this time we put to use some of her outfit inspirations.

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Figure 2 - Sketches for young Laura (2)

Finally, this set was the one we considered as having the most amount of potential among the 3 of them, and from these we ended up choosing the very first.

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Figure 3 - Sketches for young Laura (3)

In this final design sketch for Laura, we have her looking very young, wearing clothes that were appropriate for the time (1985), and appearing slightly uncomfortable. From all the sketches made, this was the one that exactly fit our vision for the young version of our protagonist.

Figure 4 - Final sketch for young Laura

Margarida

Now having a better idea of how the characters were meant to look, we were able to reduce the number of initial sketches to only 4, easily finding among them the one that fit Margarida the best.

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Figure 5 - Sketches for teen Margarida

From the 4 sketches made, we settled on one mainly based on the one that had the most apathetic look, combining it with the clothes that would fit her personality and time period (1960) the best.

Figure 6 - Final sketch for teen Margarida

Character Poses

After settling on a design for Laura and Margarida, we observed the type of poses they would be seen in in the Polaroid photos and adapted them to their chosen design.

Figure 7 - Laura's and Margarida's poses in-game

We end here this development log, having seen the stages we went through to design these two characters in their respective time and ages! We've been having such a great time exploring these characters and their story and we can't wait to share all the other things we do with this project next week!

Thank you for checking out this seventh article of ours!

See you next week!