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[Thinking About Design- A Deeper view on the design of Clown's Secret]

Thinking About Design- A Deeper view on the design of Clown's Secret

Design a game is something hard- one thing is play the game on the head, another one is play the real game. It takes a clear and open head to see problems in design and think about how to solve them. The design of Clown's Secret now is completely different than it was when we started working on it- we had to study, think and work truly hard in order to change it.
We loved the result!
We wanted to share this experience with you- "Thinking about design" tells about this process.
Hope you like it.
http://exprstudios.tumblr.com



Luciano Rateke

[A Tale of Two Brother : The Creation of Hal and Halbert]

A Tale of Two Brother : The Creation of Hal and Halbert



To have two controllable characters we consider to be an evolution in the notion of design of Clown's Secret. The end result was Hal and Halbert- two characters with distinctive exaggerated personalities, something that opened up tons of possibilities of new parts in the script and made the game much more fun to play.
Hal and halbert are key parts in Clown's Secret - the whole script was written around them.
We love them so much that we decided to talk about their creation, from the very first concept to how they were given names:

http://exprstudios.tumblr.com

Hope you like it!
Luciano Rateke.

Backed it in the first day!
And I'm about to back higher.

OBS: Post moved from other forum folder.



Clown's Secret is a 2D adventure game based on classic movies of the silent age â€" giving a modern touch to some of the most creative, profound and funny scenes ever created- daring to reimagine them and making them playable.
The player controls Hal & Halbert, two detectives that are investigating the reasons of the vanishment of wealthy women in the city of Tomainia. Hal is the younger one, impulsive and naive, his driven by emotions; Halbert is the older one, clever and calm, his arrogant and rather think than talk. As the player progress in the game he will find a lot of influences from old movies, most notably Mr. Charles Chaplin's work, what makes the ever changing Tomainia a city with huge diversity and with a lot of creative and humorous scenes. Through the progress of the game the player will cross a lake riding on a car, use parts of a lamp as a megaphone, fight a world champion boxer, meet a trainer of fleas, visit a house on a cliff almost falling, dress as a woman to flirt with pirates, see a man with a thin moustache play with a ball resembling the world globe, use the smallest parachute of the world and even dance a very famous dance between adventure games lovers; that and many other scenes that were written on the 100th page script.



As Clown's Secret has two characters as main characters- the scenes and puzzles could be written and divided around their distinctive personalities- expanding the possibilities of new and distinctive parts on the game and making of Clown's Secret a game that is always fresh, always funny and never boring. To be able to make an adventure game with two playable character be played in a dynamic way, we developed a gameplay system that is focused on the interaction with objects instead on the characters. When the player can interact with something in the game, an icon showing the face of the character, Hal or Halbert, and the action that is done on that object or person is shown over it- a system that makes something usually complex as an adventure game much more fast to be played and letting the players focus on what really matters: the story, the funny moments and the puzzles.
As the game is based on silent films it is all Black and White and has no text on it- in fact the dialogues are animations. Because of a design point of view we decided to put Gibberish on the characters, something that united with the animations of the dialogues bring some really laughable moments. And the music had to remember the beginning of the last century and the music of those movies, creating as a result a jazz married with silent film music - it's gorgeous!



  Clown's Secret is inspired by classic movies, written for a new generation that didn't raised having contact with those films and may or may not know about them; and influence by old and new adventure games- like Monkey Island, Broken Sword and Machinarium. It's currently in full production for Windows, Mac, Linux, IOS and Android;
and has a release schedule for Q4- 2014.

http://i.imgur.com/9eIEEFR.png

Expression Studios: We are an independent game developer studio determined to bring meaning to digital entertainment. More about us and the project can be found on our website: www.expression-studios.com, or our development blog: http://exprstudios.tumblr.com. The development blog is being update in a regular base and on it we are showing everything, from the very first idea to all the difficult and passion we are having in the process of making it.

Contact e-mail: info@expression-studios.com
Twitter Handle: @ExprStudios

Well- It's not being done with AGS.
Being an adventure game and knowing that people here love it- I decided to post.
Did I made it wrong?

Clown's Secret is a 2D adventure game based on classic movies of the silent age â€" giving a modern touch to some of the most creative, profound and funny scenes ever created- daring to reimagine them and making them playable.
The player controls Hal & Halbert, two detectives that are investigating the reasons of the vanishment of wealthy women in the city of Tomainia. Hal is the younger one, impulsive and naive, his driven by emotions; Halbert is the older one, clever and calm, his arrogant and rather think than talk. As the player progress in the game he will find a lot of influences from old movies, most notably Mr. Charles Chaplin's work, what makes the ever changing Tomainia a city with huge diversity and with a lot of creative and humorous scenes. Through the progress of the game the player will cross a lake riding on a car, use parts of a lamp as a megaphone, fight a world champion boxer, meet a trainer of fleas, visit a house on a cliff almost falling, dress as a woman to flirt with pirates, see a man with a thin moustache play with a ball resembling the world globe, use the smallest parachute of the world and even dance a very famous dance between adventure games lovers; that and many other scenes that were written on the 100th page script.



As Clown's Secret has two characters as main characters- the scenes and puzzles could be written and divided around their distinctive personalities- expanding the possibilities of new and distinctive parts on the game and making of Clown's Secret a game that is always fresh, always funny and never boring. To be able to make an adventure game with two playable character be played in a dynamic way, we developed a gameplay system that is focused on the interaction with objects instead on the characters. When the player can interact with something in the game, an icon showing the face of the character, Hal or Halbert, and the action that is done on that object or person is shown over it- a system that makes something usually complex as an adventure game much more fast to be played and letting the players focus on what really matters: the story, the funny moments and the puzzles.
As the game is based on silent films it is all Black and White and has no text on it- in fact the dialogues are animations. Because of a design point of view we decided to put Gibberish on the characters, something that united with the animations of the dialogues bring some really laughable moments. And the music had to remember the beginning of the last century and the music of those movies, creating as a result a jazz married with silent film music - it's gorgeous!



  Clown's Secret is inspired by classic movies, written for a new generation that didn't raised having contact with those films and may or may not know about them; and influence by old and new adventure games- like Monkey Island, Broken Sword and Machinarium. It's currently in full production for Windows, Mac, Linux, IOS and Android;
and has a release schedule for Q4- 2014.



Expression Studios: We are an independent game developer studio determined to bring meaning to digital entertainment. More about us and the project can be found on our website: www.expression-studios.com, or our development blog: http://exprstudios.tumblr.com. The development blog is being update in a regular base and on it we are showing everything, from the very first idea to all the difficult and passion we are having in the process of making it.

Contact e-mail: info@expression-studios.com
Twitter Handle : @ExprStudios