The House of Tesla News

Good everyone!

Today we are going to talk about game design, but as always you are free to just scroll to see the pretty stuff (and this time even some… eh… just stuff). It’s really hard to talk about this topic because a large part of the process is highly subjective, so take anything I tell you here with a grain of salt, or a few just to be sure.

After initial brainstorming and the creation of an outline of the core story, the main part of the game designer’s job begins. In our case, it means we already know how many chapters the game will have and what should happen in each of them.



The next phase is all about research. We scour the internet, related museums, relevant movies, biographies, and news articles (for some of us this also means studying hardcore scholarly articles and textbooks on physics). And then we start building the flow of the chapter piece by piece.

Each piece starts as an idea – either we want to make a specific type of puzzle or we want to use a specific object, invention, or concept. So let me use an example. For one specific story-related reason (which I am not gonna spoil – booo, I know) we wanted to have a model of Wardenclyffe Tower and for it to be an important object during the gameplay, so one small puzzle wasn’t enough for us. In the end, there are at least three separate puzzles and some interactions as part of this model.



With few ideas like these, it is quite easy to chain the events and interactions into a meaningful flow that will hopefully feel rewarding and point the player bit by bit toward the goal of our narrative.

After this, you might think we are done. Well, that is very much not so. We need to take all these ideas and we need to make them into a form that will be understandable not only to us (!) but to everyone who works on this stuff after us – so basically everyone in the whole company. During this part of the process, we generate so much text that it could fill several books – that said, you wouldn’t want to read them, nobody would.

On an unrelated note: do you know what happens when you experiment with gravity in Blender (3d software), when you don’t really work with Blender?

That’s it for today and next time you can look forward to learning a bit about our plans on the game visuals. Feel free to let us know if there is anything specific you like to know more about. Of course, there is stuff we have to keep a secret at least until release, but we will try our best to accommodate requests.

Viktor
Lead Designer of The House of Tesla
Blue Brain Games

Hey guys, gals and people uncomfortable with me trying to classify them into two rigorous categories! It’s time for the first monthly devlog about The House of Tesla. If you’re not interested in me reminiscing a bit and talking about what led us to the main design decisions behind the game, feel free just to scroll and look at the pretty images, it won’t be on the test.

When we first came up with the idea behind The House of Da Vinci games, we knew we wanted to do something both meaningful and accessible. We were okay with some fantastic elements but our game was to draw heavily from history and from historical figures we found interesting. Immediately we had two contenders to be the stars of our stories, Leonardo da Vinci and Nikola Tesla. At the time we chose da Vinci, but we never forgot about Tesla. When we finished the trilogy, we weren’t thinking about what to do next, we were already thinking about what would make Tesla special.



The obvious question is what did we come up with?

First, the gameplay. We wanted to have a larger focus on puzzles, maybe sacrificing a little bit of realism where needed – at least as long as we had the perfect puzzle in mind. A lot of Tesla’s inventions can get complex and hard to visualize, so we had to reinvent our take on including them in our gameplay. We even had Tesla “design” a new device, that lets us look into electrical wiring and check if the wires are currently “live”, to help us with that endeavor.

Second, the narrative. We were always fans of using gameplay and visuals as main narrative agents and that is something we wish to interlock even more. We want our storytelling to be always dynamic and as unintrusive as possible, aiming for shorter and more gameplay-oriented cutscenes. For those of you who want to know as much as possible about the lore behind Tesla and our take on his world, we will have letters, newspaper articles, and various historical documents to peruse – but we will strictly differentiate between things that help you on your journey through our game and pure lore that you can read to satiate your curiosity about things that are less in focus.

Third, the visuals. We feel that a strong visual identity was always a big part of The House of Da Vinci series and in The House of Tesla, we want to take it to the next level. We want to take the game as a whole and craft a distinct visual identity that will be only enhanced when we focus on different aspects of it in every chapter. We want people to look at our game and see the American 1900s, we want them to immediately recognize factories, laboratories, and showrooms. And we want to use all these qualities as part of the narrative design.

Finally, our focus. With these three strong points as our main focus for The House of Tesla, we felt the need to talk about our focus on platforms as well. PC is the only one that lets us do what we want without compromises, so that is what we decided to focus on. For the first time, we will release the PC version first and then work on Android, iOS, and console versions. This does not mean we have forgotten them but it makes sense to us to do the best product possible and then work with the limiting factors and specifics of other platforms.



So that is all for me. If you read all that I hope it gave you some insight into our plans with The House of Tesla, feel free to share your thoughts and comments both for the game and the dev log format we chose. In the coming months, you can look forward to some inside looks into our processes, more pretty images (yes, it’s fine if you are here just for them), and a few words from the other members of our team.

Viktor
Lead Designer of The House of Tesla
Blue Brain Games