The House of Tesla News

Good morning people!

The most perceptive of you might have noticed that yesterday day was the day when we should have had another devlog. Sadly, sometimes things don’t go as we want them to for all the wrong reasons and devlog will be available at the end of the month (you can look forward to our concept art leader showing you another part of the game dev process through her eyes).
Luckily, sometimes things do not go as planned for all the right reasons and this is exactly the case because today we have another announcement to make! While part of our team works hard to bring you The House of Tesla, the rest went to a secret underground bunker to work secretly on an amazing new project (ok, ok, you got me. It’s not so secret anymore and not really underground, it’s just our offices).
Without further ado let me introduce you to:



Yes, we are making a virtual reality game. Yes, it’s gonna be amazing. Yes, all the puzzles and environments were completely redone to use the potential of VR. Yes, you can Wishlist it right now and play it in several months!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2948310

Hello everyone!
My name is Honza, and I work as the art director for our game. In this brief write-up, I'd like to offer you a glimpse into our process of creating the visuals for The House of Tesla.

Among our initial and most important tasks was crafting a cohesive, unified vision for how our world is going to look. Coming from The House of Da Vinci, we knew we wanted to create an environment just as rich and compelling as the one presented in our previous projects. Luckily, our colleagues from the story department provided us with the perfect backdrop for a visually engaging experience: a narrative that takes place in a time of great technological, industrial, and societal change. These grand shifts also prompted the rise of unique artistic movements, be it in fine arts, architecture, or fashion, so there was no shortage of places for us to look for inspiration.



For our team of artists, the journey begins with a script and an overview of all the puzzles, mysterious places, and strange devices the player is going to encounter. Sometimes, we feel like the players themselves, scrambling our minds while trying to understand the wicked inventions our coworkers came up with. Because we are always striving for an authentic period look, we start by researching the actual places our characters inhabited, the technology they used (or invented), as well as looking at works by great artists of the era; in our case, for example, Alphonse Mucha, Louis Majorelle, or the brilliant architect Daniel Burnham. From then on, our amazing concept artists work closely with the gameplay department to flesh out the first rough sketches, ensuring that every creative decision we make supports the experience they designed.



When we are happy with those, we can move on to adding more details, while aiming to keep the look of everything consistent throughout the whole experience. We're also always focusing on visual storytelling and finding interesting ways to help make the player feel like they’re visiting a rich, lived-in world. I can’t tell you how many times I came to the story folks with a request like 'We have a stack of books in a dimly lit corner, do you have any pointers as to what person X might have been reading?' only to come back with book recommendations that would fill a library even Mark Twain would not be ashamed of. Once we're satisfied with the overall look, layout, and mood, we move into 3D prototyping.



After translating the ideas of our concept artists into three dimensions, we can begin to determine the final composition of scenes, the player's movement, and the finer technical details of how Tesla's wondrous machines operate. This is where our talented 3D modelers join in on the fun, informing us that this moving thing actually can’t be where it is because it obstructs another moving thing, thereby preventing the third moving thing from moving at all. Fortunately, they almost certainly devise a solution even before presenting us with the problem. However, all of this is just the beginning of our work; the next step is to create the final assets with which the player will interact in the game. Perhaps we can delve deeper into those at another time.

Thank you for reading our little article. I hope it provided at least a small window into the initial stages of our process. Because we're still more comfortable with creating pictures than writing words, as a token of gratitude, here’s a little sneak peek of one of the other characters players will encounter in our game. Can you guess who it will be?

Honza
Art Director
Blue Brain Games

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