Illustration by Michael DeForge
Tower of Noname: Lived in Water
Cunxi Gao + Zecheng Ye
Cunxi Gao + Zecheng Ye
Tower of Noname: Lived in Water - Trailer
+In one or two sentences, describe the main themes present in your game.
It's hard to list a single inspiration. Our creative process is more about putting elements we like into one elegant and condensed experience. We love atmospheric games that can tell and provoke strong emotions and feelings through visual and audio narrative..
In terms of visual language, we both love the aesthetics as well as the themes of retro anime, back when people still used celluloid to make very iconic visual effects. Soundwise, it's more of an exploration of using an electronic music workflow to make the game focus more on sound design rather than music design.
Short list of our references: Angel's Egg (1985), ICO, Abyssal Somewhere, Dark Souls, etc.
+Were there difficult moments when developing the game? What led to those difficult moments? What did you learn from it?
There were so many features we wanted to include in the game at first, but later we found out that some stylistic choices that we really liked wouldn't serve our gameplay effectively. So we had to cut them. Fortunately, which is also one of the best parts of making games, some of the features eventually came back in a much better way that was incorporated into our game.
We had moments when we felt like we wouldn't be able to finish the game since we ourselves were unsure how it was going to look until the very end, but we knew that iteration takes time, and we had to be patient and believe in ourselves.
+Talk about your teammates! What was everyone's role?
Although we are a very small team, we have a pretty specific division of work and a smooth workflow. Cunxi does all the artistic things to make the game look beautiful; Zecheng does more programming and sound design, and we have a pretty equal balance in terms of design decisions.
Our advisor is Patrick Trinh, who has given us very instructive feedback and helped us a lot, especially on exploring ways in a more experimental way to tell stories.
play this game on itch.io
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