The origins of Inbetween Land

When someone hears about making a game, he would imagine few people, sitting in some room armed with notebooks, magnetic boards and gallons of coffee. They are thinking, drawing something, discussing, without eating or sleeping. However, sometimes, the spark that ignites the fire of development, born by one person only, whose work was never about development of ideas. The concept of Inbetween Land (which originally had another title) belongs to our artist, Nadia.

Island First Concept

Probably, when you work in game industry for a while and see huge amount of ideas and approaches to game making, your brain starts to give you scenarios of your own game. That what happened to Nadia. She came with her idea to management and they have approved the idea to become a game. As always, initiator must do the initiative, so it was decided to give Nadia the opportunity to lead the game design of this project, periodically showing her progress to management.

Work has started: locations appeared one after another, the script reminded fiction thriller, with rapid story flow.

The alien civilization of Collectors uses their asteroid as a spaceship. While visiting new worlds, this flying island acquires new things and relics. That’s why the design has medieval statues mixed with fantastic reptiles, robots and portals. Sometime later aliens had a riot on their ship, accompanied by change of the leaders. There was also another story option: attack of space pirates and escape from them. Finally, the flying island stops in our world, unable to leave it because of engines failure and death of most of the inhabitants. At this moment, humans come to the game (and island). Someone wanted to help, another one – to rob.

The Flying Island Art

Everything was looking great: twisted story, not too much used setting, rich game’s world. The process of game creation has begun.

While game design was totally on author-artist, studio was running in its usual way, preparing for new releases, uploading updates etc. That’s why Nadia’s work was not examined in small details. When time has come to build the actual working game, it comes out that it is currently non-playable. Inexperienced game designer while thinking about visuals and storyline, forgot to consider how player will accept all these crazy ideas. She forgot how to bring this rich story in the way, that player will like and easily understand.

On the other hand, the workload of a manager made him miss all that stuff. Therefore, the huge amount of work could be just wasted. The task of bringing such dynamic storyline within the casual game seemed to be impossible. There were not too many options – whether to close the project and continue other studio tasks, or try to redefine it, to make it player-friendly, interesting to play. We chose the second option.

Island Lake

Brainstorms, schematics, diagrams, a lot of coffee and few weeks later Inbetween land was born. We had to cut many of locations from the game, or at least remade them. It is not uncommon in the world of art projects, so we were no exception. Of course, we felt sorry for the work done and had to cut now, but it was worth it. The game has received strong storyline, though not so twisted as original. We were trying to save most interesting parts – the entourage of alien travelling civilization, the fight between good and evil, along with tricky puzzles. Bright comics with voice-overs helped with storytelling.

The project was in production for a very long time, counting from the first Nadia’s drafts. With enormous team efforts, especially from project leaders, the active phase of redesigning and developing was fit in terms of regular project.

Now the game is available on almost every platform and many devices. It has its own fans and many of them are waiting for a sequel. For now, sequel is just in our heads, but we never give up hope to implement our plans.

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