whatnames

@whatnames

help help i'm trapped in the comput

i followed 4,939 people on twit and i have NOT learned my lesson
i make games, theatre, AND A LOT OF NOISE
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mousefountain
@mousefountain
mousefountain
@mousefountain

Dépanneur Nocturne

Art by Winnie Song

A while ago I made a game called Dépanneur Nocturne! It's a tiny little atmospheric slice-of-life thing set entirely in a convenience store at night.

I'm guessing most people who follow me know about this, but I realized that I never really introduced myself or wrote a bio or anything here.

Anyway it's pretty slight for a game. I'm very happy with how it was received! Not because it was very big, but because the rate of people getting it seems so high. I love seeing how people react to it and the comments they've left about their experience, it tells me that there really is a place for this kind of thing to exist, which is something I genuinely worry about often.

I kept thinking I'd write up a little retrospective or something about it but we're running out of time on here and I think it'd be nice to leave something about it behind so I'm just going to release my loose thoughts as they coalesce and hope that's good enough...

Maybe the first art I did for the game were these sketches of a shopkeeper

The original seed of the idea was to basically do a really tiny, cordoned off slice of a fantasy world and see how much I could flesh it out. I always love the experience of Getting to Town in an RPG and especially the kind of silly, adventure game like level of interactivity where you can examine every object and go up to NPCs and drill down conversation trees like "Please tell me about your settlement." I really wanted to just really focus in on what I find pleasurable about that kind of experience, and I think that comes across even if it's not obvious that was the origin!

Collaborating with my partner Eve on the French translation was crucial to the character of the game. It was her who suggested the idea of it being set specifically in a Montreal dépanneur. Originally it was a just going to be a magic item shop (at some point I also wanted it to be a magic item shop in a mostly empty mall) but we were talking about our frustration with how many games get set in a kind of...nonspecific North American setting, (regardless of where the developers are actually from) and it seemed natural to kind of adjust the setting to something more specific and as soon as we did a: the bilingual element became crucial and b: it generated a lot more specific ideas than I'd have had for things to put in it, otherwise.

All of the art in the game is grayscale this is what one of the poster atlases looks like naturally

I still don't think I entirely nailed this part though, the tone is a bit blurry to me. It's meant to be a bit magic realist, but it doesn't exactly feel like Montreal, and there's a lot of details I couldn't deliver on. It's in some kind of strange in-between space. Maybe I'm fine with that. I'm glad it didn't come out too much of a caricature!

Eve also had the idea of doing the diegetic language-switching, and once I realized that I could actually execute on it I was thrilled. This is consistently one of the features that people most note about the game, too.

Shrine art that didn't all get used

The salamander deities are a direct reference to the goddesses from Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor, used with permission since I was acquainted with Sundae Month. I tried to transform them pretty substantially while keeping the concepts intact, because I'm really fond of this thing that sometimes happens in art where people are riffing on each other's work, but it feels less like a chain of references and more like they might be drawing from the same other, invisible thing?

In any case, in-fiction I picture the salamanders having a broad, syncretic spirituality that's constantly changing to their circumstances and integrating new figures and ideas into their practices. Where they came across this particular set of goddesses and how they reinterpret them to fit their values is deliberately ambiguous.

I still love doing minor procedural generation stuff, but I'm always kind of scared of using it for critical features, so instead the game has a weirdly detailed L-System thing just for generating a bunch of dolls in the capsule toy machine that are different for every player. I don't know, over-designing that kind of thing just tickles me both as a creator and when I see it as a player.

Finally I want to thank Graeme and Nick for critically helping me ship the game! I don't think I'd have ever gotten over those final hurdles if it weren't for the support from KO_OP.

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in reply to @mousefountain's post:

SnepShark
@SnepShark

Oh neat! I had no idea you made Dépanneur Nocturne, despite both finding the game very inspirational and following you here for a while, haha.
I actually just replayed it very recently with a friend, and rediscovering the layers of basement/morse code/lantern/pit secrets with them was just as exciting as it was the first time.
Thanks for making it (and thanks for this little write-up as well)!

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jpotterfield
@jpotterfield

So cool to learn a bit about your concepts behind this project, Dépanneur has been a big inspiration.
The art and neo-noir atmosphere really stuck with me. It got me thinking about experiences at this scale and specific 'placeness'.
I revisit it at least once a year.

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steven-z
@steven-z

Love this game!! Sorry about the amount of questions below but I study the game every now and then and try to puzzle it out the visuals so I thought I'd just ask.

Would you mind explaining how you did the colors? The original art there being in grayscale makes it seem like you're mapping values somehow to colors in the shaders (unless you're doing it in another step before import). Is that what's going on? Are models textured somehow to separate colors and to get gradients, or do you use vertex colors and bespoke ways to get gradients?

In my own stuff I've yet to develop a method that's low on shaders but easy to iterate the palettes. (Like I've seen people use a 32x1 palette texture and unwrap every model to have uv islands on a certain pixel, but the texture is annoying to iterate and reorganizing it breaks every models color at once. Or one material per color is ridiculous and a lot of files to change. Vertex colors require going into blender etc). So I've had some thoughts but I'm wondering if maybe you had a system worked out.

It all just looks super cohesive!! The neutral to warm gradients and perfect contrasts. Feels iterated and considered which makes me curious about the technique.

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mousefountain
@mousefountain

Thanks! Yes, my motivation for doing the colours in shader is that I like having a kind of source of absolute truth somewhere, and then being able to iterate on colours easily at the final stage of the process.

So the models are all unwrapped with the swatch method black and white texture with various shades, later I learned a linear gradient is better, since you can do gradient areas and for solid colours you can just scale the UVs down to one pixel anyway. In fact, if you don't want to be dependent on a texture you can even just use the raw UV value in the shader to ramp from 0-1.

There's a few things I do with colour but nothing complicated. I have two values that the UV lerps between as controllable material parameters. I also have a vertical gradient in worldspace that's overlaid on that, with values to let me control the top and bottom colour and also position. Finally, there's another vertical world space gradient that fades in based on distance. This is so that I could have things change hue in the distance as well as getting the fog over them, although in practice it's visually really subtle.

The art is still mostly monochrome! I didn't use a ton of materials, simply because I grouped a lot of things together. The characters have one material, ALL of the environments have another, and the interactive props have one too. In the future, if I want to do more hue-colourful stuff I think I'll make a texture that's a bunch of vertical gradients in a row and just use that, plus a few end level colour tweaks.

Does that help?

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Codarobo
@Codarobo

I remember getting this in a bundle, and checking it out but not having a lot of attention for individual games in the bundle at the time. I’ll have to give it another look! I definitely remember the striking aesthetic though.

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