Hello everyone!
This month, we received an award, welcomed new housemates, and made Seers Isle available in a bookstore.


That's the cycle of life. The bad news is that our friends from Shinypix moved out of the 21 rue des Retaillons (Nova-box's batcave, where the magic happens) to rise up to new challenges and opportunities. We wish Fabrice, Ludo, Julien and Olivier all the best, happiness and success in their future endeavors. We will miss having them with us.

The good news is, our friends Adrien and Maxime from Studio Black Flag quickly filled in the vacant desks, moving in with us at the start of the month.

You may have heard about them and their incredible upcoming game, Orphan Age, in past issues of this column. If you haven't, I strongly suggest you take a look at it. In fact, we love their game so much we wrote a small interactive novella named Orphan Age: Diaries to go along with it. I can safely say that it's not the last you're hearing about them. Stay tuned.

Here's a link to their website if you want to learn more: http://studioblackflag.com


Black Flag is moving in. From left to right: Adrien, Maxime, and a tired writer.


Last weekend, the team attended the "Indie Game Factory", a professional meetup of the French game industry, followed by the Animasia convention where we showed our games to visitors.

Seers Isle's music composers, Camille and Julien, gave a speech about music and video games while I (Geoffroy) participated in a panel about narrative design and writing for video games, sharing the stage with Sybil Collas and FibreTigre.

We're also very proud to announce that we received the "Best Game of 2018" award during the convention. Our friends from Howly Games got the "Best Art Direction" award for their upcoming platformer Unspoken Chronicles: Nora (they're doing a kickstarter campaign right now, go check it out) and Tako Studio received the "heart crush of the jury" award for their puzzle game Minimal Move.

Here's a couple of snapshots from the weekend.


(pictures #1, #2, and #3 courtesy of Yohann Minière, Lenno, and David Elahee)


We're thrilled to announce that you can buy Seers Isle Steam keys in a real brick and mortar shop. Our friends from Krazy Kat, a comic book store located 10 rue de la Merci in Bordeaux have a limited run of keys nestled in a nice and exclusive leaflet.

If you're in the Bordeaux area, we strongly suggest you go pay them a visit. Matthieu and his team are of great counsel, very friendly, and they even have a bar where you can drink a beer or a coffee in the shop.



Here's some directions to get there:

Krazy Kat
10 rue de la Merci
33 000 Bordeaux.
Website — Facebook page

And if you're not in Bordeaux, you can still get the game here, on Steam :

https://store.steampowered.com/app/738650/Seers_Isle/

Well, this month has been quite hectic with post-launch frenzy following the release of Seers Isle. However, we found some time to start the pre-production of our next project. Everything is still under the seal of secrecy, of course, but since we love you best, here's a concept art picture, exclusive to you, newsletter subscribers.

And if you want to hear from us more often, you can also follow us on social networks:

http://twitter.com/novabox
http://facebook.com/novabox.studio

Best,

Geoffroy,
on behalf on the team.

Hello everyone!
In case you missed it, we released Seers Isle this month.

And of course, you can get it on Steam.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/738650/Seers_Isle/

We also have two bundles available:
Seers Isle + Soundtrack with 20% off
Seers Isle + Soundtrack + Along the Edge with 20% off

If you already have Along the Edge in your Steam library, you can "complete your collection" using the second bundle and have 20% off on Seers Isle without having to buy Along the Edge again (or the other way around). That way, we can reward your fidelity.

And to top things off, Along the Edge is also on sale with 30% off until Monday, October 1st!



We've been overwhelmed by great feedback from the players and the press. Here's a selection of quotes from the reviews we received (follow the links to read them in full).

In English:
— “Great art direction and an absolutely lovely score sets Seers Isle miles apart from the competition”, Visual Novel ‘Seers Isle’ Will Have You Unraveling Striking Mysteries, Thomas Faust, Indie Games Plus,

— “Seer Isle once again proves that Nova-box know how to make a visual novel with choices that matter. It’s rich, artistic, emotional and mysterious, and it draws you in quickly and holds your attention rapt. The twists are surprising, the characters are relatable and the environments are gorgeous. Seers Isle is about as perfect as visual novels can get if you ask me.”, Seers Isle Review, Jacob Wood, Indie Hangover.

In French:
— “Seers Isle est une histoire captivante et agréable à suivre grâce à ses personnages, ses illustrations et sa musique appuyant sur l’ambiance.”, Indie Review – Seers Isle, une dangereuse initiation chamanique, Seldell, IndieMag,

— “Seers Isle est bien plus captivant que j’aurais pu l’imaginer. Il réussit à rendre vivant et interactif un genre qui ne l’est pas. Il faut saluer sa bande-son de grande classe, et sa direction artistique magnifique.”, Seers Isle – Le cycle des chamans disparus, Veltar, The Pixel Post,

— “Si on aime ce genre de productions, cela vaut le coup de donner un peu pour passer quelques bonnes heures de lecture un peu interactive”, Test de Seers Isle, Zekkangel, Jeux OnLine.

Put it in your diaries! If you want to come say "hello" to us or try your hand at our games, we'll be at the Animasia convention in Bordeaux. It happens on the weekend of the 13th & 14th of October.

If you are a video-game professional, there's a special day for us on Friday, October 12th with interesting keynotes by our fellow game devs, under the moniker "Indie Game Factory".

There will be two interventions from Seers Isle's team members:

• Camille and Julien from Illustrason will talk about music and video games,
• I (Geoffroy) will share my thoughts in a panel with Sybil Collas and Fibre Tigre about narrative design.

Places are limited, so you should move fast if you want to come and watch our talks!

You'll get info and directions for the Animasia convention over there: http://animasia.org (in French).
For the pro keynotes, take a look over here (in French also, I'm afraid).

As another incentive for you to come see us, we're working on a special collector's print to sell Steam keys in conventions, and... other places (we'll tell you more about that soon).

Here's a glimpse of our prototype:



You may have already seen the portraits of Seers Isle's characters Nico made with our friend and colleague Ludovic Rivalland. If you love them enough to decorate your walls with them, go no further. We added them to our fine art collection on Society6.



Follow this link to see them all:
Seers Isle Portraits Prints

Note that we also have a selection of illustrations from our games available.
And if you are interested in Ludovic's work, we strongly suggest you have a look at his ArtStation profile:
https://www.artstation.com/ludopanda

Well, as you may imagine, we've been pretty busy with the launch. However, we didn't forget to celebrate! Here's a couple of snapshots from the release party we had last Friday at Nova-box's headquarters.



And if you want to hear from us more often, you can also follow us on social networks:

http://twitter.com/novabox
http://facebook.com/seersisle
http://instagram.com/seersisle

Best,

Geoffroy,
on behalf on the team.

 

Hello everyone!
Here's the first post launch patch note.

We sent several updates over the course of the week to address issues some of you were experiencing.

Here's the list of the fixes:
- Fixing a bug where vertical lines appeared during the game on case sensitive file systems (such as Linux Fedora),
- Fixing a bug where the transition between two images might flicker on slower hard-drives or when the hard-drive was under stress (such as when streaming and video-recording the game),
- Adjusting the variables so that some endings are easier to obtain,
- Adding a text variant in Chapter III that was missing (when Freya takes the doll, the game assumed that Rowan woke her up the night before),
- Fixing a wrongly attributed text in Chapter VI.

Help young shamans overcome the trials of their initiatory journey in narrative game Seers Isle.

Were are happy to release our new narrative game Seers Isle for Windows, Mac and Linux!

Throughout your adventures in the game Seers Isle, your choices impact the fate of a group of characters.



Dreams, fantasy, magic and shamanism are central to every decision: your choices will influence the various story paths and endings, depending on your favorites characters, for a high replayability of the game. More than 600 illustrations have been drawn for the game, in a splendid graphic style inspired by the European Franco-Belge comics.

A group of shaman apprentices land on the shores of a sacred island to be initiated to magic. As they progress through the wilderness, looking for the “Seers”, their spirit-guides, they realize they’re not alone. Who is this strange horned woman they are seeing in their dreams?

A story full of the magical spirit of Northern European myth.



“The island… It was my prison.
For ages, I roamed the land, helpless,
looking for a way out...
And then, they arrived.”

Seers Isle is avalaible now on Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/738650/Seers_Isle/

You can also get the game + the soundtrack at a special price (26% off):

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/8183/Game__Soundtrack/

Wonder how will Seers Isle sound like?

We just opened 7 new tracks for preview on Bandcamp!

You can stream them here:
https://nova-box.bandcamp.com

The soundtrack album, composed and produced by our friends Julien & Camille from Illustrason, will be released along with the game on September 18th.

Here's the link to the DLC page, feel free to add it to your wishlist to be notified when it goes live:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/924170/Seers_Isle__Original_Soundtrack/

We just shared a gameplay video with the first few minutes of the game.

If you want to see Seers Isle in action, please, head this way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGiEe0UiZ_s

Hello everyone!
So, it's official, we're in the final stretch.

 
Let's start by the big news, shall we?

Three weeks from now, on Tuesday, September 18th 2018, we'll be releasing Seers Isle.

The game will be available for PC, Mac & Linux for 12.99€ / $12.99.

Nova-box will publish the game on Steam and itch.io, and, thanks to our partner Plug In Digital, it will also be distributed on a myriad of other stores (such as Amazon, Gameplanet, etc.).

We made a trailer video to celebrate and spread the word (feel free to share it to your heart's content):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jk_vvZDXNSg
 
Once again, Julien and Camille have gone above and beyond all expectations and delivered an excellent album, with a whopping almost one hour and forty minutes run time of music from the game.

However, I admit I may not be the most reliable witness, but fortunately, you don't have to take my word for it. You can already stream a couple of tracks on Bandcamp.

The album will also be available at release on Steam, bundled with the game, as well as on the streaming platform of your choice (Deezer, Spotify, Apple Music, etc.).

https://store.steampowered.com/app/924170/Seers_Isle__Original_Soundtrack/
 
Well, as you can imagine, we've been full time on Seers Isle, polishing and ironing out all the bugs and typos we could find, while Nico and Ambre have been putting the last coat of paint on the hundreds of images that are in the game.

We ran two closed beta during August, and we would like to take this opportunity, the team and I, to warmly thank our testers for their time, their patience and their dedication.


Before we see you on release day, here's the last batch of Seers Isle in-production pictures:




 

Thank you again for your support, and see you next month!

If you want to subscribe to our mailing list, you can register on Seers Isle website:

http://www.seersisle.com/contact/

You'll get extra-fresh updates about our projects and our whereabouts once a month, nestled in the coziness of your own inbox (and you can unsubscribe anytime).
And if you want to hear from us more often, you can also follow us on social networks:

http://twitter.com/novabox
http://facebook.com/seersisle
http://instagram.com/seersisle

Best,

Geoffroy,

Hello everyone!

It's summer but we're still working hard to meet our "summer 2018" release date.

The good news is, we should make it, just in time for the autumn equinox.

We're finally entering the "polishing" phase of development. The game has been fully playable for a while now, from start to finish, including all the endings (there will be eight of them, we can now say for sure), and each new internal beta version brings its share of improvements on all fronts.

Under the hood, Raph has been doing some debugging and optimization. We finally have a working save feature again! Camille and Julien have mixed and integrated all the music and sound effects and we're pretty excited about how it sounds (if you asked me, I would tell you that it sounds fantastic, but I'm probably biased).

There's still a lot of work to do on the art side, but we're getting there. Esther, who did an internship on the game this winter, has come back this month (remember the banquet scene from Freya's backstory?).

Also, Nico decided we will bring back chapter headings (like we had in Along the Edge). Here's a screenshot of the heading for the first chapter:



These chapter headings serve a triple purpose.

First, it allows us to have highly conceptual images in the game that wouldn't fit into the flow of the narrative, like the panoramic view of the island depicted here above. There will be some weird stuff too, such as Rowan holding a human-sized hourglass with another Rowan, or our main cast having their faces hidden behind wooden masks.

This allows me to jump to the second point: it's great marketing material. Brace yourselves, because it's safe to say that these images will pop up on our social accounts between now and release day.

And thirdly, it allows us to show to you how far you are into the story. When you're reading a book, it's easy to grasp if you're getting dangerously near to the epilogue by checking how close to the back cover your bookmark is (it always happens too fast, especially with good books).

Pages don't make a lot of sense in an interactive graphic novel, so we're showing the total number of chapters on the image (and the current one is lit up).

We also noticed that splicing the story into roughly equal sub-parts helped YouTubers and Twitchers have natural endpoints to split their videos, or their broadcasts, into episodes.

 
Fun fact: there are about 7500 lines of text and dialogue in Seers Isle. Each of these lines translates into a "bubble" onscreen (to borrow from comic books lingo), shown one after another during your playthrough.

And, well, each and every one of these bubbles has been carefully placed on the screen by yours truly, over the course of this month (I must tell you, I'm not disappointed to be done with it).

I had to take into account 16/10 and 16/9 aspect ratios for monitors, and two sizes of text (we have a "large text" feature in the options for visually impaired people).



"Why not automate that?" you may ask. Well, placing the text on screen is a great storytelling tool. Letterers in comic books have known that for a while, but we've been rediscovering and adapting this tool to our medium.

It enables us to make the readers to look at different parts of the image, to make them slow down (in order to track the next bubble), or read faster (if they want to), and even to help emphasize some emotions.

To give you an example, having a bubble cramped in the bottom right of the screen tells a different story than a description comfortably sprawled along the full width of the screen, to give you an example.

If you're wondering how I work, here's a screenshot of my computer screen on a regular day:



In yellow, in the text editor, there's the "localizable" file with all the texts in the game (we have one for each language). Below, in hues of red and grey, there's the script file I'm currently working on.



To properly round off this month's newsletter (it's becoming kind of a tradition, isn't it?), here's a couple of new images from Seers Isle:




 
Thank you again for your support, and see you next month!

If you want to subscribe to our mailing list, you can register on Seers Isle website:

http://www.seersisle.com/contact/

You'll get extra-fresh updates about our projects and our whereabouts once a month, nestled in the coziness of your own inbox (and you can unsubscribe anytime).
And if you want to hear from us more often, you can also follow us on social networks:

http://twitter.com/novabox
http://facebook.com/seersisle
http://instagram.com/seersisle

Best,

Geoffroy,
on behalf on the team.

Hello everyone!
This month, we're talking about Orphan Age and Orphan Age: Diaries, sales and discounts, and, of course, we'll share our progress on Seers Isle!



As you may have heard, our good friends and fellow game developers Adrien and Maxime from Studio Black Flag are doing a Kickstarter campaign to support their upcoming game Orphan Age.

Orphan Age is akin to The Sims series but transposed into a cyberpunk civil war where the children have been left behind to fend for themselves in a derelict part of a claustrophobic megalopolis. We think this game is really promising and we strongly suggest you take a look at it and, maybe, consider participating in the campaign.

In fact, we love the game so much that we made a companion storybook called Orphan Age: Diaries. It's a short interactive graphic novel that follows a group of orphans and tells you a bit more about the universe. Orphan Age: Diaries is available now for a limited time as one of the rewards for the Orphan Age Kickstarter.

Here's a couple of images from Orphan Age Diaries:



Before moving forward, I would like to give the pen over to Nico who has some personal things to say about Orphan Age, and why he decided to give some of his time and talent to this particular project:

I wish I could explain how I feel about Orphan Age.

At this time, people are suffering in wars, fleeing their very homes to survive. If they are lucky, they end up stuck in a boat or in a camp where they live in tents. While these tragedies happen, children are born and raised. What will their hopes and aspirations be? Between revenge, fear, and loss, can we guess what their world will be?

Orphan Age brings these questions to our western cities. It brings these questions to me. My kids are at the age of drawing. They draw animals and things... like snails, grass, sea, clouds, birds (lots of birds actually), bees and fish... Things that I can’t guarantee will still be around when they will be grown-ups. Mostly, they draw their home, the world as they see it. But I know there is a chance that their home will become an awful mess very soon. A mess with no birds, no bees, no Mom and Dad. The roof and walls replaced at best with a paper-thin tent cloth. This terrifying thought strikes me now and then when they bring me one of their colorful, innocent drawings.

At the same time, I can see how children are able to adapt. It’s fascinating. This is a very simple and profound joy in my everyday life. I watch them capture the world. I can almost feel it getting into their head, becoming thoughts, mental pictures. They take some time to acknowledge a situation and then, voilà: the whole thing is accepted and it’s now making sense! It’s like real mind-blowing magic every time.

Yep, children can be tough, maybe tougher than adults when it comes to adapting to a new situation, and at the same time, they are obviously very, very fragile. It’s a delicate, perilous edge. Orphan Age is a brave enough game to try a walk on this edge.

As I'm writing these lines, Orphan Age is still a couple of thousand dollars short of reaching their funding goal. There are a few days left for you to pledge, so please follow this link for more information:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/studioblackflag/orphan-age/

 
Steam Summer Sales started last Thursday. It's this time of the year when PC players around the world lose their minds and their wallets, so, if you haven't played it yet, please note that Along the Edge is 30% off until July 5th on Steam.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/504390/Along_the_Edge/

Speaking of that, now seems like as good a time as any to talk a bit about our discount policy. As you may have noticed, we're quite conservative when it comes to discounting our games. Along the Edge was released about two years ago (June 14th on itch.io — happy birthday, Daphné!), but we never went lower than 40% off. We plan to keep it that way.

We know that we've entered an era where people only buy stuff when there's an attractive green tag on the corner saying -xx%! and it tends to create huge biases in the perceived value of things. We strongly believe that pricing reasonably and discounting reasonably is the right way to do it. Making a video-game is a labor of love and sweat (and gallons upon gallons of the darkest brew of coffee, at least for me), and we fiercely stand up for the intrinsic value of the work we're doing.

So, we're planning to stick to this policy for the foreseeable future. Seers Isle will be released at the same price tag as Along the Edge and will receive moderate discounts during sales periods.

Of course, we're always open to discussion!
 
It's been a busy month for everyone. Camille and Julien have finished recording the musicians this Sunday (I'm quite eager to listen to the result, as they seemed really enthusiastic about it already). Nico and Ambre have done a fantastic work on chapters 3 to 5, which are almost complete illustrations-wise. However, there's still a lot of work to do since we're trying to have a first version of all the images in the game by the end of July.



Yep, that's a selfie of the art team.



Nico managed to take a decent snapshot of me, so there you go: here's a rare picture of Geoffroy working.
 

As for me, at long last, I finished the first draft of the text all the way down to the eight main endings. So, for the next couple of months, I'm going to focus on polishing the game, making cuts and expanding on some of the scenes, placing text bubbles and fine-tuning dialogue, while making sure that everything remains bug-free under the hood. Still a long way to go, but it's very exciting to see things fall into place.

Here are some images Ambre has done for us. Needless to say, we're very pleased with her work:



You can follow Ambre on Instagram or Artstation (and we strongly suggest that you do).

 
If you want to subscribe to our mailing list, you can register on Seers Isle website:

http://www.seersisle.com/contact/

You'll get extra-fresh updates about our projects and our whereabouts once a month, nestled in the coziness of your own inbox (and you can unsubscribe anytime).

And if you want to hear from us more often, you can also follow us on social networks:

http://twitter.com/novabox
http://facebook.com/seersisle
http://instagram.com/seersisle

Best,

Geoffroy,
on behalf on the team.

Hello everyone!
This month, we're talking about the GDPR, the events we attended, and, of course, the current state of the dev of Seers Isle!


As you may certainly know from the gazillion emails you have probably received on this topic, a law has been passed in Europe, applicable since May, 25th, about privacy and internet data (commonly referred as "GDPR", a.k.a. "GRPD" for us French people).

Be aware that we don't collect any personal data from playing our games here at Nova-box. In other words, if you ever tampered with the black arts, or if you did some pretty questionable stuff with either Stan or Frank during your play-through of Along the Edge, we have no way of knowing (and we wouldn't judge if we knew).


This month was quite rich with public events, starting off with our presence at the literary festival "Des Livres et Moi" at the Domaine de Malagar, which was the home of the French writer François Mauriac and has been re-purposed as a public space for culture. It was the first (and probably only) time we had the chance to play-test our games in an authentic 19th-century stable.

There was also an exhibition of pictures from Along the Edge that we selected to compliment the atmosphere and the history of the place. The exhibition is still on display for a couple of months, so if by any chance you are around Langon, feel free to make a stop and check it out!

Here are some pictures from the event and from the talk we did there about our games, animated by our marketing expert extraordinaire, Yannick "Tavrox" Elahee, who lent us a helping hand, along with our musicians Camille and Julien, during the weekend.



Last weekend, we were on Bordeaux Games booth at the Bordeaux Geek Festival. We met and greeted regular patrons who we have the pleasure of seeing each and every year at this festival, as well as several new faces. Nico was also handed his first ever "fanart" from Calyss and Buddakhin (big shout out to both of you!)

Here's a couple of pics from the weekend:



To finish, last week, I (Geoffroy) made a talk at Cap Science about the narrative approach in our games. It was organized by "Le CATS" and Bordeaux Games for the third edition of the "StoryCode" seminar. I shared the stage with Sylvain from Big Bad Wolf ("The Council"), and Curtis, who's working on "Tau Station". It was very interesting to confront our vision with that of other fellow devs. If any of you attended the event, I hope you had as much of a good time as I did!




As always, let me conclude with a quick paragraph about what we've been doing this month. Seers Isle is still a couple of months away, and we're hard at work trying to chew down all the work that needs to get done to complete the game.

Nico has started doing some polish on the visuals on chapters 4 to 6, while I'm scripting everything, so we can get a feel of the flow of the story in its myriad of variants. Raph has spent some of his "spare time" (read: the time he has left when he's not working for our regular business clients) optimizing the sound engine and reworking the save feature. Camille and Julien have composed and integrated demos of all the themes of the characters in the game engine. They're hard at work writing everything down on music sheets and preparing for the final recordings (seems like I'm laying down the bouzouki tracks on June, 16th).

So, we'll be spending all of June with our heads down in order to churn out a hopefully decent beta version of the game for early July.

Last but not least, we're very glad to welcome Rachel Capie in the team. She's been working on the English localization of the game, and so far she's doing quite a stellar job!

Meanwhile, don’t forget to wishlist us on Steam. You'll be notified as soon as the game is released.

And if you want to hear from us more often, you can also follow us on social networks:

http://twitter.com/novabox
http://facebook.com/seersisle
http://instagram.com/seersisle

Best,

Geoffroy,
on behalf on the team.