Devlog 01 — Painting Neon Lullaby's first district
How we built a single rainy alley for our debut title, and what it taught us about pacing.
Neon Lullaby's first district, Sango-ku, took six months. That sounds absurd until you realise it is the lens we will use to build the rest of the city.
Every storefront is composed of three layers — a photographed plate, an inked overlay, and a thin sheet of city-noise that drifts on its own clock. When the player slows down, the city does too. When they run, the layers fall out of sync.
We went into this project assuming combat would be the loudest thing on screen. We were wrong. The loudest thing is the rain. Once we understood that, the rest of the design started solving itself.
Our next post will be about our composer's approach to writing music for a city that is, technically, also a memory.