Vokabulantis coverage

 

We’ve been fortunate to have had some significant coverage and mentions of Vokabulantis already, so here’s a small selection. 

 

• Engadget article
• GameRant article
• GameSpot Article
• Elijah Wood tweet
• Patton Oswalt tweet 

 

Here’s a mini doc where team members gets into what it’s like working on Vokabulantis:

 

 

 

 

“I didn’t take any formal education, but just build my own studio. So everything has always been possible to me in a sense. But this is really taking it to a new level. My field of art is literally evolving through this project. Never have stop motion been this dynamic and interactive. To be able to bring this to stop motion makes me so proud.” 

– Johan Oettinger – Stop Motion & Game Director

 

 

 

 

Karla getting stop motion animated

 

 

 

 

 

Vokabulantis is a love-driven co-op platformer adventure. The game is inspired by games like Inside, Unravel and Little Nightmares, yet it’s made by hand. 

You enter Vokabulantis just as Kurt and Karla are about to say, what they feel for one another.

Actually they’ve just found themselves stuck in that moment unable to get a word out, and then suddenly they are thrown into Vokabulantis.

In Vokabulantis the kids must embark on an epic quest to save the world of language. If they fail, they will be stuck in that moment forever.

They may never get to say, what they want to say to each other.

Karla falls after she has just pulled the lever, that completes the tower top level

The game can be played as a single player or as a local co-op. It is expected for all major platforms, but thus far we can guarantee you a Steam release, since it’s a bit early to promise the whole thing. 

Full story playthrough of 6-8 hours of gameplay and an additional 2-4 hours if you hunt for all the hidden quirks and achievements of Vokabulantis.

Join Kurt and Karla in their struggle to restore peace to Vokabulantis – and to express their feelings for each other after their words have been taken away. 

And please join us one of these places or all of them!

The game design of Vokabulantis is guided by a novel dogma we call Emotional Mechanics.

Everything in the game is designed to make you feel, what the characters feel. You are not being told what they feel, but you feel, what they feel, because of the game design. 

Under that dogma rhythm based levels with a pumping beat spark irresistible joy as the protagonists just survived a life threatening mission. 

Or your sudden ability to float kindles the feeling of relief having found each other again, when you thought all hope was lost.

So happy you could fly? We are prototyping levels, that make you feel like anything is possible. The level designs are really there for you, they want you to succeed. It’s gonna feel like bubbly joy!

Other places the world opens itself up as you journey through it effortlessly, and you feel so confident, that you start to believe everything turns out the way you want it.

You can also experience much darker emotions, where each character is trapped alone in illogical split screens mirroring the insanity of your inability to connect with someone.

Feeling alone? One of the Emotional Mechanics we are currently prototyping is a splitscreen mechanic, where you are isolated with each character, but you can try to manipulate the split screens to see, if you may find a way through the insanity. 

You also get to tap into the bond forming between the kids and their literal distance will start influencing the level.

Being aware of when you need closeness and when to give space are keys to any loving relationship. In Vokabulantis that becomes an actual game mechanic, where the actual distance between the players is part of the level design.

These emotional mechanics and many more are currently in development and we love to get to a place, where we can start showing them off to you for real! 

Within the emotional mechanic dogma, you’ll also experience plenty relatable and recognizable “classical” platforming throughout the game – Kurt raises the rope Karla hangs on to by activating a word power zone

Before we go deeper into the world of Vokabulantis Morten Søndergaard needs and introduktion. He is first and foremost an acclaimed poet and conceptual artist in his own right, but luckily he is also the story world writer and the poetic pillar of Vokabulantis. It’s in his mind the deep dive into the language happens. It’s from his writing we excavate the colorful creatures, story elements and environments of Vokabulantis. 

3D Rendered promo still made from handcrafted assets composed and lit in the game engine

“I’ve been exploring these poetic and complex language-philosophical questions for decades now. It’s really dear to me and making it an emotionally riveting love story is something I didn’t even know I dreamed of. And it’s interactive – playable – magic on top!”

– Morten Søndergaard – Storyworld Writer & Poet

And now put on your earphones and listen to the sketches for the music of Vokabulantis by our wonderful multitalented Nicolas Vetterli, who is both doing audio and music for Vokabulantis.

That way you will enjoy the concept art below and get a better sense of how it will be to visit Vokabulantis.

CONCEPT ART: To save the Verbe Carbs Kurt and Karla must travel across vokabulantis. When they finally reach the lake of the Verbe-Carbs things are not what they seem.

CONCEPT ART: In Vokabulantis the most precious material is Word Crystal. Although the vast word-crystal mines are beautiful and bountiful, their ressources have been restricted since they became controlled by the Word Führer.​

CONCEPT ART: The City of Noun is a storage facility bigger than any city in our world. Here everything that has a name has a container in the container towers. The Kustodian of the city is an eccentric old robot with a few loose fuses.

CONCEPT ART: Deep in the old tunnels and caves of the Word Crystal mines Numeralia hides. She is the powerful Witch of Numbers – a fiery old femmes fatales or treacherously innocent child of all ages, but Kurt and Karla need her help.

CONCEPT ART: The Word Crystal refineries uses vast amounts of Wordpower. They corrupt and pollute Vokabulantis, but the Word Furher wants the refined Word Gasses and Word Oil to power his ambitions.

CONCEPT ART: The enormous and beautiful Verbe Carbs bring life and movement to everything in Vokabulantis. They are a vital part of the world or rather have been before. They are now cut off. The Word Führer’s waist has them cornered and out of influence.

CONCEPT ART: Traversing the Sea Of Time with the Verb Carps

CONCEPT ART: The Trailer Park Castle of the Color Prince – a character inspired equally by Axl Rose, David Bowie and adjectives

You get seamlessly in and out of cutscenes in Vokabulantis. This approach draws you close to the characters and their story.

An in game shift between gameplay and cutscene

It also ensures you see the stop motion up close and powers the game experience with the fact, that you are actually playing inside a real physical world. 

The hand crafted experience brings real life to the gaming and gaming to real life.

Cutscene of Kurt comforting Karla after fall and the Custodian with his mind on other things

Handcrafted assets shown side by side with it’s scanned and processed digital result.

There are two main focuses of the art development handcrafting/handanimation and digitization. Here’s a brief introduktion to the various processes and crafts, that goes into making Vokabulantis.

Karla is being worked on

“When I build puppets I put so much time and love into them, and it’s hard to let them go when handing them over to the animators. But here I’m able to “animate” them myself in a sense, when I play. It feels like I breath life into my puppets. And I simply love that.”​

– Ida Asferg Jakobsen – Head Of Workshop

This is photogrammetry in action. Photogrammetry is the technique we use to 3D scan handcrafted models.

In the studio we shoot each frame in the stop motion animation several times with different lightings. See why in the gif below…

With the extended process, when doing the stop motion photography described above, we are able to light our characters dynamically in the game engine, making them blend seamlessly in the environments of the game.

Cutscene that has been assembled and lit digitally from handcrafted set elements and stop motion animations.

Here follows a 5 step visualization of the process we have developed to maintain the crucial ability to change, tweak and improve the gameplay as far into the development as possible. 

We do this to be able to user test and iterate on the gameplay as in any purely digital game development.

This is core to us in Vokabulantis and good game design in general.

It has been a requirement for us, that handcrafted sets, puppets and animations go hand in hand with our ability to user test, tweak and improve in all steps of the production cycle.