ilomilo

Hello folks! Here’s the second part of the exciting “behind the scenes” look of ilomilo. Today Simon Flesser gives some more insights in the developement progress of ilomilo Shuffle.

Guerilla game making:

Ilomilo shuffle was created by Björn and me in our spare time. We knew we were not going to be granted any official time for it, so we just hid it in the menus and it was actually hidden there for quite some time. The only way to reach it was to use a secret button combination – that’s still in the game.

The same is true for Sebastian’s Story. I wrote and created the scenes in my free time, and decided to hide them on the bonus levels. I did the same thing for the retro pixel/voxel ilomilo’s.

Shuffle facts:
The ”Avoid falling for high score” instructions is an obvious nod to ”Avoid missing ball for high score” instructions in Pong.

The laughing 8-bit Sebastian in Ilomilo shuffle is of course inspired by the dog from Duck Hunt.

The Huntsman & The Fox is meant to be a classic fable. The visual style is inspired by a lot of retro video games. The lost woods theme of the story is inspired by The Legend of Zelda series.

A lot of creatures are wearing hats in ilomilo. This might have something to do with heavy listening to Tom Waits (whom is seldom seen without his hat) when producing the art assets.

The trees in the park setting are of course very inspired by Gustav Klimt art. As are some of the patterns in the Autumn setting as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Klimt

A lot of stuff in ilomilo is inspired by Hundertwasser.
The house in the first setting is particularly very hundertwasserish.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedensreich_Hundertwasser

The name of the song ”Ballad of the Dog fish” (on of the songs in the second chapter) is a little nod to the”Ballad of The Wind Fish” song from Legend of Zelda – Link’s Awakening

Sebastian De Mambo got it’s name from the last stage of Wario Ware: Twisted which is called ”Wario De Mambo”. Excellent game.

Most of the square patterns on the textures are actually scans from aquarelles made by my better half. The doodles found on the house walls of the third setting’s are sketches and doodles from her notebook. Noticed the calculations? Those are actually her notes from solving puzzles in Professor Layton and the Curious Village.

Spoiler warning:
The last date Ilona and Milton is seen, is the same date as my birthday.

Spoiler warning:
The train in the ending. There has never been a bad song written about trains. The ending is experiment to see if this logic applies to games as well. Also, trains have this romantic flair in some way, somehow they illustrate the sense of leaving very well.