Burnout Game Ventures - Who They Are and Why They Are So Awesome!

We’ve received a decent amount of inquiries about our Incubator, Burnout Game Ventures LLC, so we wanted to take some time and explain who they are and why they’re so important to NORA. For those of you that aren’t familiar with an incubator, it is generally an advisory group that helps start-ups streamline the development process. They provide some resources, mentoring, and other tools

BGV is more than an incubator, more than a publisher… They provide whatever resources we require, are lining up some impressive advisers (to mentor us and the other game studios under their umbrella), and offer processes to expedite a game being successfully developed and released. They will also assist with marketing and distributing our game.

When NORA was just getting started, we lacked both resources and direction. We had an awesome idea for a game and we had a solid vision for the studio, but as we’ve mentioned before, getting the ball moving is often the hardest part of any project. We spent about a year in preproduction to hammer out some ideas before getting connected with BGV and since then the production has drastically changed.

Weekly BGV Team Meeting

Rupert Meghnot, BGV’s founder, strives of getting a game from idea to market in 6-months. With the slow pace NORA was moving we were thrilled to get started under their mentorship. We joined up with other local Indie Studios (Sour Foot Games, SymbioVR, Major Games, etc.) and got to work.

BiT: Evolution - Major Games

Aside from tools and advice to manage and maintain development, BGV’s aforementioned advisers direct specific parts of the development process. These industry veterans provide great feedback on the development of the art, design, development, and even marketing/business aspects of setting up and running a game development studio.

Victim 146 - Sour Foot Games

BGV is quickly growing. With over 60 developers under them (in just six months), each project is moving at a steady pace. One of the greatest things about this network is the ability for developers to move between teams and work on multiple projects. As most of the developers are just breaking into the industry they’re gaining amazing experience and multiple credits under their name.

If you are interested in learning more about Burnout Game Ventures or possibly even joining as a developer or an adviser, check out their website: www.burnoutgameventures.com

"Strap In, Shut Up, and Hang On"

NORA - Preproduction Concept Art

As many of you know, we're currently in preproduction of our Science Fiction Psychological Thriller game, NORA. We hope to give everyone a look at gameplay in the next coming months, but in the meantime we've been producing a good amount of concept art to develop visual understanding of how NORA would look. We decided it would be a good idea to post a collection of some of the concept art to date and start to answer any questions you may have about our game below in the comments! Ask away!

Captain Abigael Blake with the Artificial Intelligence, NORA

Composite Image, featuring Victoria Swilley - The voice of Abigael Blake

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The bridge of the NORA

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A look at the interior hallways in the NORA

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NORA's Observation Lounge

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NORA's Engineering Bay

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The Drakulich Space Station

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The Mark of the Drakulich Empire

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The spacesuits aboard the ship

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Miscellaneous character/clothing concepts 

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So there you have it. We have a ton more artwork, but don't want this blog to drag on. Hope you all enjoyed your inside look at NORA!

Note: Images do not reflect actual gameplay

Character Creation Just Gets Weird Sometimes

One of the things I like most about NORA is that it's a very character-driven game. So much of it revolves around the relationships you create with a small group of men and women, and a lot of what may make or break immersion for the player is how well we portray those characters.

Now, this is kind of my jam. I love creating characters and developing their quirks and backstories. You know those 50-question character development sheets you can find in like, every class that has ever looked at creative writing sideways? I do that kind of stuff for fun. I came into development after most of the cast had been concepted, so most of my job so far has been fleshing out those concepts into more realized people. It's not exactly building somebody from the ground up, but, well, I can deal.

One of the tricks to creating a character that feels realistic is giving them a little piece of something very human. A quirk. A certain way of looking at the world. A nervous gesture. A song they can't stop humming under their breath. And you can pull these out of the ether all you want, but the best ones come from observation. It's kind of the trick to "write what you know." You have to go out and learn things, see things, meet things, in order to write them with any modicum of understanding.

To that end, well, I've used a lot of myself in the cast of NORA.

This one is the kind of introvert that likes recharging around a small group of people. That one constantly checks and re-checks that others are following their line of thought. This guy likes to make up narratives in their spare time. That girl communicates in metaphors to the point of obfuscation.

And it doesn't end with me. He has a small dash of my brother. She has a touch of my cousin's accent. He has the same laugh as my uncle-in-law. She has the stubborn streak of an old friend from college.

None of these are defining traits. No one person has become an insert of any real person I know. They're individual characters, wholly themselves while still managing to exist as an amalgamation of several people I know and several people the other developers know. It's some kind of freakish alchemy, I'll tell you that much.

But that's not really the weirdest part.

See, this is a psychological thriller science fiction game.

Which means that I am putting parts of myself and of my friends and relatives into an incredibly volatile situation.

Sometimes I realize that this person I am carefully crafting could potentially wrench the heart right out of somebody's chest and stomp on it. Metaphorically, I mean. Or physically, come to think of it. Maybe they could eat it in front of them. Maybe they'll just up and unpeel into a gruesome flesh-monster like that scary dog in John Carpenter's The Thing. At this point I wouldn't put it completely out of the realm of possibility.

That line of thinking, well... it makes me stare at the wall. For a while.

I should probably warn my brother that somebody who might behave vaguely similar is a potential flesh-peeling dog monster.

But, then again, he probably knew when he was getting into when his sister became a writer.

By Annie Craton
Design Lead for NORA