Nadir - Behind the Scenes
WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW!
Like 616 Mock Orange Way, this is another game I spent a lot of time designing and planning, only to lose motivation to actually put the thing together. I was also in a bit of a rough spot when I came up with the story.
Another thing that inspired Nadir was an indie game which, admittedly, I didn't play myself, but watched a playthrough of. It features a character trapped in an tiny cell for a long period of time, receiving letters from people on the outside. At the climax of the game, two of the people you've been getting letters from die tragically just as you're released from your cell. It's supposed to be a really emotionally hard-hitting moment, however, during the course of the game, so many things happened that made no logical sense to me, given the scenario described in the story. The inconsistancies stacked up to the point where it seemed like a distinct possibility that those letters weren't written by actual people, but were just carefully crafted documents being fed to the character to make the character develop an emotional connection to these imaginary people and manipulate the character's emotions so that they (as well as the player) are unable to think rationally about the situation they're in and thus see what's really going on. That concept inspired me to create a game where the player is rewarded by interpreting a scenario in a logical way instead of blindly going with their emotions.
Initially, I wanted the text in the intro to fade from complete transparency to zero transparency, but I wasn't able to do this easily with GUI labels, and the very useful Tween module only let me tween label colors. Making the text temporarily turn blue as it fades from black to white wasn't intentional, but it fit the largely blue color scheme of the rest of the game surprisingly well.
I was going to implement Kerry's idle animations the way I usually do it (randomly selecting from one of several idle views every few seconds), but realized how much more effective it would be to occasionally have Kerry react to one of the various mysterious sounds that I also planned to play at random intervals. I wanted sound to play a huge role in this game to add to the oppressive feeling of the sub, although I had to scale back my plans for it somewhat. My formula for most, if not all of the sound effects was "add lots of reverb".
Changing the main character to be of Irish ancestry was the result of me trying to figure out what could tip the player off to the fact that he might not be married. Having him not wear a ring at all may have made it too obvious that something was amiss (even though his sprites ended up being too tiny to see his hands clearly), and when I was on Wikipedia looking through the various types of rings that a man of Kerry's time might wear, I discovered the Claddagh ring, which provided me with a near-perfect solution to my problem. (This also gave me the opportunity to give him the same surname as a character from an old short story I wrote ("The Anachronism"), not just because I was lazy, but because I thought the idea of making the two of them distantly related was a fun idea.)
Something I didn't realize until I was deep into the design for this game was that the name of the protagonist in the short story it was based on is Chris Jones...just like the creator of AGS, the engine the game was made with:
Siany's drawings were drawn with real crayons, and I took the time to look through a lot of my childhood art to try to emulate my "old style". The sea serpent's nostrils are drawn the same way I used to draw nostrils on horses and horse-like animals. Since I'm right-handed, I used my left hand to draw the last two drawings to make them look as messy as possible.
I used the same toolbox model in this game that I used in (and originally created for) Adventure: All in the Game.
This was my first time implementing an autosave feature in a game, as well as the first time I experimented with appending strings (something I wish I'd learned years before).
I originally wanted the game to "remember" if you get the good ending when you quit right after getting it. I almost got this to work, but I ran into some issues and out of time, so I settled for just having the different title screen appear right after you get the good end (I was going to let you start the game over from that screen, but again: issues and a lack of time forced me to scrap that idea).
I wanted to include a profound quote about not letting one's emotions overwhelm their rational thought at the end of the game, but all of the quotes I found seemed far more pretentious than they were profound.
Nearly all of the sound effects in the game were generated using a single (free!) virtual synthesizer filled with a large variety of unusual instruments called Marazmator.
While the original short story (Philip José Farmer's "Queen of the Deep") made it very clear that the enemy sub was indeed of Russian origin (the story was written by an American during the 1950s, after all), I decided to make the enemy's identity in Nadir as ambiguous as possible. I also made the time of the incident very unclear, only hinting that it takes place sometime during the mid-20th century (notice how Kerry never outright calls the sub's computer a computer while inside the sub).
Something that the intense darkness in the opening scene unfortunately covers up is that Kerry is lying with his right hand stretched straight out in front of him at a somewhat awkward angle -- a detail which only becomes significant in one of the scenes in the true ending.
Another revealing detail which I forgot to bring up in the "true" ending was that at the depth the sub indicates it's at (which is deeper than the maximum depth for military submarines), water wouldn't merely be dripping out of a leak -- it would be spraying out, due to the much higher outside pressure.
The word "nadir" means "the lowest point" -- the opposite of "zenith." In this game, it's used in both the literal and figurative sense.
Here's one of the only pieces of concept art I have for this game (drawn on a piece of Christmas stationary):
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