Nous sommes très heureux d'annoncer qu'Echoes est désormais disponible !
Plongez dans un univers intriguant où le polar rencontre l'horreur cosmique et suivez une enquête palpitante dans une petite ville d'apparence tranquille du nord-ouest américain. Chaque mensonge que vous dévoilez au grand jour dissimule en réalité une vérité de plus en plus effroyable.
Parviendrez-vous à résoudre le mystère sans vous perdre dans les méandres de la folie ?
Echoes est un remake de notre tout premier jeu narratif.
Pour ceux d'entre vous qui se souviennent de la version d'origine, merci mille fois d'être toujours là, plus de dix ans plus tard ! Nous espérons de tout cœur que vous apprécierez cette version profondément améliorée d'Echoes.
Amicalement,
Geoffroy,
au nom de toute l'équipe.
Newsletter #34 — April 2024
Hello everyone!
I know we promised you more regular updates, but I'm afraid March came and went with no news from us due to Nico being very busy with his teaching gigs and I (Geoffroy) battling a nasty pulmonary infection.
So, here we are, fashionably late, but bearing important news, as you'll discover if you keep on scrolling towards the bottom end of this digital missive.
SPAWN! Festival 2024
A couple of weeks ago, we had the joy of going to Angoulême for the second edition of the Spawn festival, which showcases indie games that are either local to Nouvelle-Aquitaine, eco-responsible, progressive, or all of the above, which, as you can imagine, is right up our alley.
As always, the hospitality of our peers from Angoulême was incredible, we had such a great time!
A wild writer is hiding somewhere in the picture, can you spot him?
Photo credit: Capucine Chauffourier.
Announcing our next game: Echoes
The name "Echoes" may sound familiar to the ears of our most devoted readers, since it was indeed the first game we ever released as an independent studio, even before Along the Edge, back in 2013. Being released in the very early days of the iPhone AppStore, we were a bit sad to see this piece our history slowly withering away, sadly destined to one day become completely incompatible with the current version of the Apple hardware and software.
It ended bothering us so much that, I (Geoffroy) started working on this side project on and off from September 2021, having a little bit of time to spare during the production of End of Lines. Fortunately, we had the foresight to prepare for an eventual PC release, so we already had high-resolution visual assets at hand. Less fortunately, the scripts for the game were completely incompatible after a decade of evolution of "Teckel", our in-house narrative game engine.
Also, diving back into the project, we quickly realized the gigantic gap of quality between our first attempt at a narrative game and our later, very obviously superior, work. So, we decided that we might as well take this opportunity to do justice to these characters we loved, and I re-wrote the totality of the text, dialogs, and choices from the ground up, keeping only the twists and turns of the original story (as imagined by Frédéric "Ekmule" Lignac) as a guideline.
After the release of End of Lines last year, Nico retouched the illustrations that were in the most dire need of an upgrade, and we asked our friends and regular collaborators Camille and Julien from Illustrason to expand and remaster the soundtrack and the sound effects of the game for good measure. As usual, Rachel translated this new version of the text into English and Alix made sure everything was free of any typos or mistakes.
That brings us to today, proud and ready to unveil this heavily remade edition of Echoes. If you want learn more about the game, please, have a look at our Steam page, and please consider adding it to your wishlist, as an offering to the mighty algorithm gods, if nothing else. We'll appreciate it.
The game is set to release soon (probably sooner than you think) for PC, Mac, Linux and the Nintendo Switch.
As always, the game has been tested and optimized for the Steam Deck or any potato capable of running Windows 10 (as it is now required to launch Steam).
What have we been up to?
As you can imagine, Echoes has been taking up most of our attention recently, but we're also making progress on our next game. Stay tuned for more on that front soon.
To conclude, here's our traditional monthly illustration. This one shows the evolution of the art style of Echoes from one episode to the next, following and depicting the gradual degradation of the narrator's psyche, one of the most original features of the game.
If you want to subscribe to our mailing list, you can register here:
http://www.nova-box.com/signup
You'll get extra-fresh updates about our projects and our whereabouts once a month, nestled in the coziness of your own inbox (we'll never send spam, and you can unsubscribe anytime).
Best,
Geoffroy,
on behalf of the team.
Newsletter #33 — February 2024
Hello everyone!
While we're secretly working on our upcoming release (you'll get a sneak peak at the end of this newsletter), let's talk a bit about carbon emissions.
JYROS
Last year, Nova-box was one of the pilot studios in France to set up a tool for calculating greenhouse gas emissions for video games. This collaborative effort led to the deployment of the JYROS platform, now available to all.
We've been striving to make low-tech games for over ten years, and we're aware of our environmental impact, but we've always refrained from communicating about it, because we didn't have any figures to back up our intentions, however virtuous they may be. The cost of a personalized carbon footprint was unfortunately prohibitive for a small structure like ours.
We're delighted to now be able to share our figures with you:
Of course, we'd love to be able to compare these figures with the industry average, but it's difficult to find reliable, anonymized data at this stage. We'll be happy to update you when we have more data to share. Until then, we think we can agree that our consumption is indeed very low, and not at all representative of the cost of IT in general.
To find out more, we invite you to visit the Jyros website:
https://jyros-jeuvideo.com/ (The "resource" page contains numerous documents, guides and reports on the subject).
What have we been up to?
We're very glad to report that our next release has been submitted and validated by Steam. Hopefully, we'll be able to tell you a lot more soon.
In the meantime, here's the soundtrack cover of our mysterious next project (though our most faithful followers might already have figured out what we've been working on *wink wink*).
If you want to subscribe to our mailing list, you can register here:
http://www.nova-box.com/signup
You'll get extra-fresh updates about our projects and our whereabouts once a month, nestled in the coziness of your own inbox (we'll never send spam, and you can unsubscribe anytime).
Best,
Geoffroy,
on behalf of the team.
Newsletter #32 — January 2024
Hello and Happy New Year 2024 everyone!
Spring is in the air, and the Nova-box premises are bursting with color and activity. The seasons just don't seem to count for anything anymore, do they?
Steam Storyteller's Festival 2024
We're delighted to be part of the Steam Storyteller's Festival again this year. You can catch End of Lines with 30% off this week alongside a great selection of narrative gems.
Nova-box was featured in a French broadcast TV show!
Last Sunday, France 3 broadcast a program about ecology in the video game industry. We were delighted to be invited to express our views on the subject.
You can watch the replay here (in French).
On a more Nova-box-focused note, Geoffroy took part in the "La culture du carry" radio emission hosted by Julie Langlois on Radio Campus Besançon. You'll also hear some delightful musical extracts from Julien and Camille's work on Seers Isle, End of Lines and Across the Grooves.
The podcast is available here (also in French).
What have we been up to?
As usual, we leave you with a mysterious screenshot of one of our current projects.
If you want to subscribe to our mailing list, you can register here:
http://www.nova-box.com/signup
You'll get extra-fresh updates about our projects and our whereabouts once a month, nestled in the coziness of your own inbox (we'll never send spam, and you can unsubscribe anytime).
Best,
Nico,
on behalf of the team.
Newsletter #31 — December 2023
Hello everyone!
Despite a very mild (and particularly rainy) month of December in Bordeaux, the Nova-box premises have quietly gone into winter mood as everyone prepares to join their loved ones for the end of the year. Desks and instruments have been prepared for this short (but necessary) period of hibernation.
Dreamhack Beyond Indies / Winter Sale
We're delighted to announce that End of Lines was selected to be featured at the Dreamhack Beyond Indie 2023 Sales. This was a great opportunity to showcase our latest interactive graphic novel on Steam, from December 15th to 21st. End of Lines was on sale with 25% off for the occasion, but don't worry if you missed it since, right on the heels of this event, the Steam Winter Sale has just started.
It will be the last time you'll be able to get our titles at these attractive prices for a while. As always, there's our nifty "complete your collection" bundle for you to get an extra 10% off on our game you don't already own. The link is here below.
As you may have noticed, all Nova-box games have recently been updated. We've added support for “DualSense” controllers (PlayStation 5). We've also taken the opportunity to push some minor bug fixes to End of Lines and Across the Grooves. All of this is detailed in the most recent patch notes of each game.
Servers migration
It's a bit technical and you won't notice any difference on your end since our games are fully offline experiences, but we're pretty proud that Nova-box development servers are now managed locally, thanks to our friends at Zaka Services, a small company in Bordeaux to whom we entrust our data management.
Zaka Services are very much aligned with us on carbon reduction and sobriety measures. For example, they only use refurbished hardware for their servers.
We're now fully committed to the pre-production of our next graphic novel, and can't wait to tell you all about it. We can't tell you much about it for now, but the story will revolve around a couple of iconic places. One of them is a strange cabaret tentatively called “The Outpost” (the name might change, but don't hesitate to tell us what you think of it).
Here's the first concept art of this whimsical albeit a tad creepy place.
If you want to subscribe to our mailing list, you can register here:
http://www.nova-box.com/signup
You'll get extra-fresh updates about our projects and our whereabouts once a month, nestled in the coziness of your own inbox (we'll never send spam, and you can unsubscribe anytime).
Best,
Nico,
on behalf of the team.
End of Lines v.1.0.6
Dear Friends,
here are the patch notes for v1.0.6 of End of Lines: — Dual Sense Gamepad support. Your PS5 gamepads should now work correctly both via USB and Bluetooth. — Fixed a minor bug text in Chapter 2, where both Rafik bonus and regular text were shown when choosing to rescue Inaya & Soan during the "Chapel" camp .
Thank you and kind regards,
Geoffroy, on behalf of the team.
Newsletter #30 — November 2023
Hello everyone!
Let's talk about some nice events we've attended and the yearly Black Friday stuff.
Black Friday / Autumn Sales
Firstly, all Nova-box games will be on sale on Steam from November 21 to 28!
If you want to complete your collection, you can opt for the bundle for an extra 10% off plus the sale discount. The games you already own will be deducted from the price.
We attended the Hypermonde literary festival at Mérignac last month. Nova-box's text-based narrative games are always in the spotlight there and we appreciate this extraordinary opportunity to meet and greet numerous authors from all over the world.
Amongst my little discoveries this year, I was able to get dedicated copies of:
Le Premier jour de paix by Elisa Beiram. An excellent futuristic novel. It’s a bit like End of Lines but with some brighter sides (warning: with no interactivity, you're in for an incredible rollercoaster ride).
L'Empire s'effondre by Sébastien Coville. The "speculative fiction" genre is known to often present insightful, sometimes disturbing, reflections of reality. I particularly appreciate the intelligence and accessibility of this one.
As always, many thanks to Fabrice Carré and the team for this event, we had a excellent time again this year!
Game Conf
We were also present at the Game Conf in Angoulême, where we were able to meet many other independent game developers and attend the Game Cup 2023.
We had the pleasure of running into a number of people from the indie scene, including Modiiie, who had done a series of live plays of our games in French. Many thanks to her.
Julien's Album
Julien Ponsoda, musician and composer from Illustrason, with whom we are blessed to work on all our productions, has just released a new album! You can discover his work here:
While we continue to make progress on Nova-box's next narrative projects, I (Nico) am doing some illustrations for the fabulous project from our neighbors and friends at Manufacture43: City Ambulance: Rescue Express (C.A.R.E).
In particular, I worked on the portraits of the main protagonists: Jakub & Mishra.
Find out more on Steam and add the game to your wishlist!
If you want to subscribe to our mailing list, you can register here:
http://www.nova-box.com/signup
You'll get extra-fresh updates about our projects and our whereabouts once a month, nestled in the coziness of your own inbox (we'll never send spam, and you can unsubscribe anytime).
Best,
Nico,
on behalf of the team.
Newsletter #29 — October 2023
Hello everyone!
This month, we're diving deep into the launch of End of Lines and its aftermath.
End of Lines is OUT!
Our latest interactive graphic novel was released on May 25th, 2023, just a few days after Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and at the very moment the press was receiving advance copies of Street Fighter 6 and Diablo 4 with only a few days for them to complete their reviews before their embargo was lifted (spoiler alert: it didn't go well for us).
But let's start with the good news: we've had some very good feedback. We'd like to thank everyone who has supported us despite all the big releases coming one right after another this year.
Here are a few samples of the reviews the game received over the web and in the press:
"If you like visual novel-style games, don't pass up End of Lines. It's really great!", yunicia.fr (18/20),
"Moving play of impressions, sublime in its sense of detail.", Les Inrockuptibles,
"End of Lines is an experience that dares to carry a difficult theme perfectly suited to the visual novel theme.", Canard PC (8/10),
“I enjoyed End of Lines’ take on the consequences of neglecting the climate crisis, as shown via the intimate stories and daily struggles of individuals living those very consequences in the future. It’s a warning!”, Switchaboo (7/10),
“End of Lines gets down to the nitty-gritty, naming those responsible for a coming catastrophe and showing the ecological and human consequences in the clearest terms. The result leaves nobody unscathed, and is as unsettling for its climatic anxieties as for its human dramas.”, The Pixel Post,
"End of Lines is a remarkable game both in terms of storytelling and direction, taking on all the strengths of the developers' previous games.", Loutre Perfide for veuillezparlapresente.com,
“End of Lines brings us a new visual novel in which we get a glimpse at a potential future that can hit us if we don’t act on the effects of climate change and global warming before it’s too late.”, PS4blog.net (9/10).
A big "thanks" too to the content creators who helped give our humble creation greater visibility.
OK, shall we move on to the bad news?
Despite the good feedback, as you can imagine, the release of End of Lines was a bit of a disaster for the studio. The game was practically invisible on release and, as a result, to be honest, sales are clearly not up to expectations.
For example, the steam page has reached a plateau of 28 reviews over the past few weeks, which is very low. Even if the majority are positive, this is unfortunately not enough to sustain an indie game.
As a result, we've had to scale back our ambitions for future projects. We also had to (sadly) part ways with Julie, the wonderful artist who produced most of the backgrounds for End of Lines.
If you'd like to help us out, you can continue to spread the word about the game and share your opinion on the Steam page if you haven't already done so.
Naturally, we haven't given up at all. We're continuing to do our best to give End of Lines more visibility.
Our launch event at the Librairie du Basilic bookshop gave us the opportunity to unveil the game with a glorious public reading by our partner Alix, co-author and proofreader of End of Lines.
We hope to continue our collaboration with booksellers, thanks to a little booklet we've produced that we can leave on the shelves.
If you are a bookseller, or know any booksellers who might be interested in this project, please write to us.
On the technical side, a patch is on its way to correct a few bugs and rebalance variables. We've noticed that certain junctions are rarer than they should be.
Social Media
For reasons we won't go into here, but I'm sure you'll understand, we've decided to stop using the social network formerly known as Twitter for our studio communications. It's a difficult decision, as for several years this platform was our main tool for talking about our productions and for engaging with our community.
As a result, we'll be publishing our newsletters much more regularly. We'd be very grateful if you could pass on the subscription link to those who might be interested in our news.
While we're going through the trials and tribulations of releasing End of Lines, we've started to work on at least two projects that we're sure to announce shortly. In the meantime, here's a mysterious concept for one of them (we're keeping the other one exclusive to the subscribers of this newsletter — so, please subscribe!).
That’s all for now, and see you next month! (we really mean it this time).
If you want to subscribe to our mailing list, you can register here:
http://www.nova-box.com/signup
You'll get extra-fresh updates about our projects and our whereabouts once a month, nestled in the coziness of your own inbox (we'll never send spam, and you can unsubscribe anytime).
Best,
Nico,
on behalf of the team.
End of Lines v.1.0.5
Dear Friends,
now that End of Lines has been released for a bit more than a month, we feel like we have enough insight to deploy a small balance patch.
One of the endings of the game looks to be a bit too easy to achieve from what we intended in certain conditions, and therefore, overrepresented in players first play-throughs. This patch is aiming to correct that.
Please be aware that the detailed patch notes here below are spoiler heavy, so we recommend to stay clear if you don't want some major plot points to be revealed!
Detailed patch notes : — Added a supplies debuff when choosing to leave Inaya and Soan behind in Chapter 2, — Added a small supplies debuff when choosing to go through the locust swarm in Chapter 2 , — Added a buff to a couple of "Lion" choices in chapter 1 through 3.
Overall, the goal of these changes is to make it a bit more difficult to make Camille survive during Chapter 3 when you decide to leave Inaya and Soan early in the game.
Of course, we'll keep monitoring the game and keep adjusting the balance as necessary.
Thank you and kind regards,
Geoffroy, on behalf of the team.
End of Lines v.1.0.4
Dear friends,
it has been brought to our attention that you might get a mention of Inaya and Soan in the text of Chapter 3 while they have already left the group.
We just released a small patch to correct this issue.
Thank you again and kind regards,
Geoffroy, on behalf of the team.
P.S.: I just pushed another tiny patch today (June 20th) to fix a small typo in the French text during Chapter 2. I'll add it as a post-scriptum here, I don't think it is worth spamming your feed with yet another tiny update (just know that we're patching the game and will continue to do so as long as these small issues are brought to our attention).
