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Inua: A Story in Ice and Time
ARTE Collection bundle sale
Get all games from ARTE Collection at 30% off -meaning ALL games from our catalogue!-
Grab yours and complete your collection now, you only pay for the games you don’t own !
ARTE celebrates 10 years of video games
To mark this milestone, we’re having a massive sale including all of our game catalogue, with discount going from 30% to 80% off!
Thank you for getting on this journey with us, here’s to many more games ! 🎂
Whether you are new to the ARTE Experience or have been there since the beginning, we want to thank you and let you know more about what’s to come, so stay tuned for all the big things to come !
Steam Awards begin, vote for Sit Back and Relax
This is your chance to encourage and support your favorite games by voting for them.
We are very proud to be able to present Inua: A Story in Ice and Time to the Steam Awards this year.
So sit back, relax in your travels from era to era and show your love for the game by voting for it at the :
SIT BACK AND RELAX STEAM AWARD
The Steam Award begin, vote for the best soundtrack!
This is your chance to encourage and support your favorite games by voting for them.
We are very proud to be able to present Inua: A Story in Ice and Tme to the Steam Awards this year.
We had the chance to collaborate with the Inuit artist Tanya Tagaq to create a unique and original soundtrack and today we encourage you to show us your love for the game and support it by voting for it at :
STEAM AWARD FOR THE BEST SOUNDTRACK 🎵
Steam Awards begin, vote for Outstanding Visual Style
This is your chance to encourage and support your favorite games by voting for them.
We are very proud to be able to present Inua: A Story in Ice and Time to the Steam Awards this year.
We encourage you to show us your love for the game and support it by voting for it at the :
OUTSTANDING VISUAL STYLE STEAM AWARD🤩
OUT NOW
MEET TANYA TAGAQ
From the start of the project, we dreamed of being able to use the musical compositions of a very particular artist in the game. Listen to this:
[previewyoutube="KaXh5FsqscY;full"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaXh5FsqscY[/previewyoutube]
Tanya Tagaq is an Inuit singer from Cambridge Bay (Not far from where the wrecks of the Franklin Expedition were found!). Her specialty is throat singing.
We contacted her label to obtain the rights to the tracks. We received a terse response: “Do you have Inuit people on your team”?
Tanya Tagaq is a diligent activist against cultural appropriation. It's an important subject that we were aware of, but we discovered how it's at the center of social relations in countries like Canada, where indigenous cultures are deeply impacted by the dominant culture.
If we planned to surround ourselves with as many Inuit as possible, at that point we only had Billy Gauthier on the team. We waited several months to get the entire team together, including a dozen Inuit people, before we approached Six Shooter Records again to apply for the rights to use the songs we wanted to use.
We are proud to have been able to secure the right to feature 5 awesome Tanya Tagaq songs in the game's soundtrack. They bring breath, depth, and sensations to the game.
A big thank you to her!
🐻❄️ 🧊
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INUIT CULTURE
Igal here, co-producer on the project. The game's narrative follows three main characters in the region of Nunavut, a vast desert of ice islands in northern Canada. It depicts the living conditions of indigenous communities and quite a few specific elements of Inuit culture.
In order to ensure the authenticity of the narrative and respect the people whose culture we're portraying, we called on Inuit advisers and an author. Their respective personal stories are also remarkable. Here they are.
Billy Gauthier is an Inuit sculptor from Labrador. In addition to sculpture, he ices fishes, hunts caribou, rides a snowmobile or canoe, and rescues owls attacked by crows.
Billy is also an activist. In 2016, he went on hunger strike to protest the environmental impacts of the hydroelectric dam project in Muskrat Falls, where he's from. 13 days without eating to help sway decision-makers and politicians.
Billy traveled from his home to Lille, in the north of France, to tell us with a mix of intensity and sweetness about these various events, the harshness of his living conditions, the beauty of where he lives, his art, and his inspirations… A big thank you to him.
Monica Ittusardjuat is a teacher, educator, and author of children's books living in Nunavut. She's an active and respected elder in her community, with a lot to say about a myriad of topics, from Inuit spirituality to the making of sealskin clothing.
Monica Ittusardjuat is also a survivor. She attended three residential schools, schools created by the colonialist Canadian government to "kill the Indian within" every Inuit child. This system, in place for a century, contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands of children, malnourished and badly treated in schools deliberately located far from their communities of origin. A national scandal.
We spent many hours consulting with Monica by video about Inua's narrative. She helped us with spiritual and moral aspects of the project, and these discussions helped us give substance and truth to the story. We owe her a lot.
Thomassie Mangiok is a school principal, graphic designer, animation director, and board game designer from Nunavik.
In each of his projects, Thomassie strives to compensate for the overabundance of English-language content drowning Inuit youth. He narrates from within his own culture, promotes the Innuttitut language, and offers a vision of the territory and its resources, its heritage.
Thomassie co-wrote a central part of Inua's narrative, an inspired tale steeped in Inuit culture and morals. He agreed to help us when he discovered the name of the game we were asking him to contribute to: a few days after we made contact, little Inua, Thomassie's fourth child, was born! One hell of a coincidence, and a real emotional moment for us too :)
These three encounters, and a few others, produced the same observation, which was particularly difficult in the case of Canada's indigenous peoples: an aggressive expropriation of identities, territories, and cultures by the colonialist spirit. The fight against this spirit is central to Inua's purpose.
Many thanks to Billy, Monica, and Thomassie, as well as Lucy Tulugarjuk and Marie-Hélène Cousineau of Arnait Video Production for their assistance in our research.
🐻❄️ 🧊⏳
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INUA'S GAME DESIGN
Igal here, co-producer on the project. Inua's game design is the product of long iterative reflection, carried out mainly by Armel Gibson, a talented French designer from Brittany!
Armel is the creator of Vignettes, a successful iOS game released in 2017. It was a special project, without a character, without a story, and visually very elegant. Its main attraction is the “game feel”: you can manipulate and rotate objects with your finger. Try it out, you'll see it's a gem ...
That’s where Armel’s design excels: an initial approach through the simplicity of player sensations and abstraction. While some designers may start by considering the design of a game's "system", Armel prefers to think in terms of gestures and user experience. How should the universe on display offer itself to the manipulations of the player? How can we reinforce the narrative vision of the game through its interactions alone?
However, Inua as a project is obviously anything but abstract; it's a tangible universe, stuffed with narration and characters. Was it the right choice to implement a game feel-oriented design in this way?
Our intuition was as follows: The deeply spiritual story of the project should provide the player a special role in it, omniscient, which we wanted to make them feel instead of revealing head-on. We hoped that Armel’s approach would convey this idea in a sensory way.
There were a lot of uncertainties, but Armel got down to work and one by one he broke through the barriers. From the prototype, the idea of scenes in isometric view was essential, like dollhouses to be rotated to gradually reveal characters and settings. The feel was already there, and our ability to unfold a dense narrative remained intact via levels meticulously crafted according to the story.
The omniscient role of the player was made concrete via a classic aerial view but with real meaning in the universe of the game and fixed camera angles to navigate between.
A shader reproducing a white fog around the scenes gave the sensation of observing reality through space and time, which we liked very much.
Another challenge was to find a way to update the principle of an inventory, an essential ingredient of point & click games. Here again, how do we signify this omniscient role of the player but via their own interactions? Through iterations came the idea of tokens replacing the objects of a classic inventory: Abstract ideas found in scenes and then breathed into the head of any character to trigger a reflection or action in response. Thus the system perfectly matched the game's narrative and allowed the collection and exchange of abstract information between characters, each of whom ultimately having their own inventory. In addition, the possibilities for storytelling were increased tenfold with access to the inner, intimate life of each character.
Armel also suggested the idea of interacting at the crossroads of the abstract and the tangible, offering several levels of interpretation and which opened up a boulevard of gameplay possibilities. And thanks to his game feel skills, tokens are very simple and a joy to handle.
That and a thousand other design choices gradually brought all of its feel to the project. Who doesn't want a story that is discovered as much by the mind as by the senses? We hope you do!
🐻❄️ 🧊⏳
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