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.
Patch Notes v2.1.1
Dear Friends,
here are the patch notes for v2.1.1 of Seers Isle: — Dual Sense Gamepad support. Your PlayStation 5 gamepads should now work correctly both via USB and Bluetooth. — Fixed a bug where the mouse cursor was disabled when playing on a touchscreen equipped Windows device.
Please note that our Twitch integration beta has been disabled. Unfortunately, Twitch completely changed its token system, rendering the feature unusable for the time being.
If you're interested in Twitch integration, please reach out to us, we will consider devoting some of humble resources to make it work again if there's enough demand.
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.
Newsletter #28 — May 2022
Hello everyone!
It's official, after three years in the making, we're finally ready to release our next interactive graphic novel, End of Lines.
Continue reading for an abundance of details.
Coming Thursday, May 25th
Mark your calendars: End of Lines will be available worldwide on PC/Mac/Linux via Steam and a selection of trustworthy online retailers across the Internet on Thursday, May 25th.
In this new interactive graphic novel, you'll be following a family trying to survive in a post climate meltdown Europe. To achieve that, you'll have to manage their resources and the people who travel alongside them, while, of course, making choices that will shape their journey across the continent.
In other words, we decided to explore one of the possible outcomes of an important contemporary issue in this game. Perhaps the greatest challenge of our time.
We really hope it will resonate with you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_FP8IPv9hs
Of course. we have scheduled a release discount over on the Steam Store (If you haven't done so already, please be kind enough to add End of Lines to your wishlist — it really helps with discovery algorithms and will let you know when the game is out).
And for those who are wondering, well yes: the original soundtrack, which consists of nearly 2 hours of instrumental music and ambient sounds from the game, masterfully crafted by our friends Julien and Camille from Illustrason will be available as a DLC on Steam, as a downloadable album on Bandcamp, and on streaming platforms such as Spotify or Deezer.
Release party at la Librairie du Basilic in Bordeaux
The team will be at the Librairie du Basilic on Saturday, June 3rd from 2PM to 4PM (and possibly later). You'll be able to test the game, and meet and greet us. We're also planning a couple of surprises for the afternoon.
The Librarie du Basilic is a very nice place, specialized in speculative fiction and fantasy literature, with a great selection of books and lovely people who will happily point you towards your next favorite author.
And if you are itching to pay them a visit before the party, note that they've set up a demo of Seers Isle in the store. They also have some Steam keys for this game to sell from a limited run of beautiful ex libris we made back in 2018.
The address: Librairie du Basilic — 20 rue du Mirail, 33000 Bordeaux
What have we been up to?
Once again, I have to apologize for the lack of news these last few months, but as you may imagine, finishing the game has been quite a hectic endeavor for everyone involved, to say the least.
Still a lot to do before we cross the finishing line, but we're definitely seeing the light at the end of the tunnel at last.
As always, let's conclude with this month's new illustration, the last you'll get for End of Lines. Soon, we'll be switching gears and we can't wait to tease you about our upcoming interactive graphic novels.
That’s all for now, and we hope we'll see you on release day!
Please consider adding End of Lines to your wishlist if you haven't done so yet!
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).
And if you want to hear from us more often, you can also follow us on social networks:
http://twitter.com/novabox
http://facebook.com/novabox.studio
https://instagram.com/novabox
Best,
Geoffroy,
on behalf of the team.
Newsletter #27 — December 2022
Hello everyone!
First of all, we would like extend our best holiday wishes to all of you, dear readers.
In this month's issue, we're talking about the awards received at Indie X, our ongoing winter sale and the price adjustments that are coming up early next year.
As always, we'll finish with an update on End of Lines production, along with a new illustration from the game, so keep on scrolling!
End of Lines won an award at Indie X 2022!
So, last month, we had the chance to take part in Indie X, the biggest indie games festival in Portugal, where End of Lines received a nomination for "Best Art Direction" and won the award for "Games for Good". We're very proud to have received both those distinctions.
And if you missed it, our IndieX livestream is available for replay on Youtube, where we go in depth into the artistic statement and game development of End of Lines. Big thanks to Patricia Casaca who was a wonderful host!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWaHn6uI3RA
Price adjustments are coming in January
Let's do the classic "I have good news and bad news" routine, shall we?
Let's get the "bad" news out of the way first: Steam adjusted the recommended prices conversion earlier this year, and we haven't applied them on our catalogue yet, but we're planning on doing it early next year, once the current Winter Sale ends. That means that the prices of our games will go up in certain regions.
Also, as you may have noticed, two-digits inflation has made a nasty comeback in Europe. That means each sale we make returns less value than it did in the past. To give you an example, if we only needed to sell six copies of Across the Grooves to pay for a kebab for each member of our team in the past (these are not real-life numbers, just an example), we will now need to sell seven or even eight copies of the game for same number of kebabs, because the price of kebabs went up with inflation, while the price of our games did not (yet).
That's why we're also planning on updating the base price of our games from 12.99€/$ to 13.99€/$ on Steam and other resellers.
We know that this may seem like a very peculiar decision, but we really hope you'll understand why we're trying to approach things differently.
Winter Sales
I can hear you asking me "okay, we get it" (and we really hope you do), "but what's the good news, then?"
Well, the good news is that we're making our the biggest discount to date on our full back catalogue, with 35% off on all our titles. So if you're on the fence about diving into a Nova-box game, now would be a great time to do so.
On top of that, you can get an extra 10% off with our permanent "complete your collection" bundle on Steam. Follow the nifty link here below, it will point you in the right direction:
So, to sum it up:
— the base price of our games will go up 1€/$ next month to counter inflation,
… but:
— we're currently running our biggest sale to date, with 35% off across the catalogue.
What have we been up to?
We're currently in the midst of our "friends & family" closed beta, and the first waves of feedback we've received are quite encouraging. We're very grateful to our testers for their time. Thanks to them we will have a lot of adjustments and improvements to implement into the game next month, once the beta session is concluded.
On the art side, Nico and Julie are still upgrading all the illustrations from placeholders to finished art pieces, and they will be doing that for the next couple of months, since there's a lot of images to behold in End of Lines (we've passed the 1000 visual assets for the first time, and by a good margin). All in all, we're still on track for an early-ish 2023 release, and we'll keep you posted once we know more, of course.
That’s all for now, see you next month!
Please consider adding End of Lines to your wishlist if you haven't done so yet!
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).
And if you want to hear from us more often, you can also follow us on social networks:
http://twitter.com/novabox
http://facebook.com/novabox.studio
https://instagram.com/novabox
Best,
Geoffroy,
on behalf of the team.
Newsletter #26 — October 2022
Hello everyone!
This month, we're talking about the Indie X festival and the new demo for End of Lines that you can try out on Steam.
Have a look below for the details on the new demo, as well as a look at new art from the game.
Indie X Online Festival 2022
We're very happy to take part in the Indie X Festival this year!
End of Lines was selected in the top 50 finalists out of more 500 entries, which is quite an achievement.
We won't attend the physical festival in Lisbon, however, we'll be part of the online part of the festival with a special Q&A live stream on November 7th at 2PM CET.
We'll relay the news on our social channels so please keep your eyes peeled. In the mean time, you can go and visit the Indie X Online festival website, lots of great games are attending!
Also, the festival comes with a special event on Steam. To celebrate, we decided to update our demo and to make it public for the duration of the festival, starting right now!
Try End of Lines updated demo on Steam now
To properly celebrate our participation in the Indie X festival, the demo of our upcoming interactive novel End of Lines will be available on Steam starting right now until November 15th.
The demo showcases the first chapter of the game. We made several tweaks to the art and to the story, but the most striking upgrade is the music and sound design which went through final recordings with live musicians since our last demo during June's Steam Next Fest.
Since our last issue, we made a lot of progress on End of Lines and crossed a big milestone: the game is now playable in its entirety from start to finish in all variations of the story. We still have some adjustments to make on the texts and the scripts, but we're quickly approaching the "beta" state, to the joy of the team.
On the art side, Nico and Julie are now busy on upgrading all the illustrations from placeholder images to release-ready art. We also had the joy to welcome a new art intern last week: Liannesoa Farge, who will be with us until the end of the year. You can check out her portfolio on Artstation.
That’s all for now, see you next month!
Please consider adding End of Lines to your wishlist if you haven't done so yet!
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).
And if you want to hear from us more often, you can also follow us on social networks:
http://twitter.com/novabox
http://facebook.com/novabox.studio
https://instagram.com/novabox
Best,
Geoffroy,
on behalf of the team.
Newsletter #25 — September 2022
Hello everyone!
Looks like summer's come and gone in a heartbeat! In this month's issue, we'll talk about End of Lines (and its lateness) and the upcoming events we'll be attending.
End of Lines is late (again)
Let's get the the bad news out the way first: as we were telling you last time, we've accumulated a fair amount of lateness. Unfortunately, it means that we may not find a release frame for 2022.
As you might know, releasing a small indie game is quite akin to crossing the Strait of Gibraltar on a small sailboat. You have to navigate around big tankers and other large boats while being extra careful not to be crushed by the mastodons surrounding you.
Since we're quickly approaching the holiday season, it might not be advisable to release our tiny and delicate vessel of a game with all the AAA titles that usually get the attention of everyone at this time of the year, so we'll take advantage of this extra time to polish End of Lines further.
We're still considering our options, but the most likely scenario is that we're going to aim for a February or March 2023 release spot, to give the End of Lines its best chance to get some attention from the press, the influencers, and most and foremost the players.
We really hope you won't be too disappointed if you've been waiting for our next game, and we, as a team, would like to extend our apologies for that state of affairs. On the other hand, we're really excited to be able to devote this extra time to make the best game we can, and hope you will enjoy it once we eventually release it. In any case, we'll keep you posted about any further development.
Events around Bordeaux this Fall
Mark your calendars! If you're in the Bordeaux area on the weekend of September 24/25th, you will be able to test End of Lines on the second edition of the Hypermondes Festival at the Multimedia Library of Mérignac. It is a free Sci-Fi convention and we warmly recommend you to check it out.
I (Geoffroy) will also have the honor to participate on a panel about video games and utopia during the event (on Sunday, 09/25 at 11:50 AM).
All relevant information is available over there, on the event's website:
http://hypermondes.fr/
Geoffroy (left) and Nico (right) showing End of Lines during the Union St. Jean playtest in June.
Later in the month, Nico and I will also be present at the GameConf in Angoulême, where I'll participate in a panel about self-funding. If you're an attending member of the industry, don't hesitate to say hi to us, and if you're not, chances are the recording of my panel will be made available after the event. If that's the case, I'll give you the link in a future issue of this newsletter.
What have we been up to?
As you might guess, we've been hard at work on End of Lines all summer, and we've made tremendous progress. The French text is complete, English localization is almost done. We can already tell you that End of Lines will be the longest game in our catalogue, text-wise: almost twice the size of Seers Isle and a good quarter longer than Across the Grooves.
On the Art side, the storyboard is almost complete and we should officially be in the "beta" phase at the end of the month. Still a lot to do, but we're finally beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel!
If you're wondering what our storyboards look like, here's a sample here below:
That’s all for now, see you next month!
Please consider adding End of Lines to your wishlist if you haven't done so yet!
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).
And if you want to hear from us more often, you can also follow us on social networks:
http://twitter.com/novabox
http://facebook.com/novabox.studio
https://instagram.com/novabox
