Thread by @timsoret

How #TheLastNight started:

I saw the cyberpunkjam in 2014.
I thought it would be cool to pay a tiny homage to Flashback.
My starting point was this moody scene from Matrix.

I made a quick mockup in Photoshop to see if it could work.

With only 6 days ahead of us, I went for super low resolution pixel art + spaghetti characters, and very few frames of animation. It was so fast & enjoyable to churn out content, so straightforward.

My brother @AdrienSoret then took over the art, expanding the scene while I implemented. I never made a game, but I knew Flash inside out from my past career. It was like making a glorified flash banner to me: it was lightning fast.

The whole thing was rendered in 360*150 then upscaled x2.
A lot of the mood comes from my lighting trick:
• Invisible colored points are sprinkled around.
• Tint character sprites by interpolating between the closest colors.
I wish more games would do this. Debug view:

AI was broken, but a flying police car was supposed to come if drones scanned your weapon. Sometimes it works, especially in front of the nightclub. Too hard to debug in such a short amount of time.

To go fast, we drew a dozen random neons and we put them everywhere, in different sizes, colors, and flickering patterns.

Why "Bussy" in the train station?
It's the name of small town between Paris & Disneyland where we grew up. There was a direct train to Paris, but it was always late & disgusting. Adolescent, I spent hours waiting in that train station (or running after trains about to leave).

The nightclub was by far the funniest part to work on. We just spent a night animating & randomising all the characters, not being too concerned about animation quality (it was just a gamejam).

The overall feel of a crowd > perfect individual animations.

I still really love that ending, with the brutal change of tone & music.
It works quite well.

Anyway... We submitted our entry, and we forgot about it.
A few weeks alter, one morning we woke up... and...
The Last Night won the gamejam out of 265 games!!!🥇
With a visual rating of 4.75/5

Hundreds of thousands of people played this game we made in isolation in our bedrooms in France. The gaming press worldwide wrote about the game & our story. I was 25, @AdrienSoret was 19. Utterly surreal.

It traveled far beyond what we could imagine:
People at Scott Free then working on the upcoming Blade Runner congratulated us. The original creator of Flashback, Paul Cuisset, was amused to see us celebrate pixel art while it felt like an annoying limitation for them at the time.

You can still play this old gamejam here:
timsoret.itch.io/the-last-night
or directly hosted on our website if you have issues:
oddtales.net/cyberpunkjam/
I even fixed a few things along the way.
Nothing new, don't get too excited.

At that time, we were dreaming of a full game called Behind Nowhere.

We were already upgrading pixel art with lighting & post-processing. A dark, gritty game with a new take on fantasy. A lot of ideas ended up in The Last Night. Small thread here:

https://twitter.com/timsoret/status/693132216264687616

If we could achieve this in 6 days,
what could we do with more time & more people? 🧐

It was time for a new mockup 💫
• Get rid of spaghetti characters
• Detailing, shading & lighting

Then Adrien & I we both drew different areas of this first picture in Photoshop, to see what we could achieve with a bigger canvas. Huge, massive upgrade here too 💥💫

• From 360x150 to 640x270
• 172 800 pixels to draw manually per scene 😍
• 3.2 more pixels than before 👌

Here's the finished picture.
We finally had our new target quality.
We wanted to push ourselves as hard as we could.
Challenging, but exciting.

• Dozens of parallaxing layers
• Fully animated characters, billboards, ads...
• Complex dynamic lighting