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Worldless

It might have no name and no world, but this is why Worldless caught our attention

The first indie project that caught our attention at the indie showcase at Gamelab 2023 was the soon-to-be-released Worldless by Noname Studios. Here producer David Sánchez tells us more about their fresh take on the metroidvania genre, including a minimalistic visual style, a story open to different interpretations, void entities, and turn-based combat.

Audio transcription

"We are at Gamelab 2023 in Barcelona and it turns out that the indie area this time around is not a cave with no light and no people this time around is this beautiful place at the pier, like Santa Monica Pier but in Barcelona and we got to talk to the developers and the first game that caught our attention was Worldless which sounds a bit sad in a way but you know it's beautiful in its art and thank you so much for joining us David what can you tell us about the main concept, is it really a sad message that you want to send?
I wouldn't say it's a sad message, I would say it's just a message which is not super clear from the beginning because we want our players to actually understand whatever they want from the game we have a clear idea of what the main story is but we don't want to tell it so we want to see what people understand from it and to do different theories and see what they think about it and the main character is sort of void, so you use that in both terms of narrative and what you want to tell about the character this mystery and also in the gameplay yes, because you have different entities in the world of Worldless and what we use is a very characteristic art style where you don't see the body of the main character and you are doing specific actions like a dash or while you are fighting the enemies and we think it's beautiful and at the same time you can feel that the character is in this world which is kind of empty and where things are not completely created yet, so we feel like it's a really poetic way to show it to show this worldless sort of thing and you platform around and then you have some encounters but then when you have to combat then it turns into a turn based system so what can you tell us about this whole mechanics and the gameplay dynamic?
so the initial idea came actually from games like Final Fantasy where you actually have a combat which is totally turn based but we wanted to have a twist and we wanted something which is actually really action based so what you have is two turns, in the first turn you attack the enemy and you can do combos you can think like games like Devil May Cry where you can make crazy combos and then when your turn is done you have a limited time to attack then the enemy is attacking and you have to defend from different kind of attacks and you can have like magic attacks or you can have physical attacks and you have different ways to defend from this kind of attack so initially it looks really simple but then once you progress the game you see that it's actually quite deep and it's actually quite fun to play and to defend from different attacks of the enemies let me try to understand this, so then you explore the level and then you find these enemies and then perhaps there are bosses, so it's level based and the structure is are the levels pre-designed or there's some random element to it and then how you sort of progress through the story no, there's nothing random, so actually the game is a metroidvania so in the sense that you have to go back and forth, so you have some backtracking in it with new abilities with new abilities, exactly, so you unlock new skills which allow you to enter different areas which were closed initially and also you're going to encounter different bosses so the thing is that with enemies you cannot continue past the enemies until you have actually defeated them so bosses act as kind of like doors, so until you don't defeat them you cannot go through them what's the status of the project, what I saw looked nice, looked like it's working perfectly fine so can we expect a release anytime soon?
soon, I still cannot say when but really soon we're going to announce the release date for the game so the game is basically done and now we're working on porting and we're going to announce pretty soon when Worldless is going to be out in the world you guys have a publisher or are you out of publishing yourselves?
we have a publisher, we are publishing the game with Codesync and with Thunderful and with Thunderful, fantastic and just for those who might not know about your studio, tell us a little bit about the studio and about your background because I know you guys aren't new to videogames precisely so yeah, we are actually quite a small studio yet, we are 7 people right now we were founded in 2021 by 3, I wouldn't say veterans, but people who have been around doing games for a while so our background is from different places, like for example myself, I worked at King for a while and then some of my colleagues they worked in games like Grease or they worked at Mailbot which are also well known here in Barcelona and yeah, we are actually 100% remote at this point we don't really have an office which is something which is not typical but for us it has worked really well and we are here to make the best we can and to release a really cool game you could work from a pier here, you could work here yeah, looks really nice, looking forward to learning more about it hopefully it releases soon and thank you so much for your time David yeah, thank you for your time you"

Gamelab

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