OverNight is an in-development project created by Hessel Bouma (@maankalf) during his HKU internship/mentorship with our team (Fnife Games)!

OverNight follows a young boy who has been transported into a fantasy land of his own imagination. On this journey he’ll meet unique people to befriend, and stumble into strange situations, learning about confidence, responsibility and conflict resolution.

(Plz follow the project here: twitter.com/OverNightIndie)

On Internship

Collaboration:

Across 2020 to early 2021 Hessel completed a 20 week remote-internship with the ShelfLife team (“Fnife Games”, for those in the know) as a component of the HKU University of the Arts Utrecht’s “Games en Interactie” Programme. During this time we were lucky enough to work closely with Hessel on a variety of small tasks and projects, as well as collaborating on content for ShelfLife and content for OverNight: a new RPG in development with Hessel as Project Lead.

We’ve really enjoyed working on the OverNight prototype with Hessel. During the period in which we facilitated the HKU internship with Hessel as our mentee, one of our core goals was assisting in creating the foundations of a project that he would be able to continue developing (in the role of Lead Dev) beyond the limited scope of the internship.

Working together collaboratively, we assisted Hessel with developing a storyworld, characters, a tight plot synopsis and a detailed project bible with which to draw from. A large amount of this process was discussion, consultation, critique and iteration… and lots of Discord conversations! We also spent a decent amount of time working together in Unity to string together an OverNight prototype, which (although full of garbage code and held together with chewing gum and tape) displays a pretty reasonable example of many of the core gameplay features!

Overview

Details:

OverNight is a character driven story about friendship and coming of age. The game follows the story of an inquisitive, spirited boy who runs away from home one night and enters a world of his own imagination, influenced by his real life experiences. He will meet unique people and undertake various adventuresome quests in this fantasy world, in a succinct coming-of-age journey! OverNight is being developed in Unity. It features a top-down pixel artstyle (Pokémon, Stardew Valley), but will combine that with high-definition illustrative graphics in the battle scenes and UI. The game will be around 4 hours in length.

Two of the core themes in this game are diversity and acceptance. Hessel is interested in creating the type of representation and diversity he would have benefited from seeing in games and interactive media as a vulnerable queer adolescent growing up, which is a massive element of our creative intentions behind ShelfLife, too.

Hessel has approached the visual aesthetic of OverNight in a similar fashion to that of ShelfLife. Both games emulate the graphics of older games, but possess the more aware, satirical and punchy tone evident of the storytelling of modern indie games. Hessel’s first console was a Nintendo DS Lite, and his first game was Pokémon Diamond (yes, he makes us feel old), and this made a huge impact on him as an artist. He intends to combine nostalgic and modern elements into something that feels relevant and fresh and inclusive with the OverNight project (something we can definitely relate to as ShelfLife draws on so many Playstation One era influences).

Wowee

Yay, sounds cool:

OverNight is inspired by games such as Undertale, Earthbound and the early Pokémon games, and is intended to appeal to the same kind of folk who enjoy those games. OverNight also caters to queer people, as the game is full of queer characters and themes!

We expect that many/most of the people who are into our ShelfLife project will also enjoy OverNight! It’s an ambitious student-led project with a really solid foundation (and the prototype is already off to a good start).

Thanks for reading! You can follow OverNight here: twitter.com/OverNightIndie
PLUS you can find Hessel’s work at artstation.com/hesselbouma or @maankalf (and also @maankalf)