Over the last 5 years, Acre Shore has been through a lot of iterations. The original narrative syntax has improved and expanded a lot in that time.

The 'code' behind the story

The language now has a name: NML (Narrative Markup Language), although it has evolved into more than a simple markup language. NML is now a hybrid language, incorporating logic to allow for more dynamic stories to be told in our interactive narrative engine.

We've also been building a handy NML editor to both improve the in-house development of Acre Shore and provide a much nicer experience for custom story creators when the game is released!

As you can see, the game's art style has also changed quite a lot over the years. From the questionable "MS paint" style character art that we used before to a much cleaner style based on classic cell animation over painted backgrounds.

Behind the art

The new Acre Shore art style features backgrounds painted digitally in Procreate. The characters are also initially drawn in Procreate, but then taken into Adobe Illustrator to be vectorised.

Although all character sprites in Acre Shore are raster graphics, the vector pass allows us to clean up our line work and colours for a truly clean look.

What do you think of the upgrades we've made since we last checked in?