Hi! This is Nils from Daedalic Entertainment, publisher of Children of Silentown, I’m here today to share how that idea evolved into today’s game – a full-fledged title by a small group of people in their free time from their full-time jobs in software development and YouTube content creation. Originally developed as an animated short, Elf Games and Francesca of Luna2 Studio worked together to bring it Children of Silentown into the interactive medium. The passion that this team radiates is contagious and slowly but steadily flows into the project over the years. Check out the Making Of video below to hear directly from the team. Even Jack the punk can’t wait to share it with everyone! Meet him and the team in the Making Of video embedded at the top of this post.
Piero, the team’s programmer, shares that “at Elf Games, we spent four years of our free time creating it Children of Silentown. It’s a game that some would say is a hauntingly beautiful point and click adventure game, but see for yourself. We’re very proud of that. But we are not full-time developers: Elf Games instead develops video games outside of business hours as their members are already busy with their software development company.”
Children of Silentown is certainly a point-and-click adventure, but the team wouldn’t say it’s a conventional one. Most traditional point-and-click methods focus on finding elements and combining them at the right time. Elf Games has of course taken these elements, but also combined them with elements from other classic adventure games. For example, they were inspired by one shot and A bird story, especially the camera view that allows for more exploration and the quest-like structure in some parts. In addition, the game features song-based mechanics that tie directly into the story. By using songs, the player unlocks situations and puzzles. Each of these songs is linked to a themed mini-game that adds variety to the gameplay.
The short version of the how Children of Silentown came like this: at the end of 2018, Francesca, known on YouTube as Fraffrog, showed Fabiola and Piero an original short film that she created for her channel but never published. She asked them what they thought of it and was delighted, they told her it would be perfect for a video game.
Children of Silentown is a game about Lucy, a girl who lives in a city surrounded by a forest inhabited by monsters. From such a simple concept, the team tried to create a story that could live on many levels. They wanted to create a story where each piece could be an additional piece of the player’s puzzle, to help them unveil how the city and forest came to be.
“Video games are a powerful passion where we feel like we can bring our skills and creativity together. We’ve spent the last four years building this project in our free time, mostly on weekends, so development has been slow but steady. Dedicating yourself to such a long project is not easy, but we really believed that we could make it happen,” Francesca recalls.
That’s how it started, and like many projects, the original plan was to do a small, simple project. But things changed very quickly. After releasing a short demo and being amazed at how well it was received, we decided it was worth making a bigger project out of it, enough to really bring out the characters and story of the world of Silentown.
It makes sense that the development of Children of Silentown would also be a bit unusual, as was its original conception. The team worked diligently to not only fulfill our vision for the story, but to make the game something bigger than we initially envisioned. Many people today have multiple jobs or hobbies that they pursue, this is the case children of silenttown, that we love to share with the world. We hope you can all see what a labor of love it was and that you all enjoy playing it as much as we enjoyed making it.
Children of Silentown is now available for Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S!
Children of Silentown
Daedal entertainment
$19.99
“Join Lucy and her friends in this dark, beautifully hand-drawn adventure game. Lucy is afraid of the forest, just like any other child: every night the echoing roar robs her of sleep. Even her dreams are not a safe place to play. Disappearances are not uncommon in the village, but this time Lucy is old enough to investigate on her own, or so she thinks Explore the town and its dangerous surroundings, meet its quirky residents, solve puzzles and master mini-games Join Lucy on her adventure to get to the bottom of what’s haunting the strange Silentown…if you dare. ”
