Nunaka
Client: Chugachmiut
Camai! After you walk through a beautiful forest and settle by the campfire, your grandfather teaches you how to fish, while a bear waits for you to collect berries. Your adventures in Nunaka have just begun.
Chugachmiut, an Alaskan Native Tribal consortium, collaborated with FableVision to create Nunaka, a fun and engaging mobile game exploring Sugpiaq heritage, the Sugt'stun language, and key school readiness goals for 3-5-year-olds.
In the story-driven game, players take on the role of a Sugpiaq child living with their grandparents, Emaa and Apaa, in a fictionalized version of a community based on Sugpiaq villages in the Chugach region. Nunaka contains four episodes, each representing a day in the child’s life. After players create an avatar, they explore the village, completing activities and minigames, while collecting items and interacting with other residents of the village, including human characters and animals from the region. At the end, players receive a scrapbook summarizing the activities and learnings of the day.
Nunaka has a unique look and feel with both 2D and 3D graphics. Artists created an immersive 3D game world and textured animal characters with a handmade look, bringing out the natural beauty of Alaska. To ensure that the art style from the 2D world stayed consistent in the 3D world, developers wrote a custom shader. A pipeline was created between the 3D modelers, animators, and developers to take characters from 3D modeling programs and add them into the game.
FableVision made sure that the content and art accurately reflected the nuances of the culture. Every detail was strategically chosen, researched, and double checked with culture and language experts, community elders, and Head Start students.
Nunaka is now available as a mobile app for phones and tablets — download today on iOS and Google Play.
A Peek Inside
Product: 2D/3D Mobile game
Age Range: 3-5-year-olds
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