Once Upon a Glitch

Welcome to our game page! We are the Daylight Animation Studio team, and we are currently developing the game "Once Upon a Glitch"!

"Once Upon a Glitch" is our new, and quite unusual project, inspired by the aesthetics of the 2000s and cartoons from the end of the last century – the renaissance of classical animation. The visual design combines meticulously crafted hand-drawn animation with cinematic live-action footage, complete with a whole bunch of vintage props, taking us back to the retro era(yep, 2000s are "retro" now)…


The project is being developed in our free time by creative people who know what they doing – talented animators, programmers, and musicians with extensive experience in their fields, and a great passion for the project, even for the seemingly insignificant details (although there is no detail too small for us).

In terms of gameplay mechanics, it's sort of an homage to early adventure games like "Neverhood", "Myst", "The 7th Guest", "Monkey Island", and other more recent indie projects.

The game's plots (shortly) unfolds like this:
At the beginning of the third millennium, technology is taking world by storm.
Everything is becoming digital. Computers are everywhere. IT industry is bathing in its glory.
Here we see SuperMegaSoft corporation. A software giant. Corporation of epic proportions. Worldwide magnate.
Of course, by pure intentional coincidence, this is where our protagonist, the Professor, works.

Today's very important day.
He's preparing to breath life into his ultimate masterpiece!
At the control room, his faithful, long-time assistant and old friend, Mr. Enter Deletmann waiting for the experiment to launch.

But something doesn't go as planned, and instead of a grand finale of hard workday and big fat pay-check, our scientist friend is faced an incredible adventure and journey through a wonderful new world, during which he will encounter amazing creatures and… well, try to find his way home, along with some answers to new world's countless mysteries...

First-person movement in the laboratory levels (for the human world) is filmed on real camera (in a best traditions of the FMV genre)

We have several hours of source live-action footage filmed for the game.

But wait... the virtual world appears before us in completely different colors...

Animated characters are drawn using classical animation. In addition, some clever processing algorithms are applied to them to give them a more dimensional, livelike appearance.

In total, there are more than 380 pages of various monologues and dialogues for the characters were written and fully voiced to give the characters maximum liveliness and believability.

Most of the backgrounds and textures are done using colored pencils or watercolor techniques.

The game combines both levels with a classic third-person view, and pseudo-3D ones, with a Professor's point of view. There are a considerable number of levels where you need to drive some vehicles, operate various mechanisms, and also solve various kinds of puzzles.

Stay tuned, there is more to come!