[Blog] The Various Homes of Liao

You may all already know a lot about Liao's apartment in Taipei-it's where the story of Nekojishi begins after all. But we wanted to share some more details about background and area of this location in this blog!

The scenes of Nekojishi take place in many real-life locations. In fact many players have tracked down these locations to places in Taipei. For example the mirror wall used by the Dance Club to practice is a famous location inside the campus of National Chengchi University (NCCU), located in suburban Taipei.

Map showing the location of NCCU and Ximen Ding, where Senpai and Liao went for a date.

Photo of Mirror Wall in the real world, compared to the background art in Nekojishi.

We never set an exact location for Liao's apartment to be, but we think of it as being in the southern suburbs of Taipei,  i.e., Xindian or Wenshan Dist. The southern suburb of the city is surrounded by mountains filled with wild animals, including leopard cats (Guess that's one of the reasons why Senpai wants to hang out there all the time?).

The majority of residential buildings were built before 90s so they can be quite dated both inside and outside. There wasn't any background art describing how it looks outside the apartment in Nekojishi but if you're a patron at the World Tourist tier or above you'll get an early look at an artwork of the outside stairwell of Liao's apartment which will be featured in an upcoming project. (Be sure to check the corresponding concept art post out if you haven't yet!)

Typical Street in Taiwan

Typical Alley in Taiwan

Old Residential Building with Iron Window Grills 

Although it's not mentioned in the game, we think of Liao's apartment as being located on the second floor. The unit itself is a small studio with an attached bathroom. Since the apartment is the main location where a lot of the story happens, we mocked up a 3D model of the interior to help our artists and keep all the background elements consistent between them.

Interior Layout of Liao's apartment

However, there were some changes made to the reference layout when it came time to start making the assets. For example, Liao's bathroom doesn't comply to the above image. Bathtubs are less popular in Taiwan, and the shower gave mode depth to the scene so we stuck with that. The room itself looks a lot longer and wider to help fully make use of the 4:3 aspect ratio of the game.

Liao's bathroom in Nekojishi

Liao's hometown, frequently mentioned by Lin Hu, his dad, and older brother, is a place never shown in the game except for the CG in Lin Hu's traditional ending. It's never revealed in the game but we set this place to be in Tainan, the oldest city and the capital city of Taiwan in Dutch colonial era and Qing dynasty.

Location of Tainan on Taiwan Island

Unlike Taipei which is a typical modern city, Tainan is much more traditional and traditional Chinese religions are popular there. Temples are everywhere and pious people tend to engage in different religious activities. As patron gods, guardian tigers are frequently involved in such activities too, which also lends this minor deity to be popular in the area.

Watch a traditional ceremony involving guardian tigers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCZc6yN5H5s 

A CG from Nekojishi, showing Lin Hu and Liao during a ceremony.

The temple served by Liao's family is based on Beigang Chaotian Temple and Xingang Fengtian Temple, two major mazu temples in Taiwan established during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Xingang Fengtian Temple is also the only temple which enshrines their guardian tiger on the table, and not under it. That's also the reason we chose this place as a reference.

Wikipedia of Beigang Chaotian Temple:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaotian_Temple

Wikipedia of Xingang Fengtian Temple (in Chinese only):

 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%96%B0%E6%B8%AF%E5%A5%89%E5%A4%A9%E5%AE%AE 

In the story of project Carmacks, Liao and the three cats move to a new place to start a business. Unlike in Nekojishi, scenes in Carmacks are not exactly based on real places so we have more freedom to design the gameplay and screenplay. But we'll have more to share on this in the future I'm sure!

This new place has three floors with a small courtyard out the back, so you can imagine it's quite the upgrade from Liao's old apartment building. (Shu-Chi's the one paying for the place after all) We've included some concept art for the outside of the building if you're at the World Tourist tier or higher this month.

An IKEA-inspired shark plush in the new place of Liao and cats (scene work WIP). 

Side note but coincidentally this shark fellow can be found on the Divine Battles Chapter 5 - Page 28!

In fact, the new house of Liao and cats is not quite an ordinary style in Taiwan. However, stand-alone houses do have a significant presence in Taiwan just like apartments. Traditional stand-alone houses are called “tou tian cuo”, literally means “house with a rooftop”. Different than the term in English, “tou town cuo” can also refer to terraced houses, where buildings adjacent to each other closely, but not sharing any public area. This type of houses is more commonly seen in southern Taiwan, were more population living in suburban areas.

And that's the end of this blog! We hope you enjoyed this little insight to the scene setting Nekojishi!  We'll have a new poll up soon so Oracle patrons and higher will be able to decide our next topic! 👏