indiegraze.com

on June 6, 2017

Eye-catching games that successfully combine narrative with surreal, reality-distorting elements don’t come around every day, and Distortions has a growing community watching its development. This week, I chatted with Renaissance man Thiago Girello on the many permutations of the project.

Erik Meyer: The world of distortions quotes our world but is based on memories and mash-ups of people, events, and places. That said, game worlds need a fair amount of continuity and logic, so what do you see as common elements guiding level design and plot development? What processes have you used to make the game complex, rather than confusing?

Thiago Girello: We are huge fans of David Lynch. He builds surreal worlds, but through repetitions and cadences, he creates pillars to sustain his universes. We try to do the same with our game, building a surreal world that has its own logic and systems at play. These rules demonstrate themselves through repetitions and cadences for us, as well, and we don’t break the continuity, knowing that if we did, our world would not feel consistent. So we created a surreal world, but one that at the same time feels very real, since we never break the rules.

EM: Music plays a huge part in the game; the girl carries a violin, and a minigame allows her music to solve puzzles and move objects. Provide some background on this. What kinds of planning did the sound interface involve, and how would you place it in relation to your overall goals for Distortions?

TG: It’s not a puzzle game, but the player shapes the world with music. The player can play the violin in real time at any moment in any place and create effects with it. These effects can be used on the environment or against the enemies, as well.

Each player will find different ways to survive in the world; it’s not a very scripted game.

There are 2 ways to play the violin. The first one, where you create these skills, and the second one called “free to play”. In free to play mode, the world can “hear” what you play. We use free to play to present a few hurdles for the players.

Music is very important for the main character, so as the player learns more about how to play the violin, the main character will evolve in psychologically.

EM: Locations are striking and range from primal, almost prehistoric landscapes to modern office buildings and the like. What kinds of asset standards did you use to maintain a consistent visual feel throughout the environs? Similarly, what parts of the game feel clean and polished to you, and where are you still working?

TG: There are 2 worlds that coexist, the alternative world and the white world. The alternative world is a strange place with huge landscapes where you can explore mountains, caves, and lakes. Time there has stopped in the face of an imminent collapse.

The white world has modern architecture and feels more familiar for the girl. The masked man is the only person who lives there.

The player can travel between these 2 world in real time and needs to use this ability at some moments during the game to survive or to reach different locations.

EM: You’ve been working on Distortions for years, so let’s speak to that a bit. Among Giants is based in Brazil, so what have you taken from your challenges and learning experiences along the way? How has dev culture where you’re located impacted the project, and what has helped you the most in the last few years?

TG: Most of the team is Brazilian, but our programmer hails from California!

The game scene here in Brazil is really small, but it´s starting to grow. When we first started Distortions, there were way less developers.

We’ve never had major issues related to development, especially because when we first started Distortions, the idea was not to finish the game. We just wanted to gather close friends and make a game that we really wanted to play and try to experiment with new things related to game media. So the whole process was very lightweight, and we never really had any huge problems with production.

I think that’s one of the reasons why we never gave up on the project during the last 8 years. Making Distortions was always a fun time with friends.

EM: You’re publishing the game as chapters; what do you see as the advantages of serial publication rather than releasing everything all at once? Certainly, a number of games have successfully used the installment model (Bendy and the Ink Machine, Orwell, The Dream Machine, to name a few), but what advantages do you see releasing Distortions in parts?

TG: We just wanted to release Distortions in chapters because we knew that it was a huge project for such a small team. But in the middle of the process, we realized it would be impossible to impart to the players what we really wanted to say through chapters. You need to play the game for some hours to understand our intentions. And if we had divided the game into chapters, we would have lost this.

Especially the modular gameplay. The game would not have a identity and would feel kind of confusing.
So we decided to make a core game, and if sales go well, we can release the other parts as dlcs.
I like games as chapters with less hours of gameplay from a sales point of view, especially for older people like me who don´t have a lot of hours to spend gaming.

EM: You’ve created a number of tools to help enable smaller teams as they build larger projects (easy camera, fast light, ready voxel worlds, and the decomposing world shader and scripts). As a small team, how has the creation of these assets sped your progress with Distortions, and what do you see as obstacles to progress for smaller teams, in general?

TG: The Distortion tool was created especially to make games similar to Distortions. So they speed up the process of making natural environments, aid in changing the gameplay perspective (like sidescrolling, fps, top down), help to build realistic lighting, assist in importing external data from vray, streamline the mass animation of natural movements (whiteout moving any vertex), and create and decompose a lot of meshes and levels in real time. There are some cool things that speed up the pipeline process.

So in the end, the Distortions tool is a collection of all the pipeline processes and tools that we created over these 8 years.

In my opinion, the biggest obstacle for indies isn’t production but marketing. It’s been super hard for us to spread the word about our game. And it’s getting harder every day, with more and more games going to Steam.

EM: I’m curious about the masked creatures and the kinds of interactions players can expect. The trailer shows us a Godzilla-sized version and a nearly-invisible chap playing the guitar, and you mention influence from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on your site, so I’m imagining them as guides of a sort. How did you come to include the creatures, and as they’re a visually unusual part of the game, what do you aim to provoke in players?

TG: There are some unconventional folks in the world of Distortions.

Each character serves a different purpose for the girl, but they are all connected through the music.
The masked ones are stranger creatures that live inside dark caves. They are blind but possess acute hearing. They are super fast and aggressive. So if they spot you, it’s time to run. They have a pack mentality, as well, so most of the time, they will attack you in groups.

There is a violin skill called “silence”. This skill distorts all sounds near the player, and it´s a good way to lose track of the masked ones.

The monster (the giant creature that you saw on the trailer), is familiar somehow for the girl and remains linked with the guy playing the acoustic guitar.

The guitarist lives alone in the white world. He acts and talks in a way that looks like he is part of some sort of memory; he helps the player to remember about music.

Another interesting character is the writer. The player finds the journal of a traveler with quotes and thoughts about the world that work as a guide, providing directions for where to travel.

EM: Distortions includes open world elements and a high degree of satisfaction through exploration and narrative meshed with discovery. Now that you’re putting the game out into the world, what kinds of responses have you been getting? As you push ahead with development, how do you find yourselves interacting with the online community? Have you gotten suggestions or feedback that has surprised you?

TG: I love to climb mountains, so you can expect a lot of contemplative moments in Distortions, along with a road trip feel.

To be honest, people have been very positive. But there are a lot of people who don’t understand the game. They are kind confused, saying that the game don’t fit in any genre. Some people think that it’s a puzzle game; other people think we’re making a walking simulator or a Guitar Hero game.

Since the beginning of the project, we’ve been worried about the rhythm of the gameplay. We always wanted gameplay to follow the script, and we try to make it better approach the feeling that the script needs. And you can see these shifts in pace, not just in the mechanics, but in the narrative, as well. Some parts are more open world, others are more linear. We try to explore different genres like drama, suspense, action, and adventure, using these nuances to further the experience.

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Here’s the trailer, in case you missed it: