Interview: Chiaro and the Elixir of Life’s Jay Rosenkrantz
With stellar graphics and film sensibilities, Chiaro and the Elixir of Life: A Virtual Reality Adventure has been turning heads, bringing players to a magical world as a young engineer seeking the secrets of the Alchemists. With a Kickstarter campaign underway, I chatted with Martov, Co Game Director and Co-Founder Jay Rosenkrantz on the inner workings of the project.
Erik Meyer: Chiaro and the Elixir of Life drops players into a magical ream in which the secrets of the ancients bring machines to life. Locations include striking art and a careful use of space, making scenes feel balanced. Similarly, variety within the NPCs (Boka, the steam-powered penguin and Scoria, a living machine, not to mention a pig that seeks peanut butter) creates a fun, anything-can-happen feel. As devs, what does your process of balancing the different aspects of the project look like, and regarding game narrative, what philosophy guides you?
Jay Rosenkrantz: Our process has constantly evolved, from when Chiaro was just an idea between me and Martin about a young man bringing a steam-powered penguin to life, to now, years later, with a full team of artists and engineers all contributing their unique touches to the experience. We want to deliver meaningful story, enchanting characters, and fun gameplay all inside the highly detailed world of Neverain, so each of these factors are weighed carefully in our decisions.
Our team has a lot of creative freedom to tap into their incredible imaginations and decide what features they want to pour their own passions into, so long as these features are in service of the story and the player’s enjoyment. Without this passionate spark from our developers, the game wouldn’t come alive. With it, the result is truly magic.
In terms of narrative, the story has to be clear and feel significant to all the characters and the player. As a player, you need to understand the basics on a simple level in order to invest yourself: who am I, what do I want, why am I trying to do this, what’s at stake for me if I fail? Why does the Peanut Butter Pig love peanut butter so much, why does Ellary, who works with machinery, hate alive machines so much? What is Scoria pursuing, how does she feel about Boka’s creation and your presence in her world? Every character needs a reason for being there, and the player should be able to get a sense of that. You can use the tools of game design and the strengths of VR to bring these concepts out and make them felt. Adding a bit of interactivity to the narrative draws you in even more deeply, and when you’re watching a scene between two characters, you should be compelled to watch; the action needs to be so interesting and magnetic that you won’t want to look away.
But the simple guiding light for us has always been, this is a story about you, the player, in a mysterious and enchanting world, and your relationship with this alive machine you designed and will build and bring to life. We want you to feel that and have worked hard to give that story a ton of heart.
EM: The game is being created for VR (Vive and Oculus), so how do you see the hardware and the technical aspects of the platform informing the game experience? What unique advantages do you see these VR headsets offering, and how do you see this changing medium impacting narrative?
JR: Chiaro and the Elixir of Life is, for us, a statement on what can be possible for adventure in virtual reality. We have been working hard round the clock since we first tried VR technology several years ago, when the dream of being inside an experience that felt like a movie from Studio Ghibli or a game like the Legend of Zelda became too tantalizing to ignore.
VR offers an unprecedented level of immersion, where your hands and your body become the new controller, and wherever you want to go you can go, whatever you want to touch you can touch and feel. Now that we can step inside the narrative and participate, we’re closer than ever to experiencing stories as if they were actually happening to us, whether we are the protagonist, or the sidekick, or even the antagonist. We’re at the very beginning stages of what may be possible, and for Martov Co, it’s been exciting to explore this frontier when there really are no rules and players are hungry for new experiences.
In Chiaro, you can ride an elevator through the treetops fashioned like a giant birdcage in the style of a Faberge egg, you can row a boat through peaceful Blue Crab Lake, or acquire the Janus Knife and cut portals open to traverse a mountain with Boka. You can also play a game of catch with Boka, who responds in real time with a variety of catches worthy of an ESPN highlight reel. Since the medium of VR is so new, none of these mechanics have ever been attempted before, or put in the service of an epic adventure story. So the appeal of the technology to do all of this is extremely alluring to us, and we have had a tremendous amount of fun.
EM: The game incorporates an arsenal of tools for players and offers puzzles as challenges, so can you give an example of a challenging, well-implemented puzzle? What roles do you see them serving in the overall gameplay? And how do you prevent a minigame from changing the pace of the experience?
JR: With a game that has 3-5 hours of playtime and is divided into roughly 12 chapters, pacing is very important. We want the experience to always feel like it is moving forward, even while players are free to explore and discover small interactions, hidden coin collectibles, or even little minigames like fishing or a classic game of snail hoop at Machu Peakoo. We’ve been quite relentless in the pursuit of good pacing and rely on playtesters to show us when moments could be tighter, are too difficult, or too easy.
I don’t want to spoil any puzzles for the players, but I will say that looking around your environments, thinking about the tools you have, and interacting with the clues that are presented to you are key to progressing. We have constantly sought to build on what you know as the game progresses. You could begin Chiaro and the Elixir of Life never having played a VR game at all before, and go on a journey from building an alive machine (which doubles as a tutorial for basic interactions), to ascending a deadly tower filled with fire-breathing salamanders, dodging danger with your body while expertly making shots with the Janus Knife and cutting portals like a pro.
EM: I note Jay’s background as a film producer and the game’s high level of production values, which includes a voice acting cast, so which aspects of your project feel similar to the work involved in movies/animation, and where does it move solidly into the videogame world?
JR: Making Chiaro has been like making a fully independent blockbuster 3d animated adventure movie, except it’s also interactive and experienced entirely in virtual reality. So storyboarding and creating animatics to prototype animated sequences are tools that we use frequently, as well as traditional outlines for chapters, budgeting and scenario planning, writing screenplay, and dialogue, as well as working with actors, editing trailers, and staging cinematic sequences.
Several years ago, my co-founders and I began a period of intense learning in Unreal Engine, working to figure out how to integrate every aspect of coding and game design into cinematic quality productions. We were like babies learning to crawl, playing with blocks and trying to figure out how to make them work to build a kingdom of castles. The tools to communicate narrative are different in interactive entertainment than they are in film or television, so as a creator, you need to choose which tools fit the experience best in order to get the story across in an engaging way. Then you need to realize you are making a virtual reality experience, so throw out everything you think you know and embrace this new medium and make something nobody has ever seen before. To that end, we used tools like Tilt Brush and Quill to get inside the scene and draw ideas in VR, in order to inspire our prototypes in Unreal Engine.
EM: The team’s varied experiences include high stakes poker playing, so how do you see alternate skill sets and life paths working their way into your current work?
JR: Martin and I both had big careers as high stakes poker players in our 20s, and more than anything, that created a mutual respect between us and a deep understanding of what it takes to compete at a high level at a pursuit that’s incredibly challenging and complex. We learned valuable lessons about how to balance work with life, about how to deal with dozens of variables at once, prioritizing factors that can often become emotional, keeping level heads under pressure, and making quick decisions with so many unknown variables. Playing lots of poker teaches you to learn to evaluate those decisions afterwards, independent of your results: was the decision to do X, Y, or Z a good one? Or did you make a mistake in the moment? How can you do better going forward and avoid repeating your mistakes? These elements of poker inform strategic thinking about everything, whether it’s how to build a flourishing VR studio or whether or not our story is working or our polygon count is too high in the forest.
EM: You have a Kickstarter in progress, and indie games have changed over the last few years, as have the ways they’ve been funded, so what do you see as the strong points of crowdfunding, and from the campaign’s launch, what have you seen as must-dos?
JR: We were actually inspired meeting Cloudhead Games at Steam Dev Days, who told us that their Kickstarter for The Gallery was invaluable in building a small community of players who were extremely excited about their game and even became champions for it in the wider world. Since the VR games community is still small, we really value our early supporters who are showing us that they are psyched for our team to finish the game and want to play it; it inspires us to work even harder to deliver a final experience that is highly polished.
In terms of must-dos, producing some great high resolution art to show off the game has certainly helped, and we have been focusing very hard on creating a final launch trailer that will show off the scope of what we have been making in a big way, and I think that when we release this trailer, it will excite people more than ever before. With a Kickstarter, there is so much content out there in our lives that you really need to reach out personally to people you think could be excited about what you’re doing, knock on those digital doors and introduce yourself as a passionate creator.
EM: You’ve taken the game to a number of festivals and won the 2017 NVIDIA Edge Program Prize for excellence in aesthetic achievement, which underscores the fact that you’ve gotten a fair number of eyes on your work. From technical critiques to gameplay mechanic tweaking, what kinds of responses have been helpful, and which have surprised you?
JR: Every single response any player has ever given us playing Chiaro and the Elixir of Life has been helpful in some way. Players are constantly surprising us, so we really can’t get enough playtesting. Every month since the early days of development, we have taken Chiaro to Gameplay Space’s playtesting night in Montreal, where we’ve been able to watch players do things we never would have expected in our game. So taking the game to events like this, to some of these great festivals, watching what players do and thinking about why they did it has been invaluable to making Chiaro better and deeper.
If you think it’s too early to show your game in public, I would argue that it’s probably never too early, because the earlier players get their hands on it, the more ideas you will have to make it even better. To get specific about Chiaro, it took us a very long time to get the rowboat at Blue Crab Lake right, and that was a direct result of testing it with players and surveying how they felt about the speeds, acceleration, turning, and overall comfort.
For developers, I think it’s key to not ask players whether or not they liked what they played (especially since people who have just played your game will want to please you and find it hard to be completely objective), but instead to ask players what moments frustrated them the most, and then work hard to turn those pain points into strengths.
EM: The game takes place in Neverain, which leads me to a favorite topic: world building. In order to maintain internal consistency, devs often create a great deal more backstory than will find its way into the final release, so can you describe the history, social hierarchies, and overall thrust of the game universe’s technologies, moving beyond the Alive Machines and the Alchemists – what else drives this world, and what has been lost?
JR: Neverain is a world where long ago, humans, who were mostly farmers and engineers, found Elixir, which flowed endlessly from a great Fountain, where the fireweed flower grew. They discovered that this Elixir, when heated, could be used to bring machines to life. This discovery became the basis for the science known as machines-to-life alchemy. Together, humans and the Alive Machines they created built an amazing civilization, including architectural marvels, an underwater network to transport the Elixir, and scientific discoveries on the arcane properties of the Elixir. A watchful Guild of Alchemists was established to oversee the valuable Elixir, but over time, they began to abuse their power as creators, and the Alive Machines began to feel that perhaps humans should not be the ones in control of their life source. A war erupted between the Guild and the Neverain Resistance, who opposed the Guild’s aggression, and their corrupt and greedy leader. The death toll in this war was catastrophic, and when it was finally over, humans hunted down the last alive machines and sealed their sacred Fountain.
It’s into this post-war world that players enter, playing Chiaro, a young engineer and a child of the Resistance, who learned how to make Alive Machines at a young age from his parents, without the help of the Alchemists. Left alone in the world after his parents’ deaths, Chiaro decides to bring a new machine called Boka to life, vowing to not make the same mistakes as the Alchemists. But there are several forces in Neverain who also have survived the war and have their own views about the sealing of the Fountain of Elixir and the purpose of the Elixir of Life…
In case you missed it, here’s the trailer:
