We like to say that our teams at Piccolo Studio “build” games. We believe video games are the most powerful medium in which to tell a story – and as Game Directors, Jordi Ministral and I love to tell it through what makes the medium special: gameplay.
We have released Arise: A simple story three years ago and together with Private Division we are launching our newest game tomorrow May 23rd, After U.S.
Arise: A simple story was a gentle lullaby that played with time mechanics to explore the memories of an elderly man who had recently died. Well, building on practical experience, After U.S comes closer to a conceptual opera. It’s a story of heritage and hope, through epic and atmospheric landscapes. It tells the story of Gaia, a little nymph. She explores a metaphorical, surrealistic version of our earth – where humans have corrupted all life forms – in search of the salvation of the souls of extinct animals.
It is difficult to customize due to our game design process After U.S in a certain genre. It’s a mix of platformer, puzzle solving and action. But the individual nature of these elements and the way they are assembled are far outside of genre conventions.
“It’s on purpose. The way we design games is primarily about the feelings and emotions we want to portray. As we delve into execution, we find game mechanics that make it stand out. Then we place them in an organic, artistically rendered world and spend hours refining everything until it all fits together nicely,” says Jordi.
Sometimes, and this is more common in video games than we think, the potion we brewed doesn’t work and you have to start over. But most of the time that’s the case, and here at Piccolo we strive to come up with ideas that go against the traditional rules of game design.
The whaling case study
Let’s take an example! Gaia’s goal is to save the souls of the last extinct animals, including a majestic humpback whale. We want players to feel what this whale might have felt in its final moments. feeling hunted. To do this, we place the action on the seabed of a dry ocean. On the ground and above lie the remains of huge, rusting oil ships, hovering in the air. Gaia is surrounded by patches of toxic oil that taints the sea floor. She starts to run. Then huge harpoons begin to fall from the sky, targeting Gaia as she approaches them. Pure panic ensues.
Conventional design would clearly define when the harpoons are triggered, how they attack, and what you can do to avoid them. “That’s what games are based on, but that’s not how a whale feels when it’s being hunted.” She doesn’t understand what’s happening. Harpoons keep throwing themselves at her as Gaia runs and jumps. Danger is not something she can control or predict!” Jordi explains.
In fact, we intentionally blurred the way harpoons trigger, how they move and attack. There is no clear pattern for avoiding them. Sometimes you don’t see them coming. And yes, sometimes they kill the player without them fully understanding what happened. We know this raises a lot of red flags in traditional design, but if approached with care, it works. When this is the case, it is far more effective than any traditional approach. Because of the (apparent) lack of clear rules, the players feel how they might feel in such a situation.
We like to be inspired by other media, such as films, novels or comics. So for this “scene” we referred to the famous final scene from Akira Kurosawa’s film Throne of Blood, where a lone character is shot at with arrows by a huge army. We wanted to recreate the same somber sense of inevitable danger, unpredictable impacts, and the nail-biting pace of attacks.
Emotional instead of mechanical rewards
But it’s not just about dangers, enemies or specific scenes. We defy traditional game design in a broader sense: the game offers players emotional rather than mechanical rewards.
After U.S has 8 main animal souls for you to find and rescue, but there are an additional 100 “optional” souls for you to free. In saving an animal’s soul, specimens of this species populate and enliven the world. In order to free a soul, one must explore the mysterious world of the soul After U.Ssinging to find out where it is hidden or solving environmental puzzles.
But freeing them does nothing from a mechanical point of view. “No points, no powers, no XP. The reward for freeing an animal soul is… freeing an animal soul! And experience a world full of roaming animals,” says Jordi with a smile.
For us, and hopefully for many players, this design works. After all, what better reward than an emotional one?
After U.S Coming to Xbox Series X|S on May 23rd.
