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BBC MUNDO RADIO
Nostalgia runs deep in today’s indie game development scene, from Minecraft’s blocky textures to the old school platformer escapades of Super Meat Boy. And when a developer combines those comforting “jaggies” with a new and truly unique experience, that’s when gamers begin to drool.
This recipe is what first drew us to Sword & Sworcery, a forthcoming iOS adventure game from Superbrothers, an “ambiguously pluralized art and design organization in Toronto.” The project was made in conjunction with Capy, a Toronto-based game studio.
But we didn’t discover it on some indie gaming message board or an insider blog. It emerged from the ether on a handful of cryptic tweets — little updates emanating from those in the know who were already enjoying an advanced release.
So what is Sword & Sworcery? Good question.
On its face, the game looks like an homage to those early Sierra Entertainment titles, where you guide your pixelated hero via text commands. Mix that aesthetic with some Legend of Zelda-style questing, a dose of humor, and a tactile control scheme made especially for the iPad, and you’re getting closer to what S&S is all about. Throw in a dynamic ambient music system, optional Twitter integration, and some sweet arcade style combat, and you’re almost there.
Confused yet? We were too. Luckily, the game’s creator/artist/animator Craig D. Adams came to our aid with some insights into Sworcery’s development and upcoming release.
Interview With Craig D. Adams of Superbrothers
Sworcery crosses a lot of traditional genre boundaries and can be hard to describe. How do you sum up the game when you’re explaining it to people?
For a while we were referring to it as a “brave experiment in input output cinema,” lately we’ve been calling it “the archetypical video game adventure,” [and] on the App Store our description refers to it as “an exploratory action adventure with an emphasis on audiovisual style.”
Really, the best way to get it across is just for people to see some of the artwork and get a sense for the songs and the moods they evoke. We’re hoping that’s enough to intrigue people to discover what’s actually inside.
What did you set out to achieve when you started creating it, and how did that mission evolve?
We knew from the get-go that we were going to try to make something a little unusual, so right away that makes the project experimental, creatively and commercially. We also knew going in what the aesthetic was going to be — an extension of the Superbrothers style I’ve been developing for a few years now. We also knew that Jim [Guthrie]‘s music and a fresh approach to sound were going to be the soul of the project. The Archetype character, the dude in the suit who greets you and guides you, was there from the start as a Carl Jung + Terence McKenna + Rod Serling type who is conducting an experiment upon the audience. Still, it took us awhile to figure out what all this actually meant for the nuts and bolts of the experience, and that’s where Capy’s design experience came in, with Capy’s creative director Kris Piotrowski acting as co-designer and helping to shape things.
Sworcery’s music isn’t just for ambiance. Can you talk about why it’s so integral to the gameplay?
I love me some music, and I’ve been a Jim Guthrie fan for years and years. I think he’s awesome. Right after my first Superbrothers illustration gig back in 2004, I sent some pixels to him via his record company Three Gut Records and Jim was nice enough to get in touch and send me a record’s worth of unreleased made-in-Playstation compositions. The songs were amazing and the tone seemed really in tune with what I was trying to do with the pixels, so I went ahead and made a music video for Jim’s song “Children of the Clone.” Basically, I was just trying to communicate what was awesome about the song by wrapping it up in some visuals and a concept.
That was also the starting point for Sword & Sworcery — we had the aesthetic concept, the archetypical Legend of Zelda and Conan vibe to draw from, and then Jim sent over some tunes he thought might fit, and I tried to paint the ideas those songs inspired. As we moved forward, things went back and forth, with us creating a narrative or visual concept and Jim dropping a song on top, but the goal was always to get the art + music + narrative concept to resonate. So yeah, there are cases where the music connects to the actual mechanics, but even outside of those cases, the music is the core of the whole experience.
Why iOS and not PC?
I go way back with Apple. After messing around with things on the Commodore 64, I really got into art and animation on the Mac Classic with Hypercard. When Jobs got things back into gear and they launched the iPod, I really dug it. I remember thinking, “this is the form factor and these are the designers to create the mobile video game console of the future.” When they launched the iPhone, I was in the video game industry doing PS3 type stuff, but I was conscious that the iPhone was “it” — a design that would last — and their high level approach to the App Store was a revelation compared to the licensing, publishing and distribution headaches on other platforms.
When I met the Capy dudes back in 2009, they had some experience with the platform and we wanted to make something small that would find an audience, and the iPhone was a natural choice. From the start, our approach was, “what would be the perfect experience on this little machine, how can we design something that fits it like a glove?” When the iPad popped up, it was natural for us to explore the idea of scaling our hard-edged pixels, and it’s a real treat on that machine, too.
Personally, I don’t spend any entertainment time on desktop machines or laptops, and of course, the expectations are quite different on those platforms. But with iOS, it feels like a smaller, more laid-back, more relaxed audiovisual-heavy experience is just about right.
Not a lot has been written about the game’s Twitter integration, but it has a social component that encourages spontaneity. How does Twitter fit in as you play Sworcery?
Right near the start, you’re invited to sign in to your Twitter account. All of the text — dialog, hints, descriptions — have been written to fit within the 140 character limit (including a #sworcery tag), and all of it can (optionally) be broadcast.
I feel like social network integration is anathema to the video game enthusiast crowd, for good reason — it’s usually clumsy, worthless or spam-tastic. So this aspect hasn’t been something we’ve been playing up. But in our case, I think people will probably dig it. Our approach was, “How can we design this aspect so it’s non-obtrusive, optional and actually worthwhile?” We saw it as a content thing. If the writing was decent — funny, useful, puzzling, cryptic, profound — then the audience would be expressing something of value when they chose to broadcast. It took us a while to find our footing with this, but the team has been on Twitter for a while now and I think we kind of got the hang of it.
I’ve read that your team was not interested in getting much feedback during the development process. How come?
I’m not sure if that’s entirely accurate, but yeah, we did tend to keep things quiet. I think this is partly Kris’s influence, as Capy creative director and co-designer on the project. I don’t want to put words in his mouth here, but Kris operates a lot on instinct and he has the design experience to trust in himself and the instincts of the team. He also knows that a video game sucks until it’s nearly done, and then suddenly it’s awesome, and so maybe if there had been too much feedback in the sucking phase, we would’ve doubted our original goals. Personally I really like feedback, specifically the “watching over the shoulder while someone is playing” variety, where the player doesn’t have to verbalize or intellectualize their responses, but the video game has to be pretty far along for this to be worthwhile. So I don’t think we were averse to feedback at all, we were just careful to avoid unnecessary noise.
What games have informed or inspired Sworcery?
Too many to mention, on all sides. I go way back to the VIC-20 and Commodore 64 days, Jim goes back to the early arcades, and Kris’s knowledge of video games is super deep. So in general, I think we were looking to create something fresh, something that echoes the genreless pioneering video games of the ’80s. I’ve always credited Shigeru Miyamoto’s design sense with the original Super Mario Bros. as a key inspiration for Superbrothers, and Sworcery’s aesthetic was built to echo Metroid, Castlevania and The Legend of Zelda.
Jordan Mechner’s original Prince of Persia and Eric Chahi’s Another World are a few more references. They have a cinema-influenced style, expressive human movement and a more grounded narrative concept. I think Fumito Ueda, creator of Ico, is on the same wavelength there. I think we probably owe a debt to the old LucasArts Adventures and Double Fine’s Tim Schafer for some of our jokes. So yeah, between us, we have a broad range of inspirations and common references, but to be honest, very few of these video games came up in conversation. We’d reference music and film works at least as much, and beyond that we were just operating on instinct.
After the iPad and iPhone releases, what’s next for Sworcery? Add-on content, a sequel?
For Sworcery, really it all depends on whether or not we find an audience that’ll help us recoup our expenses and scheme on new things. The project operates on a cosmological clock, so if all goes well in the next little while, we’ll start scheming on updates to S:S&S EP timed for the solstices and the equinox — we have no shortage of ideas. Sequel-wise, S:S&S EP was always intended as a one-off concept. It was intentionally quite loose at the start so Jim, Capy and I could figure it out together, so there’s no grand plan at present. But as it has taken shape, we are left with questions about the world that could be interesting to answer.
In any case, I think we’d all like to get together at some point in the future and do something like this again, but we’ll see how it goes. I definitely have a concept or two that I’d like to develop that’d build on what we learned with this project, but I’m going to have to take a decent-sized break, get some exercise, get some sleep, and then I’ll see what’s what and who’s where.
Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP will be available in the iTunes App Store for iPad starting on Thursday, March 24, with a price somewhere around $4.99. An iPhone and iPod touch version will be available in April.
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