This desert-bound co-op adventure is the latest work from LA studio, thatgamecompany. Previously responsible for beautiful PlayStation experiments, Flow and Flower, the 12-person team has a unique approach to development, focusing on emotion and experience rather than conventional notions of design, challenge and structure.The game's producer is Robin Hunicke, one of the most influential and inspiring figures on the US indie gaming scene. Starting out at Will Wright's Maxis studio she was a designer on Sims 2 and MySims before working on Steven Spielberg's BoomBlox puzzler. Now firmly ensconced at TGC, she's also a co-organiser of the Game Design Workshop and Experimental Gameplay Sessions at GDC and speaks at games festivals around the world. Her sessions at Nottingham's GameCity festival, which this year included a playthrough of Journey in the Old Market Square, have been among that wonderful event's highlights. Meanwhile, she's also currently completing a PhD in game d esign and AI.Recently, I got to chat to Hunicke about Journey, and about the future of interactive entertainment. Will artificial intelligence ever mean more that just effective path finding? And will games ever completely personalise their content to individual players? Hunicke was fascinating on all of this. Here's what she had to say.Starting your development career with a series like the Sims must have been a highly educational experience. What have been the lasting design lessons?Well, it had a huge fan site, and at the time that was really rare - you didn't really have social sites based around games. The Sims Exchange was a sort of strange phenomenon. That taught me how diverse a gaming audience can be. Also, my first experience of working in the games industry was at a studio that was well over 40% women - I was totally spoiled, I had no idea! The Sims was a completely different kind of game team at the time. I think now if you were to go and visit Zynga or one of th e social games developers you would see that there's a similar mix, and a similar relationship with the players.
The development culture at thatgamecompany is very interesting, too. Is it true that you start out with an emotion that you want to explore or communicate through the game, and then you start on things like design and environment. Is that how Journey started?It is. Our approach is a combination of two things: the feeling that we want to communicate and create in the player, and then our own passions as developers.So moving from Flower to Journey one of the things we really wanted to do was explore the online component. We'd never made an online game, we'd never made anything with a network backend. And also we'd never made a game with a character in it, so it was our first animated avatar! There were a lot of challenges - the simulated sand, the simulated cloth, all the animation systems - that's all new. We were really passionate about expanding our technical capabilities and learning as developers.Journey Journey is set in a vast desert, where the ruins of a mysterious c ivilisation litter the landscape.
There's something very evocative about the desert, something immediately beguiling and mysterious. Is this why you chose it?One of the things we talked about early in the project was this idea of creating a connection between players in an environment where you feel small and less empowered than you might in a tradition video game setting. We thought this would be conducive to a feeling of wanting to spend time together. And we wanted to create this connection without forcing it - we don't make you play with someone else, but we chose the desert setting because we thought a desolate and unfriendly place might actually encourage a connection between players.The desire to make the player feel small within the game environment is totally at odds with what most titles try to do. And in your previous titles, Flow and Flower, the player is almost obliterated entirely as a virtual entity. And yet your projects have proved popular with 'core' gamers. Why is that?I guess it's that we offer the same kind of craftsmanship, art and care that would be put in to a very high-end core game. I think if you play mainstream games, you will understand what the components are in Journey - it's just that they're put together in a different way. And if you're into video games then of course you'll be into new experiences, right?!The co-founder of thatgamecompany, Kellee Santiago, has spoken a little about this, but I'm interested in your angle: why is it important for your co-op partner in Journey to remain anonymous, even when the game ends?Well, there's a lot of pressure associated with performing socially, when we spend time together. When you go out to a bar and meet new people, the quality of the experience is really determined by how well you connect - there's so much that you see in each other from the moment that you meet.If you see a person's online identity, if you hear their voice, if they send you text messages, you're getting a lot of information that might get in the way rather than facilitate the connection. So we wanted to see - as an experiment - if we could take away a lot of that noise, in the same way that the desert takes away noise from the visuals. The tactile experience of moving through that environment is quite different from, say, a cityscape with tons of buildings and doors and stairs. Similarly, not being able to talk to each another, you just have to be togetherAnd does the game have a traditional narrative to it?There's a reason behind the world. We spent a lot of time talking about why everything exists, what it meant before and what it means now, because the world has a history and a backstory. But the narrative of Journey is about what you do in it - it's really hard to describe to someone who hasn't played it. It's a little bit like a mirror - the way you engage in the experience you take something away from it because of who you are. If you want to follow someone you may, if you want to lead, you ca n lead. These things create the narrative of your own journey. That's what we wanted - we wanted to leave it up to the player, the individual.That's intriguing, because I think it's a key question in modern game design. I wrote a feature earlier this year about Deus Ex and how much freedom you can really give to a player. How much do they want? Is this something you thought about while designing Journey?Yes, and actually Warren Spector [designer of Deus Ex], has always been a huge influence on me; we spent a long time talking about Journey when I was down at Fantastic Fest. He asked me the same thing: how much agency do I have in this setting?It's a very interesting philosophical question. What would it be like if you could live the same life over and over again, and see the same things over and over, but with the ability to change them, like Groundhog Day? If you have a favourite hike you regularly go on, it's always the same, but yet also never the same. That is how Journe y is attempting to be - like a place that you visit, and while you're there you experience yourself and other people, but it is effectively the same Journey. But then it isn't! Do you know what I mean?I do, but then I worry that modern game design orthodoxy is moving toward prescriptive narrative experiences and away from player agency and interpretationIt's expensive and difficult to find new things, to do systems engineering for tactile experiences, for nuanced gameplay. It takes a lot of time. What I talked about at GameCity was, well, why did Journey take us three years to develop? A lot of people would be hard-pressed to justify that sort of effort to a corporate entity. It's expensive and it takes a lot of energy.We're a small studio, we can get by, but if you had 300 people doing that, it would become really scary. We stay small because we want to be able to experiment - that's the nature of what we do. It's like research. And we always wonder - will this be the one t hat doesn't work?But I think we're at the beginning of a trend - a lot of indie developers are doing things that are similarly exploratory. Whether or not they'll ever be as large as Call of Duty, I'm not sure. But maybe that doesn't matter.Flower Thatgamecompany's Flower was a critical success on PS3, despite its abstract nature.But then, are indie games being experimental enough? I thought that, by now, we'd see a totally procedurally generated game, which creates unique landscapes, populates them with intelligent characters and leaves the rest up to the player.I actually think there's a real buzz about this in the community. I was at IndieCade recemtly, and Casey Reas, Robert Hodgin and Zach Gage all gave talks about procedurally generated environments and working with generated events and content. It was very exciting. I heard a lot of people talking about how they're going to start working on procedurally generated stuff - so you may get your wish in about five years! B ut there have been examples - Darwinia, Minecraft - it's happening, it's just that it's happening in isolated areas.
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