The Art of Severed: Making a 2D/3D Hybrid

okay I think we're ready to start welcome to the art of sever talk it's kind of weird because the game is not out yet but it will be soon a couple of years ago I did talk about the art of guacamelee and they put the video in the vault and I watched myself and apparently I have an accent which I didn't know about that so hopefully every can everybody can understand me properly let's get started because it's a bunch of stuff so I work at drink box studios as a concept lead where we developed about a blob mian blobs attack and most famously guacamelee and four severed I mean we've had been doing platformers for like a long time and we were kind of saturated

a little bit so let me take you back to the magical time that was 2013 when we were wrapping up welcomed a label and all these ideas for new projects started to come up in the studio Chris Harvey or someone one of the founders an idea of making maybe a touch going a touch game by an iOS or something like that there was some other ideas maybe like a curse warrior or something and this were all just like ideas nothing nothing tangible yet but it can I kind of got me thinking of doing something very different just to kind of have a new set of challenges and kind of change change it around a little bit so around that time I'm also having kind of just just different ideas

about memories and being away from from my family I remember I distinctly remember weird moment with with my mom we're like I think we were grabbing off guacamelee and like just talking to her in the phone and I'm just pacing around the room and she's giving me like some nice advice and I remembered some other advice that she had given me like six months before but the image of the memory was me pacing around the room having a phone conversation with it's just disembodied person which was very interesting because usually when you have memories nice memories with someone you have kind of like a place and smell and maybe what they're wearing maybe the scenery is different but all these memories started to be kind of the same even though in my mind they were different so so kind of thinking about that as kind of like an emotional kind of cover for a game and all of these ideas started to come

together and at one point it's kind of like it starts to simmer and then all of a sudden like starts boiling and you're like okay I need to do something now so I did a concept video which I'll show you right now so I would go home after work and like that week a couple of days that we can make this really rough concept pitch for what eventually would become severed so I'm gonna show you this doesn't have audio it's just images okay yeah so I just animated this in flash very very roughly as you can see is it's just basically a square tool over and over but the idea is to create a mood for what the game could be kind of packaging all the stuff that some

ideas from the studio in some ideas kind of package with what I had just been talking about the memories and all that stuff so the plot wanted to have something very mysterious in not as operatic as guacamelee or known as prototypical and at that time I call the game slash which I thought it was pretty clever with just like a division symbol meaning obviously like it's lashing around but also to like it the divide that this character is going through and now here is like some example of what the navigation how I envisioned navigation being and this is kind of borrowed from an old game called shining in the darkness is a precursor for Shining Force it's like a obscure Genesis game but basically you're in the middle of the town and you act as kind of like the

axis around it so so you can choose to go say to the tavern to recruit people or to the shop or whatever in this case this is like transition you're inside and your life may be by something just the idea was that you can make like a 2-d game or make 2d art in percent in a way that you can have a spatial relationship that feels more three-dimensional kind of like those old-school dungeon crawlers or something like that so I wanted to make something simple something kind of like a palate cleanser from doing all this platform or something that was easy and cheap to make and we can create a lot of content out of it and that's kind of the exploration part of it and here's kind of like what the comma would be you know like character shows up maybe like a Pokemon really and then you go into like kind of battle mode and you have your

life bar or whatever and all this lashing I was interested in keeping it simple so not having like a shield or anything that you're carrying so everything is like basically touching and I mean this is like incredibly crude as as you can see this is no like wow this looks amazing but that was not the point the point was to like hey guys this is the idea and this is how this sort of place and I see concept pitches or concept art kind of like I think good ideas just generate like better ideas so if you kind of have like a seed and then hopefully you end up with a full crop once you share with the team who are also very talented and then so you're some ideas on how to expand like kind of like magic systems and stuff like that like maybe you you have to draw some

some pictographs or something that create a magic spell or something like this which I mean maybe it's complicated to do that kind of detection but like anything that was at this stage it's just like a cheap drawing right now I remember being very nervous about sharing this with the team as I have spent like some weeks thinking about it and and like a week or two making it and it's like a Sunday midnight deciding whether to send it or not to to the founders of the team because I know it like at this point this is completely outside the wheelhouse of what we've been doing as a studio like just from guacamelee just switching to something completely bizarre with like a very dark atmosphere like a sword fighting game we've never done a full touchscreen game so it was like kind of weird to be pitching this thing and so for the first

day I said that nobody kind of mentioned anything and I'm like okay I maybe didn't see you the second day like to say nothing hey guys did you see the email so yeah we started oh okay okay cool and then like a week later like okay I think we're gonna we like it we're gonna do a prototype without a bunch of other ideas that we're doing basically this is the pitch and like this is just like some mood kind of sort of storytelling thing I mean coming back to the cursed warrior kind of an idea that kind of started off so this was a pitch for me like having a single-player touch-based experience with really easy to make backgrounds just like flood art I mean it's just short make it Arkady

you know like it doesn't need to be graphically amazing 68 production cycle like very quick turnaround or way quicker than what we've done before low diesel characters continue with like a graphic theme we don't even need to do a man character because this first person like we don't need to do all those animations and stuff they come back keeping it very simple very light and the storytelling will be very minimalistic and kind of like in the background not in the foreground so I mean what could go wrong it's like this whole thing looks so solid but everything wrong so we did that prototype among with other ones this is some animations that Ben Thomas it he's animator at drink box and I was away during this prototype we did like a two day jam at the studio and I was away in

Mexico for vacation so I missed it but they did a uh prototype they were used Samurai Jack backgrounds for an eternal game Jim Jeff that was cool so let's go through all these points single crate touch based experience so to put that in context we're also doing Super Turbo Championship Edition so we're prototyping this stuff at the same time we're doing like welcome le DLC and porting and doing the sort of welcome le 1.5 at that time and welcome Ellie was a pretty straightforward formula like everybody got it it's like Metroidvania would like Mele combat ^ Mexico and then that's basically welcome Ellie but when trying to define this like single-player touch based experience is like well what is this experience is it action is adventure how much is it how much you

know I'm like Zelda has puzzles are we doing puzzles we're looking at things like Mike Tyson's punch-out because we like that combat the rhythm like waiting for weak points and stuff like that we're looking at the awesome art for like year walk and things like that were like the storytelling is very moody although that doesn't have combat at all it's just like a puzzle game we didn't want to do like a Mexican game this time it was just too much pressure to keep going with ELISA and something like missed I thought was an atmosphere that was very interesting but also elements of Zelda but also like it's not top-down this game is so you know touchscreen for ninja it was like ninja of course it's like it's not that gameplay but there's something there it feels good to just like cut fruit right and Infinity Blade of course except infinity blade has dodging mechanic and it's third-person and the graphics are fantastic and you

don't explore too much and you don't fight more than one enemy so it's not really a template that we can fit our game into so that was incredibly tough to do because everybody kind of took their experience of this is what an experience means oh this is what touch-based means or action-adventure mean and we were not kinda in the same page so it was hard to find exactly the genre so single-player top straight experience was a very difficult thing that I we didn't think it was gonna be difficult think yet we kept coming back to that problem to try to finesse it it turns out we were doing a dungeon crawler but we found that out like a year into production they easy to make backgrounds okay well like at least we can do this like we can finesse what the game is but the background productions should be pretty straightforward this is some early navigation concepts so

basically that is to have like a scroll kind of like a Flintstones background that keeps looping around and that's basically dividing quad right so the towers like north east south the cave and west the other passage or something and then cross the salt between them these are just some kind of explorations on style and things like that I kind of like the brushy kind of texture part of it which we actually couldn't do because it was very expensive to do sprites for our engine so we had to go back to do something more like what Camilla wears like graphics and ingredients and just firts these are just like kind of all over the place because still we don't we're figuring things out still so you can see like it kind of we're gonna have NPCs do you know how much of an adventure part

of it we're gonna have towns what's gonna be like but I do this imagine here's where I feel like for me kind of started to turn around because just like a struck a chord or something was here that was very interesting so this was kind of like the beginning of like Canada and going in that direction at the same time we're figuring out how to do the the concepts of the rotation and combat so here's like a quick battle mock-up you fight but then you turn maybe you go to the cave maybe you keep walking we'll keep going around this is all not an engine this is just like a quick animation I did in flash and it has some parallax in the background which is weird because when you rotate there's no parallaxing but it looked cooler oh it's so and doing something like your walk where when you move forward then more stuff shows up these

are some I'm just gonna go quickly over this year's are some other tests but something that was very difficult is determine arbitrarily how much is moving forward how much is like a unit of moving forward is it like a soccer field this is like two steps this is like you know how many steps forward are you are you doing and that was kind of like this test with this this house and the right and the left is kind of like an early kind of dungeon can idea and this is again this is all like stuff that as we're getting the tech ready we're figuring out what are the rules of this world for the navigation because it's not a CCS just doing the squirrels it has to there's a lot of rules like how big are the doorways how far can you see things that kind of thing in open areas you cannot do diagonal so limiting it to like the cardinal directions things like that

that we didn't think before starting it didn't work at all it was terrible like you don't feel like you're rotating you just feel like you're moving side to side and that was not a good thing for a game that you needed that 360 kind of look so one solution was Hotel virtual tours which are is basically a panorama basically it's like a cylinder with flat images on it so Google Maps kind of uses this also so if you ever seen like a panoramic picture app this is what they do it's basically a mesh that is a cylinder around you in 3d and you're putting your stitching together pictures that are 2d so when you when you move around then the mesh deforms that deforms the image so I was showing them in how it looks but basically this is my crappy diagram

drawing because we needed one cylinder of course for the first layer but you also want to have that depth so that meant having to do a second layer and a third layer so it's three cylinders inner engine where we're mapping this to the art this is a tested stuff Goulet the art director did play it yeah he did this in 3d max really quickly and has like the cardinal points just so their rotation but you see like the ground layers has three different colors so like now you're in layers three now and that kind of thing how that how would that work it's obvious that it was really hard to figure that stuff out given like this test doesn't look as good as what didn't looking at but that was like charlie narrow with it with this thing and we started to like

be very concerned about being able to pull this off because it looks so simple but it was not it didn't scale that way at all at the same time I'm doing more exploration on the style so it's just like some palate cleanser images before it gets too technical again exploring kind of moved in that kind of thing now like the ground like the layering this fish is visible there so this is what we ended up attempting as a first test so for the outdoors it's okay if the cylinders are just kept like that because the forest is organic is fine but the indoors within one just to be in circular rooms so we did this thing where when you map things to a cylinder it deforms it so if you have a normal plane it just like natural

difference so if we pinch the art when it deforms that it makes it feel like there's a corner there so this is final art from the game and each of those kind of bubbles that's like a cardinal direction in our game and this is what whoops this is what mapping it to those cylinders looks like as you're navigating now in the game so eventually we have to do I mean this is very polished we didn't figure this out at that time but it was kind of refining that process to the point where it feels like you're in a 3d space but you're not you're just in a salon the camera moves a little bit and then you're just teleported to the next node so this is kind of like what Google Maps does it just cross the salsa between them and it just it just it just works for some reason like it's not it ended

up being not distracting when you're playing you just accept that that's how the world happens so easy to make backgrounds is super simple all you need to do is to the art of an interior distorted with some action or script in illustrator map it to a cylinder in our engine and you just make sure to not tilt the camera up or down cuz there's no art there and you need three of those layers so no it didn't it was not simple I don't and at this time I should mention like pre-production getting all this stuff ready already had taken like four to six months and formally because we're doing some work on metal stuff but that like short turnaround game was also not gonna happen and at this point this is like a year after the pitch and we made this like concept video we wanted to do an out and announce trailer but we

didn't have the tech running yet or anything to show for after all this work so we decided to animate kind of like have like a target of what what the game would look like so I'll show you real quick a portion of of this concept video also the music is by the amazing Yamantaka sonic tycoon who signed up to do the music the soundtrack for the game and that they did an amazing job so this was animated by then myself also using flash and some of the concepts are shown there a lot of this stuff we don't know how to do like all this stuff is just like this would be cool to do but we don't have the game structure yet so this is it's just like conceptual things

at that moment and introducing some NPCs and characters that kind of made it up some of these were reused from the earlier tests that had I have made but somehow it starts to these ideas are started to generate more ideas and getting the team excited to make this [Music] [Applause] so yeah maybe I was just create kind of like a crazy visual kind of dump on this and see how much we could try to try to do for the board game so that's like within the timeline this is where we're at right so we decided to do it like a vertical slice a demo at that point

these are just some rough storyboards for kind of the first dungeon of the game and this is this is just like some concept art I kind of like I wanted the dungeons to not be monotonous or just be brick walls definitely wanted like Moody kind of dark kind of aesthetic but also combined with on the left there's like maybe you reach kind of like an internal garden or something like that with some some stuff that looks kind of like there was a culture there or something and maybe something off-putting or creepy like those plants that look like eyes we're starting to do concepts that now are tied to game areas so this is like

another quick test just to see how much we can reuse now we have established some stuff like how much it's gonna be foggy in the background we're gonna just have three layers deep that you can look into and obviously the outdoors we'll just make it as though they're giant walls so that it's clear the direction the cardinal directions are clear there's some concepts of the house at the beginning of the game this is kind of taking with that the first image I showed you guys that was that struck a chord with me that was kind of like their interpretation of what it would look like in the game some exploration on forests and palettes is very quick just reusing is raising things how can we block doorways how can we make the dungeon not look the same if there's just like doors and notes like that so finding some variety maybe with vegetation maybe with what you see

through the doors excuse me so for I want to jump I mean I want to jump a little bit to the characters because some stuff in the characters is not a lot of like it's not like normal is not like a parade of NPC's in the game but there's like a bunch of characters so some sketches of our main character Sasha she's this warrior that's in search of her family and at the beginning I thought she'd be like in her 20s or 20 year old or something like that but as we're developing the game we realized we're doing rites of passage in a story so then the designs shifted to be more of a teenager just so that it feels like she doesn't understand the world yet completely she doesn't have that maturity yet and I wanted to make her kind of racially ambiguous we're

like on like a mixed heritage or something like we're doing a fantasy game but I didn't want to be tied to doing something that since part in north technology or or something like that that's kind of like the established thing so we could make anything and even the language is gibberish and people think it's Spanish for some reason so so yeah so when I kind of like an exotic kind of kind of look for the family and for Sasha but I really want to talk about the enemies and at this point we have four enemies I mean like at this point in the timeline not in the game we started doing four enemies and those took a long time the iterations it was slow it was not working so then we made

some judgements and we decided to prototype one enemy per week so we have two months to make eight enemies and like that's like a lot of work but I want to show you because this is I think the most fun I had during the process so I'm gonna go over quickly but I can talk about this after basically everything starts with like an idea so gram or in this case David Luther grandmas producer is one of the founders and David he wears multiple hats but he was in charge of doing the design of the enemy is a paper design so we had this giant Google Doc and then he would write some ideas and for in this case I'm just gonna go over one of the enemies it was called Demi ghost at the beginning and the idea was to have an enemy that would split apart and maybe attack you and in a flurry because when you prototype it as enemies they need to work in tandem because you're not

fighting one-on-one like like a boxing match you have to fight one and then another one appears and now they need to work sort of together so that is fun for the player so the behaviors needed to be different so that do not just like spamming dragging your finger around like crazy there's like some strategy to it so in this case it was an enemy that the more you engage with it the more you attack it the faster the more aggressive it becomes so when Wednesday comes David writes a proposal then on Thursday we meet I go over it I selected some visuals from like the giant pool of different sketches that Ben and myself had made for like a year and a half and in this case when had this cool like ghost guy made of ghosts because we didn't want to have like just like guys with access or zombies or something like that like you could do anything at this

point so why not a ghost made it goes so it would disband maybe and I don't know this was just like one visual idea and not and I just throw like three different ideas to to the team so the second one was another of Ben's sketches this guy with like multiple mouths and multiple wings and I thought that was cool so maybe they're actually different like when they dodge they actually disband and then they individually attack and then one then they kind of mush together and recombine into one and the third one is kind of more like okay more like a ghost or a blob or something your slashes maybe has a normal attack but not the bottom maybe has a heavier attack or like it's someone's this statue back into life and then attacks you like that so then that's Thursday Friday we meet Alex who's doing the programming who would do this really amazing flowcharts of the enemies

basically this is the behavior of that enemy you have the idol stage a timer to the attack and then if I'm parried then it repeats if parried this happens and that's kind of like a nice kind of portrait of our enemies in this just scribbly pages so we decide what the behavior is we like sort of certain things about some enemies or the statics and then we decide so then that Friday I go back to the desk and I kind of clean up in this case we realize we need it we like the guy with wings so we realized we needed kind of like a distinction when like it's aggressive and when it's not aggressive some animation notes for then like when they recombine like we don't want to make the animation completely expensive so maybe just like just make it like that and then there's

combined already in the server post so in this game you chop the enemy parts and that's kind of like your currency in the game so we needed that variety so we chose a guy with wings because nothing else is dropping wings at that time and we wanted kind of that variety so would be cool then bang goes on and does the it starts to rig up the animation file and start to talk to Alex about prototyping the enemy and in the meantime I do like kinda like a finished polished pass of what the enemy would look like in this case I chose blue because none of the enemies at this point were blue and we wanted something colorful the wing is how this enemy attacks or changed the wings from a feathery look to more like a razor-sharp kind of kind of look and it was important that it was not floating around but like the wings are actually having like to carry this body so this

is what the animation looks like in our file like we're switch to - boom at that point and this is Ben's animation on the attack ammonia attacks this has been iterated and is polished I just wanted to show you what it looks like and this animation polish happened later but on Monday and Tuesday of next week we reviewed the enemy as it's being prototype as Alex has time to program it and Ben has a first pass over the enemy and then Ben polishes up until Thursday because on Friday we already started the next cycle on Wednesday so I'm gonna show you what this guy looks like in-game and this is like actual thing so

the attacks are there we would change it we have to do kind of like a state where like catching his breath and then if you if it gets too aggressive dynamics it splits up and now you need to kind of manage manage the different attacks from different directions - can I use the screen a bit more and then severing and then you collect your wings so for this the interesting thing is that this is just one enemy in this arena but they could be multiple ones so it makes it more dynamic and more difficult as the game keeps evolving so low detail characters yes I would say they're graphic and simple looking but I wouldn't say low detail because a lot of the detail on these characters comes from their behavior and a duration how how they need to convey the information for the player because it's a very intuitive game we wanted to make it

extra clear where the attack is coming from not like you feel it's unfair because you've died against this guy like five times you need to kind of learn from that and that's like a lot of work for the animation team to convey that as an enemy's attacking you from the front in a 2d game and this also piggy backs on the simple combat using touchscreen because yes the Kama is simple intuitive for the user but not for us making it to make it look seamless and simple it's like a lot of work that goes in there and combat is the main focus in the game so that's something we cannot skimp on we cannot like just yeah I mean there's other things in the game there's like exploration and characters and stuff like that in the storyline but the combat is the main thing so we will need

to make sure we prioritize that and make sure the combat was very deep and so for minimalistic storytelling originally I didn't want any dialogue in the game but we're not journey and we couldn't do it it was so hard so you can like spend like two months trying to do a tutorial we just pantomime or you can just like okay fine let's do that do a text boxes so we went to put the text box but I do think we succeeded in doing like a minimalistic story for the game it's kind of like it's in the back it's kind of it's very moody and it's not too direct but that makes the player more engaged in a way to try to discover the meaning of some things without having to handhold them through the storyline so I don't want to talk too much about this

because I don't want to spoil anything but I'll show you real quick this is at the beginning of the game this is a tutorial I was mentioning it's just the mother character and just like trying to convey I mean yeah you're conveying the rules of the game at this point but also it was important for the characters to feel like characters and this is kind of like a glimpse at the relationship that sasha has with with her mom and and it's just in like the small choices in in the animation and the posing it's basically two poses but it is important to convey things through the character design and through and through this this choice of poses that was very hard to do so I'm crossing it because it was really really like minimalistic stuff as our narrative stuff it's always super complicated so

for to recap how am i doing with time to recap the single-player touch-based experience yes what you need to do is define it because this was a problem that was constant for us like just putting everybody in the same page was incredibly difficult so we discovered we're making a dungeon crawler like that was the closest John ran but that came after like a lot of trial and error and like looking at games that they don't fit that generates sometimes like when when you say like oh let's make this game an x game like a Metroidvania or

like a fighting game there's like a stigma to does John is because like other mediums have more like you know genres that are more emotionally based instead of mechanically based so sometimes there's like I didn't want to jump into doing that right like I just want to make our game that's fun and interesting and engaging but by not having that label that made it a bit difficult so in a way it's counter intuitive it kind of sometimes have to start with something that's pre-established because that will make it easier so for the easy to make backgrounds I mean if if you're mapping to the art two-cylinder and all that stuff you're not making it easy on yourself it does look way way cooler than any of the initial concepts but it blew up the project it was not a 16-1 project it

just became this giant game that we still thought in our minds that was like a small game so when that happens I mean the solution is like it could be like scale down like okay let's go back to this Arkady Flynn says okay maybe it doesn't look as good but at least we can finish in time or okay let's just keep going with this scaled up version and make sure you make kind of like the psychological change to make okay we're not doing a six-month game we're doing a two year game so that's also adapting from what I just said like there's an initial plan and sometimes you're like very worried to deviate from that plan but it's it's all it's timelines are very difficult in this industry and things change and you discover new

things about the game and what you want to do so you do need to make some judgment calls and make sure everybody's on board with that and adaptation is it's very important for the characters I would say yes you need to identify what's the center of your game for us it was the characters so we definitely spend a lot of time and detail with those because that's what's gonna make the game good and that allows you to not spend a lot of time worrying about some more irrelevant things but when you're trying to do everything you're not going to accomplish much the biggest thing there was maybe it won't be a huge revelation for you guys because you were smarter than me but simple does not

equal simple to do so a lot of this thing was like it was simple because it's just simple to explain but to execute like very soul combat or our story or something like that there was a lot of care and a lot of things that it simply was not it was not simple to make and this is storytelling it's not such thing like you still need to do the whole iceberg you know and then if you want choose to show only the top 10% that's cool but you still need to build the whole thing and in a way you know less is more like it is more work simple and storytelling it doesn't happen it's just be constantly iteration and in headaches so don't think because you have less things to show in your story that's gonna make it simpler especially in a game where like

it depends on the mood and the storytelling of our character because in a way you need to be more careful because you're not showing everything so you really need to show only the specific that good things and that means there's a lot of work and just taking out all the excess stuff but you don't need to listen to a live set because I think mistakes are actually okay I think learning from experience is so so valuable and I think people sometimes dismiss that as failure or something like that but the mistakes we made here were crucial for us to improve the game and to improve ourselves as as developers if someone asked me if I would go back and

try to do the whole thing knowing what mistakes I was gonna face and in the tough parts that I was going to face I don't know if I would like take that chance if I didn't if if that meant I didn't get to experience the failure of that if if i if i was told to go back knowing what i know now knowing all these failures and mistakes and yeah of course of course you know jump back in that DeLorean and fix things make sure like this is the priority this is what's going to happen definitely but you want that experience you want to go and try it and fail and try it again and fail right again if someone just gives you the answers to the test sometimes it's not actually useful at all so I encourage you to just like don't listen to me and just do your own thing

and that's it I have the trailer here [Music] just really real quick just to get like some respect because I haven't shown of the game just a little bit [Music]

[Applause] I don't know if we have time for questions if anybody has any questions welcome thank you so much for taking that for you know taking that challenge and doing it you probably just allowed me to win a bit I've been talking to a few technical guys I'm a 2d artists and wanting to try

the something on like that and they said it couldn't be done so thank you real quick though about your earring setup yeah when they move forward is the ring moving into them or are they moving into the next ring does that pass ring yes it's it's kind of tricky so the question is if with three Ewing you know the three ring setup what's actually happen with the camera so the camera is moving forward in NZ like it's actually moving our engine is actually it's 3d it houses that cylinder but when you move away from a cylinder it starts to deform and it starts to break but at that time that's where the cross dissolve happens so basically yes the cylinder is deforming and the layers in the back stop matching perfectly but then you cross this off and then they dawn match

perfectly and then you get to the center of it and your brain just kind of like fills in the rest and it's like oh it's fine I just move forward yeah hello first of all thank you Augusto for making guacamole and Sara with your team it's a to me it's a really great experience to see this kind of games that's being released and my question here is well I know this is not based on Mexican culture but to me it still feels really similar to some things you did for wakame like I still see the monsters as some sort of a library here it has a little bit of influence and that's and that's great because you are representing your culture I mean it's it's almost impossible to I don't know distance yourself from that right and so my question here is are you guys planning to continue doing uh things like that they're pushing different cultures into games and maybe

making things like a fantasy man because fantasy it's just often dwarves elves and things like that I mean there are so many mythologies that could be explored and the games industry seems to be a little bit fixated and those archetypes you know so I know what your thoughts on that yeah I mean I love all that stuff too okay that's great it's just gonna think we want to sort of stand out it's like we're a small team we really need to make it look different so yeah and whenever you sorry so like this talking about like adding the cultural aspects of making like a fantasy game in how yeah it's hard to distance myself from the Mexico stuff because I just like it so I'm just gonna do it it's not like somebody forced me to do good wacom la stuff but yeah as soon as you add color to monsters then you get a Liberty kiss

because that's what they are and they're very unique and we didn't want to shy away from the color in a way having a very colorful game with like such gruesome themes like you're chopping enemies apart so if you make it very dark and moody then it starts to feel very weird you start to feel off so we wanted that balance where like it's still a game is still abstracted you still feel a bit uneasy but you don't feel it's not not a gory game because of the graphics are are stylized and the colors are very vibrant so that kind of compensates that and makes this we're really weird like that dissonance is what makes it interesting for us Thanks

art no bar commander was every game is different Rose is not like for this one it started with that for guacamelee it was more like what about doing a game in Mexico and just like the visual stuff and there was like a bunch of ideas that fit really well with that but like the dimension idea for bottom alien like the idea of Mele moves as platforming that was that was sort of a separate idea and it just kind of magically merged seamlessly yeah thank you thank you yeah I think that's it thank you guys for

coming and enjoy the rest of the juicy [Applause]