Interview done on July 11th 2024
In this new interview on DCDL, Alexis Corominas, game director at Piccolo Studio in Barcelona and author of Arise: A Simple Story (see article here), an impressive dreamlike 3D platformer, has been kind enough to agree to answer a few of my questions. Enjoy!
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Hello Alexis, thank you so much for accepting this interview. First, I’d like to know a bit more about the team. You said on the game’s website that the studio is composed of artists that have been working together for over twenty years. Is it true for all the members of the team or have you been welcoming new and also younger artists over the years? If we focus mainly on Arise, did you also use some exterior help? For the music, for instance, which is one of the strong points of the game?
Hi Florian! About the team, I mean, the founders, we have been working 25 years together, but we have spent most of them working in advertising. The three founders, we met in the year 2000 in an international advertising agency in which I was working. We used to do interactive experiences, multimedia experiences, things like that for advertising, for big brands, such as Audi, BMW, Nike, Coca-Cola, and things like that. It was fun. But at some point it became less fun. We had some sort of a middle-age crisis, you could say. So we decided to move to video games because it was fulfilling a childhood dream. And it’s something that we said: if we’re going to, you know, fail, at least we might fail at something we’re passionate about, right?
So with that in mind, we contacted some veterans from the Spanish industry, which is not that big, and we were lucky to convince some of them. They joined the studio in 2016. We started working on Arise, on the pitch of the game, on the first prototypes. Then it took us a whole year to find a publisher interested in financing the game, which were really tough times as well. It’s so hard to start in this industry, especially if you are looking for financing, because all publishers, even if the team that we had built had experience and we had some veteran people from the Spanish industry, are always a bit, you know, cautious when the founders don’t have this experience. But we made it and we have some of the best working with us. For example, our art director, José Luis Vaello, who was the creator of RiME and the art director of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. That was an AAA game published in 2010 by Konami. So, I mean, we have people in the studio that have been for a while in the industry. And I will say that the core of the company are the ten, twelve developers that we gathered to start working on Arise. Most of them, practically all of them, are still here eight years later. So, that’s an important thing for us, right? To keep the team, at least the core team. We’ve known each other so well for so much time. But sometimes you still have to ask for exterior help.
For Arise, we worked with David García, who had worked with many of these people that we hired. So, they had been working on RiME, right? And other games before that together. And everyone at the studio told us, this guy is a genius. So, we talked to him. He was working at and is still working at Ninja Theory, developing Hellblade back in the day, Hellblade 1. We pitched him the game and, because he’s talented, crazy and a genius, he decided he would work on nights and weekends on Arise because he loved the game. And you can feel this love in the game because the music is very important in this experience. We even designed a lot of places in the game taking into account that music would be important there. We designed these spots for the music. And he delivered. David delivered a lot. I think music is half or more than half of the game. And all the feelings that he was able to, you know, to stimulate… I mean, it’s amazing. He did an amazing job. I think it’s, you know, it’s my game. But I think it’s one of the best original soundtracks for a game that I’ve ever heard.
What’s the story behind Arise? How did the core ideas first emerge? Why the Nordic background and not, for example, an Iberian background?
If you have watched Up, the Pixar movie about the grumpy old man living in a house who puts a lot of balloons on it and all that, there’s a short sequence at the start of that movie, a flashback, that covers the life of the couple, of this old man with his wife. And it’s a one-minute-and-a-half sequence. It’s amazing. It tells the whole story of a romance, right? And we wanted to take that concept and translate it into a video game, stretch it to three, four, five hours with, you know, dreamy landscapes and all that. So that was the origin of the idea. Later, we came up with the idea of time because we were, you know, playing with memories, reminding, remembering the past, a past life.
So at some point we decided that it had to take place in a prehistoric setting, so to speak, because we didn’t want, because it’s all about memories, we didn’t want memories to happen in, you know, a factory or going with a car or with technology. We wanted to move out technology from the project, because then we could work on feelings and also because then we could use nature as a language. Because there are no words in the game and basically we use music and nature and the color palettes and all that to build these emotional landscapes. And a lot of people say it’s a Nordic background and yeah, it may seem so, but it’s actually not important, I mean, for us, because we don’t use, you know, like Nordic myths or things like that. We just use a guy, you know, from the year, like, 2000 before Christ, that lives in the mountains. What was important for us is that it’s a sturdy, stoic character used to cold weathers, to survive with very little. Also, I have to say, there’s a Japanese anime from the 70s called Heidi and there’s this character, the grandfather of Heidi. It’s actually the character that inspired us in terms of how he behaved and the kind of character he is. Someone you will go to for protection. Someone that will be there for you, that is hard to move and hard to break.
Arise: A Simple Story is a 3D platformer, but at times it’s closer to a walking simulator with a few puzzles, which is great, because the story and the feelings it conveys are at the center of the experience. According to you, its creator, what genre does Arise belong to? How would you describe its art style?
It’s hard to say because for some people it’s a walking simulator whereas some people would say it’s a platformer and other people that it’s a puzzle-game. Honestly, we don’t mind, we don’t care. I mean, we just wanted to create an experience. An emotional experience. And for us it’s like a song or like a movie or like an opera that has its pace and we wanted gameplay to be intertwined with that. And yes, of course we used platforming because we were playing with time so it made sense that the challenges had to do with things that move and things move over time, right? So everything came together, very naturally.
In terms of the art style, we wanted to do something low poly but not in a trendy way, so to speak. Not recognizable. I mean, something that was recognizable in itself. And with the color palettes that we used and the kind of art style of all the assets, even if it’s simple, we wanted to create an identity and not to look like a hundred other games that use low poly. I think we succeeded because one of the things that we do in the game is that because of the use of the camera, often we are just framing your character as a little point in the screen. What’s important is the environment and we focused a lot on composition rather than detail. This is why we used a fixed camera. So we could work on this composition. So there’s an incredible work on having this diagonal tree here, this other there, and keeping very, very, very simple volumes, but put in a way that creates small pictures all the time on screen.
A couple of years after making Arise, you released a second game called After Us. I really enjoyed playing the first game. Would I be on familiar grounds if I played the second one or are the mechanics and the whole philosophy completely different?
Familiar grounds if you play After Us? No, not at all. We decided to do something completely different. It’s a platformer, it’s 3D, free camera, it’s a very dark game, it’s a very oppressive game. For some people it’s too much, for some people it’s because we are judging humankind in that game and, as a spoiler, we don’t pass the exam, so to speak, but what we wanted to do was make a game that was like a punch in your guts. A game that, even in terms of design, didn’t hold your hand. We wanted to make you feel lost sometimes. We know it’s a risk, that some people will love it, some people will hate it, that it’s a very divisive game. Arise tends to speak about what is universal in people. Like feelings of love, grief, hope, happiness or joy. We did Arise in a way that we wanted to cater to everyone. With After Us we didn’t care about that and we didn’t want to care about that. We wanted to do something that was honest regarding what we think about our relationship with nature. So it’s a very, very dark game some people don’t like, but it’s something that had to be said. For us it feels like that and in terms of gameplay it’s very different. It’s mainly a platformer with a lot of parkour. Some players love the controls, but if you don’t like 3D platformers, you won’t be comfortable, because it’s a very specific genre, but it’s okay for us. It’s what we were set to do, right?
So, Arise and After Us were your first solo games. Do you have other projects in the pipeline?
A lot of studios have critical success with one game and then they just do the same or something very similar. We’re not that kind of company. We want to take risks and we want to do different things. As I speak, we’re working on the next game, the third one, and it’s absolutely different from those two. A completely different genre. It has thousands of lines of dialogue, so it has nothing to do with the other two. We want to face challenges and we want to explore things.
There seem to be many game studios in Spain. I’ve recently played the entire ludography of Octavi Navarro and tried Blasphemous by The Game Kitchen. What’s the current situation in your country from your perspective? Is game development a blooming Spanish field?
Yes, game developing is blooming, I mean, back in the 2000s there was no industry, in the 2010s I think that the indie scene flourished, at the same time that we did. For example, in Barcelona here, where we are based, there was a mobile gaming hub being developed and we really are one of the most important cities in Europe for mobile development, and this has like pushed other areas of gaming. So AAA studios have opened offices lately in the last years, other big studios have opened, so yeah, I think it’s blooming. I mean, it was blooming, of course, until the current situation. You will surely be aware of that. The industry is in a very big crisis now. Some companies have closed and it’s a very difficult time to find financing, so some of these companies are no longer with us. It’s a pity, because they were great people doing great games. I think that there’s a lot of indie development because we lack the industrial perspective. We don’t have any publisher that was created in Spain. I think this speaks a lot about the lack of industrial vision that we have had in Spain, but we are trying to, and the government is trying to, even if slowly, but I think we’re on the right direction now.
To conclude, I’d like to know about your gamer profile. You’ve always been passionate about video games. What games have influenced you the most? If you still have time to play, what recent games were you the most interested in?
I started playing games in, I think it was 1982, 1983, so I have a lifetime of games that inspired me. I’m interested in all sorts of games because I just love telling stories and being told a story. I studied cinema, for the record. I programmed video games when I was 10 years old with an MSX using the basic language. Very, very simple games. I used to love games that really struck me a lot. The games from Fumito Ueda (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, absolute masterpieces). To quote a more recent game, I love the first The Last of Us. I think it’s an incredible narrative video game. I love all the Souls, all the crazy indie games from Papers, Please to Journey. Of course, back in the day, it impacted me a lot. Thinking that this kind of art product can be done now on consoles, and that it has a market, it’s great. I love playing co-op games with my wife. Little Big Planet was such an incredible experience with her, it was so fun. All the Lucas Arts graphic adventures from the late 80s and 90s really blew my mind. They were, in terms of the tone, the humor, the dialogues, the characters, incredible. So creative. I miss this kind of games. I’m such an old fart, you know. I’m a dinosaur already, I’m too old. I don’t play multiplayer games, I don’t play competitive games. I just want to be told a story, and even if it’s not a story, and I play a game like Katamari Damacy, which was great, I just enjoy it a lot, but I like old school games in that sense, and I like action games and simulators. Civilization, too. I like Age of Empires, I mean all those games I have put thousands of hours in. And recently, I loved, and my game of the year, last year, was Alan Wake 2. I loved that game even more than Baldur’s Gate 3 and even more than Zelda. To me, Alan Wake 2 does incredible things in terms of story and tone. I just love the tone. It has a Twin Peaks vibe that I just love. It’s the kind of game I like, right? It’s a lot more disruptive than what Baldur’s Gate does. Baldur’s Gate is very classic in every aspect. It’s an incredible piece of software, it’s an incredible mix of systems, but to me, it does nothing new or refreshing or artistically, you know, memorable. And that’s what I look for in video games.
Thank you so, so much, Alexis. I can’t wait to find out what Piccolo Studio’s next game will be all about! Take care.
Florian Baude (Des Clics & des Lettres)
ARISE: A SIMPLE STORY (article about the game)