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The Stone of Madness
Cutting the Stone - Phỏng vấn The Stone of Madness tại Hội nghị BIG 2024
Ở Bilbao, chúng tôi đã bắt kịp các nhà phát triển The Game Kitchen để trò chuyện về một cái gì đó không phải là Blasphemous, và thay vào đó là dự án mới thú vị của họ.
Phiên âm âm thanh
"All right, we are in Bilbao for the BIG 2024 and I'm here joined by a couple of guys from The Game Kitchen and this is very interesting, very unique to me because normally we always talk Blasphemous or the games The Game Kitchen are publishing as part of Billete Cohete and other from other indie studios but this time around we're talking about a quite different game which has some things in common with Blasphemous which is like a Spanish art and lore background but in a very different genre so thank you so much for joining us. What did you guys share about the game in the panel that was earlier this morning that I didn't attend at all?
Okay, so yeah, during that panel we will talk about the process of developing this game. This game had quite a few extraordinary events during its development. It started as a development from a small indie studio from Spain called Teku which was famous for the game Candle, an adventure game they developed, I think they released in 2016, 2018, around when we released Blasphemous. Teku started the development of this game, The Stone of Madness, and at some point in the development they were facing some difficulties to finish the game. They broke the deal with their publisher and they were looking for another way to release this game to continue the development of the project and in The Game Kitchen we were really in love with the concept. We really like how it took inspiration as we do from the Spanish culture and from the history. We really like how it also pays tribute to games like the Abbey of Crime and Commandos, games that we grew up with. So we end up actually buying the game from them and hiring them to develop the game with us. So basically we continue the development of the game."
"Since then we've been working on it. We found a new publisher, Tripwire Presents, and now we're going to release said game on January 28th.
I think in your case it's not your typical case of producing a new project from the get-go, from scratch. So in this case, as you just explained, you guys entered the production midway. So how did you guys arrange yourselves with the teams and with a project that wasn't being conceived from scratch in your head, but something that you had some progress on and you had to intervene and make it happen?
This is a really good question because when I started working on this project, the first thing I did was reading the whole GDD and understanding what the team intended to do. So initially I spent many many hours playing the current demo they had and interviewing the responsibles of each area, the designers, the development team. So understanding what they want to create and what the time we had, the resources we have. I established the first plan for creating the vertical slice and then with that version we go to find a new publisher. Just to make this clear, the team that was working on the original version, on the original game, was sort of absorbed into the wider, the Game Kitchen sort of organization, right? Yeah, exactly. Because the initial team for the game, the game is pretty ambitious. It's a really difficult and complex project."
"And the initial team members, it was only five people. So they needed more muscle there, basically. So once we took the project, we hired them and we also had more people. My colleague Anna, she entered as a producer and we also introduced more people into the team, specifically in the technology side."
"You work remotely with them? As far as I understand, Game Kitchen is based in Seville and also Tenerife, if I'm correct. But these guys are from Teruel.
The whole team in The Stone of Madness is pretty much distributed all over the place. Not only in Teruel, but we also have a couple of colleagues in Madrid, some other in other parts of Andalusia. So it's pretty much distributed that we work for remote. Let's talk about the game proper. It is, as I said, it's a different genre, coming from metroidvania for The Game Kitchen fans. It is depicted as a tactical stealth game, but when we played it, Ben played it, you can read his impressions at your local Game Reactor site. When he played, he said, you know, it feels smooth. It feels like it doesn't stop you. It doesn't break the pace, even though it's tactical. When you see tactical, you go like, oh, it's gonna be turn-based, it's gonna be slow. But then it's more like Commandos that you mentioned. You probably mentioned the two biggest, most respected games in the story of Spanish video games, right? So what can you tell me about this sort of hybrid concept and what you are going to do in this game? Okay, so I'd say that the tactics come from the tactics stealth games, like real-time tactics stealth game comes from infiltration games, stealth games like Metal Gear Solid, things like that. That was like real-time tactics spionage action, right? Something like that. But our game, I think one of the reasons why it feels fluid, it's because we embrace failure for the player. There is no failure condition, there's no fatal condition, there's no game over whatsoever, and you cannot save the game at any point that you want. So that means you just need to embrace failure. You just need to plan how you're going to achieve your next objective and then you execute that plan. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but we will not stop you. You just keep trying, you will lose resources, maybe you will lose one character for the day, but the next day you can keep trying it. And there's a procedural element to it, if I'm correct?
The procedural element was part of the original concept, back when Teku started this project, but it was really quickly cut off the project because of the complexity. That was cut off, but there is another element to complexity, which is different characters. What can you tell me about those characters and how are we, as players, going to deal with them?
Okay, each character has their own abilities and disorders that form the way the player will need to interact with them, because probably one of each has a fear of fire, but the other one has a spell that turns the lights on. So you can extinguish a pyre, so the woman that is afraid of fire, she can now approach a guard that was close to that pyre. So basically each character has... Collaborating between them to create the strategy, to plan."
"So you switch between them in real time? You have the possibility to play with three of them, and the other two are sleeping in the cell or creating things. So you will need to plan during the night what are the best options for the next day. Tell me more about the setting. It's an 18th century monastery, if I'm correct? It also acts as an asylum, right? And you're dealing, as you mentioned, you're dealing with madness, with illness, with mental health at the same time. So how are you guys... With the Inquisition as well."
"So how are you guys sort of, you know, surrounding the characters with this setting? Well, it was a really interesting setting to play stealth gaming, because it allows us, similar to a prison in a way, it allows us to have a place when the characters, they can just, they can move around, because they are allowed to be there. They're already in prison. But there are some places that are forbidden, so you need to balance that. You need to take care that once you enter an area that is forbidden, you need to take care that no guard is seeing you. But otherwise you are free to just roam around and try to do some stuff while they're not looking. So it allows for a lot of different possibilities. And also because it's a monastery and it's full of friars and nuns that are just living their lives there, we have this clock during the day. And in different parts of the day, the people that are living in the monastery, they move to different areas, they do different stuff. Like at some point the friars go to eat and you can find they are eating in the refectorium and now you can use that time to sneak behind them or something like that. And something I wanted to ask you about is, I've mentioned Blasphemous of course, and the way it sort of portrays or links to Spanish folklore or art is sometimes deliberately obtuse."
"You know what I mean? It doesn't give you like the literal reference. It goes like, you know, twists the narrative. Is this game like that or are we going to really feel like the Goya inspiration or a more literal way of portraying this background? Okay, I understand where you're going. I'd say like the inspiration from Goya, for example, it takes a lot of inspiration from his paintings. It's probably not too on the nose. Maybe if you know the paintings you will recognize patterns that are taken from them. Like for example, when Agnes transforms to make a spell, she transforms into a witch that you can see in the "Aquelarre" painting of Goya. Or there are these paintings from Goya, they're called "Fray Pedro contra el Maragato" and there are a set of paintings in which a friar is defending himself against a bandit and he ends up disarming him and then shooting at him. So we have a character which is Fray Pedro and he has a gun. Nobody eating kids here? No, not the same. All right, and finally in terms of production, we played the game at Gamescom. You guys released a demo. What sort of feedback did you get from the demo? Is there anything from that demo that you guys introduced very last minute before release into the game?
Well, we are working on polishing all the controls for PC because during the whole development we intend to create experience that it could be smooth in consoles, playing with controls. And when we prepared the demo for Next Fest, we introduced the keyboard and mouse. It's funny because we are working on PC and we received so much feedback. So for the final release we are going to work on that, on polishing those controls. It wasn't there before? Yeah, they were but they were in a state that was way less polished, let's say. You know, isometric view you instantly think of. Yeah, of course, but this is one of the reasons we did that is because these games usually are catered only for PC players, but we wanted to introduce console players too, so we wanted to ensure that the controls were good for controllers. And now we encounter that we still need to polish the mouse controls, but well, those are some things that we have more leeway to work with because it's PC only, it's always faster. Which leads me to final release details. You're releasing next month on which platforms? Is it also available on the Switch? Yeah, and the idea is to release simultaneously all the consoles."
"Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox X and S, Epic and Steam. And do you expect to cater to Blasphemous fans with this style or your intent is also to try and bring new players into the Game Kitchen works? To be honest, this game is so weird, there's no other way around it. It is a weird game, there's no other game like it. So we're not sure if the Blasphemous fans will love it or not. I love the game, I think if you like the inspiration that made Blasphemous you will also enjoy this game, but the genre is quite different. So it might be that the niche is different too, but I think people will really enjoy playing this and making plans and seeing how they are not complete. There are not much games in this style because it's really expensive to create an experience like that. It's its own beast, you know. When I say expensive, I mean it's hard to do it, hard to develop."
"Like there is no recipe for a game like this, there's no clear recipe, like a Metroidvania was easier because everybody knows what a Metroidvania is and a Metroidvania player knows what they're going into, but in our case... Would you say it makes you mad? Yeah, this made me mad. That's a wrap, thank you so much for your time guys, enjoy the show and good luck with the release in a few weeks."
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