Personally, I'm included in that heady club. Sword & Sworcery: EP scored a 9.5 from me, as I was head over heels for its playful marriage of game, sound, and visuals. And so I was eager to talk to Craig Adams, founder of Superbrothers (the developer), about not just how Sworcery came together, but also how Twitter was successfully integrated and if there was a chance I'd someday see another adventure in this intoxicating little bit-art universe.
IGN: What was the genesis of Sword & Sworcery?
Craig D. Adams, Superbrothers: I started Superbrothers Inc. in 2003 with the dream of one day making this type of audio-visually rich, cinema-inspired video game with cool music. As for the specific 'sword & sworcery' theme and concept, I can trace that back to a film clip I made in 2007 called 'Design Reboot HD', it's sort of an illustration of an excerpt of Jonathan Blow's essential video game design lecture 'Design Reboot'. I developed a super-generic and iconic video game-inspired aesthetic for that clip complete with monsters, knights, spell-books and fire-breathing horses, and this got me thinking about making an actual video game project in that style.
All that said, the real genesis of the S:S&S EP project was when I met the Capy dudes at [Game Developers Conference] 2009. A minute or two after meeting them they said 'let's make a video game' and I said 'ok', and I already kind of knew that I wanted whatever it was going to be to have a classic fantasy aesthetic. We wanted something that folks raised on The Legend of Zelda or whatever would respond to and find familiar. We knew our whole approach to the theme and concept would be fresh so it made sense to choose a 'traditional' theme that we genuinely enjoyed.
IGN: So, where did the "W" come from in Sworcery?
Adams: The original title of the project was kinda going to be Poopsock, but we were submitting a grant application to the OMDC - a provincial funding government institution here in Canada - and Poopsock seemed like it might be kind of a deal-killer.
The concept was always to create 'the archetypical video game', something that would resonate with folks who dig iconic action and adventure video games, stories of myth and monsters, that type of thing... so 'sword and sorcery' was the cleanest, most generic description.
The 'sword and sorcery' phrase was coined in the 1950s specifically to describe the kind of full bodied, hard edged, horror-tinged high adventure stories typified by pulp fiction maestro Robert E. Howard's 1930s Conan stories, but taken more broadly the phrase includes most of the myths and adventure stories dreamed up by mankind since time immemorial. While this stuff might be lowbrow there's ample evidence that it taps into that 'collective unconscious' that Jung was always talking about - no matter who you are or where you're from, a story about an adventurer embarking on a perilous adventure, sword-in-hand, is going to tickle people's fancy and live in their dreams.
So that's a lot of high-minded, high-concept nonsense... and while it's interesting to ponder, we weren't trying to write a thesis for graduate school or whatever. We were setting out to make something enjoyable and entertaining, something people wouldn't take too seriously... so as Kris Piotrowski and I were writing the grant proposal - Kris is Capy's creative director and co-designer on S:S&S EP - we added the 'w' to the logo to make it our own and to let people know that we like jokes.
IGN: I have a friend who just doesn't get the bit-art thing in Sword & Sworcery. Help me convince him that he is tragically wrong.
Adams: Haha, hmm...
For your friend: if he doesn't dig the style then he doesn't dig it and that's totally fine. If the audiovisual is not to someone's taste or if they're unwilling to take a chance on it then S:S&S EP will probably not change their mind.
That said, I think there is an angle on the style that sidesteps all of the usual retro pixel talk and gets to the heart of the project and the reason for Superbrothers Inc. Warning: This is going to seem like a bit of tangent!
An author can sit down and write a book, a songwriter can write a song, a painter can paint a picture... and when they do it right it can be an absolute marvel.
By contrast, art for video games these days typically requires a shit ton of man-hours, which requires a decent-sized team, which requires a decent-sized budget, which requires communication, management, investment... consequently the creative conversation can become diffuse and an unusual idea can be seen as risky, so people (understandably) feel the need to play it safe, which is why a decent percentage of video game projects stick to proven mechanics and accepted attitudes, even if they feel they're pushing the envelope in one direction or another.
With S:S&S EP, one of our top priorities as a collaborative team was to strive for 'audiovisual alchemy', where the sound, the art, the concept and the experience come together to feel like one thing. Beyond that we chose to try to explore some video game entertainment strategies that are under-represented in the video game landscape of 2011, taking a chance on an occasionally obtuse adventure video game. A more diffuse creative conversation and an aversion to risk would have put the kibosh on most of that.
So what I've been trying to do with the Superbrothers Inc. since its inception in 2003 is to develop a style that would solve the presentation elements effectively in such a way as to allow the team-size to stay low, so the creative conversation stays sharp and some risks can be taken, and hopefully things can stay more flexible and the video game can feel more like an authored collaboration and less like something that came out of a factory.
So in effect, the style is as much an engineering solution as an artistic inclination... it's my answer to the question 'How can one person create art for a film-style video game featuring expressive human movement?'.
Additionally, I think that the peculiar abstraction and crystal clarity of pixel art has an expressive power beyond just nostalgia. Anyone who's read Scott McCloud's 'Understanding Comics' might find something to think about there.
So yeah... while the audiovisual style does hearken back to the pioneering video games of the 1980s and early 1990s, the S:S&S EP experience was made for the audiences of 2011 with the intention of moving things forward, and in its own way we hope it will compete for people's time, attention and curiosity against larger scale higher-fidelity efforts like L.A. Noire, Uncharted 3 and whatever Nintendo is doing on 3DS.
On the next page, Adams talks about Jim Guthrie's soundtrack, blanketing Twitter feeds, and the future of Sworcery.
IGN: Jim Guthrie's music in Sworcery is, well, insane. As in, insanely good. As in, I cannot wait to get the soundtrack. What was the process of marrying the music to the Sworcery?
Adams: Jim Guthrie is a marvel, plain and simple. Jim Guthrie's Sword & Sworcery LP - The Ballad of the Space Babies, his first solo full-length since 2004's excellent Now More Than Ever, is available now for digital download and on vinyl with a limited edition print by designer Cory Schmitz. My take on the record is a bit skewed, as you can imagine, but I love it and I haven't heard anything quite like it.
The process of marrying the music to the experience in S:S&S EP was in some ways similar to the process of creating the clip 'Children of the Clone', my first shot as a filmmaker where I created a kind of music video in the Superbrothers style for a song of Jim's. My aim was to find a concept, a narrative and a look that matched the sound of the composition, and then to cut it in a way that felt right.
With S:S&S EP we looped in Jim early on and he sent us some songs he thought might fit the general concept. One of the songs suggested a 'Walk in the Woods' in the pre-dawn twilight, so for the GDC 2010 playable I painted a series of environments intended to echo each phrase of the song, which ended up on Side B of the finished video game. Other pre-existing songs inspired the meadows and mountain path segments of Side A.
As the project wore on we'd create art, design and narrative concepts and then show them to Jim and he'd score them a bit like how he scores film, and then we'd evolve and iterate those sections until they looked/sounded/felt just right. For example, the sword and sorcery concept called for some dark, spooky caves and temples... so I painted these and then we asked Jim to give us a John Carpenter vibe for the score, and a day or two later, after fooling around with a build and pondering it, he delivers a song filtered through his sensibilities that absolutely nails what we're going for. In another instance, Kris - co-designer on S:S&S EP at Capy - had the idea of meshing badass synths with cosmic geometry for some overt-the-top boss battles. I did the art, Jim delivered the song and together we figured out how to actually make the Trigon encounters work.
The song I think I'm most fascinated by is the song 'The Ballad of the Space Babies'... in S:S&S EP this is the song that plays when The Scythian 'sings a Song of Sworcery' and summons these strange 'sylvan sprites'. This general idea was a part of the project concept from the start but we only got around to clarifying the nuts-and-bolts part of the way through. We showed Jim what was up and he retreated to his subterranean sound cave and came up with a profoundly beautiful song and a set of sounds, when we got this working in-game it was a really big moment for the project where everything kinda clicked. This song and these sounds are on the record only Jim has composed the 'perfect' version of it, I think it's absolutely transcendent.
IGN: There's a balancing act between making an "experience" and making a game. How did you thread that needle? Or are you happy with S&S EP existing in a new category that somehow merges experience-game-toy?
Adams: I started playing video games on the Vic-20 and the C-64, a time when genres and categories were still forming, when toys, experiences and video games weren't so distinct, and while I played the hell outta the next twenty five years of video game history I never really lost sight of those formative adventures. When I started Superbrothers it was with the intention of blurring some of those lines.
Initially S:S&S EP was entirely an 'audiovisual experience' or a toy with hardly any 'video game' component - this is pretty much what we had on offer at GDC 2010, and people definitely dug it. When we got back to Toronto we started to scheme on the what the project was going to be, I dreamed up a ton of concepts and then it was down to Kris Piotrowski, creative director at Capy and co-designer of S:S&S EP, to help us thread the needle and find a path towards a reasonably solid video game. Along the way there were plenty of cases where we talked about adding more video game-style elements but either Kris, Jim or I would typically just hold off a bit to see if another idea might fit better, so only the ideas that 'felt right' actually got in.
IGN: I saw plenty of whining about the Twitter integration. But then somebody brought up an interesting point. Without a clear universe of rules in Sword & Sworcery, they thought that tweeting was integral to the gameplay and that something special would happen if they did it. I know that's not a question, but I wanted your reaction.
Adams: So yeah, there was a hype-fueled, enthusiasm-driven Twitter shit-storm for the first day or two after S:S&S EP's release on the App Store. This phenomenon - players choosing to broadcast bits and pieces to excess - was not intentional, or at least the enormity and intensity of it was a total shock. Our goal was to find a way for players to occasionally broadcast their findings - clues, secrets, jokes or whatever - in a way that would add something interesting to the Twitter conversation. To be honest, before launch we didn't really know if people would notice this feature and we just straight-up hadn't anticipated that it would blow up the way it did.
Thankfully, now that the iPad #sworcery storm has blown over, most folks understand what's up. It's an entirely optional thing with no mechanical reward, people who were broadcasting have chosen to sign-in and press a couple buttons for each tweet that goes out, all they get back from this is a little bit of conversation with the folks around them on Twitter, plus maybe a comment or two from me if I happen to see them in my #sworcery saved search.
With the #sworcery tweets approaching a safe background level we've had plenty of reports from people who are really digging this aspect and are using it in moderation, the way it was intended, so I think it has been pretty positive.
Of course, in retrospect it's clear that a little bit more clarity in-game about this feature would've been helpful. With that in mind, I've already gone ahead and added a new comment from The Archetype right after the feature is introduced that should clear up any confusion that might still exist.
IGN: If this is an EP, does that mean we can expect a full album for Sword & Sworcery?
Adams: We called it an EP for a few reasons: we knew it was going to be an experimental first effort from a new collaborative 'band', we thought it'd be small (our original target was a 37 minute duration) and because we wanted to communicate that music and the concept of an album was an essential reference point for people looking to understand the project. As the project grew, the 37 minute duration concept was left behind but the idea of making a small, music-inspired video game with a distinct beginning, middle and end remained... so we kept the suffix.
S:S&S EP was always intended to be a one-off - Capy, Jim and I have never seriously discussed sequels, ports or franchise-extensions - but of course it's natural for people to imagine that there would be a 'full-length' video game, the equivalent of an LP. Now that S:S&S EP has found an audience we're in a position to grow and strengthen the existing project with additions timed with the solstices and equinoxes, so if all goes well we may eventually end up with something that we can re-name to S:S&S, without the suffix. We'll see.
As for the LP, from the start Jim has owned the music he has created for S:S&S EP and the idea of releasing a record was something we talked about and planned for. When the time came to actually commit to it, Jim was excited about the idea of doing a vinyl pressing... given the record iconography inside S:S&S EP this seemed inevitable. Of course the record was going to be an LP, so it made sense for us to call it that... plus, as much as the video game was and is a more substantial thing than the record in terms of effort and man-hours, the music is in some ways much bigger than the rest of the project... the songs on their own, outside of S:S&S EP, conjure up imaginings of other myriad adventures and moods.
So yeah... anyone looking for more S:S&S EP - be sure to keep in the loop on the Teletex, an erratic email broadcast from Superbrothers Inc., or follow members of the team on Twitter. We'll be in touch eventually on this topic.
Anyone looking for a Sword & Sworcery LP- be sure to get the record, put on your headphones & dream a little epic dream.
