20 / wfmag.cc
When games look like comic booksInterface
that end, Kythreotis has drawn from
Arcosanti, the Arizona-based desert
living experiment, and the Japanese
Metabolists – a school of architectural
thought epitomised by Kisho Kurokawa’s
Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo. When
we spoke, Kythreotis was looking to
the organic architecture of the natural
world. “It just depends on the problems
we’ve got ahead of us,” he says. “For
some of the architecture I’m designing
at the moment, I’ve got a book on avian
architecture, so birds’ nests and the like.
The approach we take tends to be quite
research-driven, and the visuals then
come as a natural resolution to context.
So, if the context is, ‘These people live inso developing a game’s art style is an
act of translation. “Our main goal is to
emulate the beauty and dynamics of the
original 2D source material,” Yamanaka
says. “But there is definitely a lot of trial
and error involved.”
For Kythreotis and Fineberg, the
early days on Sable – a narrative sci-fi
adventure that takes cues from The
Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – felt
like exploring uncharted territory.
They weren’t aware of any games that
captured the exact interplay between 2D
art and 3D space the way they wanted to.
For the most part, the Shedworks team
ended up going beyond games, drawing
from the work of Studio Ghibli and the
French cartoonist Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud.
Comic artists and animators can,
however, frame each moment and
determine the exact angle their audience
gets on the action. Sable is a third-
person action game that gives the player
control of the camera. To bring the comic
aesthetic to a 3D space, Shedworks looked
to Kythreotis’s education as an architect
for philosophical and aesthetic guidance.
“You can never control how people
are going to interact with a building in
a really forced way,” Kythreotis says.
“You have to design architecture so
that it’s looser, so that it’s based on
functionality... We try to anticipate how
people are going to interact with it in an
architectural sense, rather than in a more
scripted shot-by-shot sense.”
This means that Sable’s world requires
a logic beyond mere aesthetics. To
REVENGE OF D’OH
After Kythreotis and Fineberg had already
solved many of the early problems that
the interplay of 2D art and a 3D world
presented, they discovered a game that
had already solved many of the issues they
faced. “There was actually one [game],
but we completely missed it, which was a
Simpsons game on the Wii [The Simpsons
Game], but I’ve only been told about it
since,” says Kythreotis. “That would have
helped a lot, to have seen that game.”the desert in sand dunes,’ then I’ll go out
and research, ‘How do people who live in
sand dunes live?’ Then it’s about world-
building culture from that framework. It
answers the questions that start to come
naturally when you build worlds like that.”
For the team at Blue Manchu,
inspiration for its strategy-shooter Void
Bastards did come from the world of video
games – and, unsurprisingly for an indie
project, from budgetary and personnel
constraints. “When we first discussed
the project, [the question] was: ‘Can we
even do a first-person shooter with such
a small team — less than five people?’”
says Lee, who leads Blue Manchu’s art
team. “And the solution was: ‘How about Sable’s story is being written by Meg
Jayanth, a narrative designer who worked
on Horizon Zero Dawn and wrote the
interactive fiction game, 80 Days.