They say the camera never lies, but that doesn’t mean it always tells the whole truth. So accustomed are we to the concept of a side-scrolling platform game whose viewpoint exists purely as our window into a world that it’s a shock to discover it might be someone else’s perspective too, someone keeping tabs on our every move. Fortunately, in American Arcadia, that someone is on your side, under your control even, along with the little running man at the centre of your screen.
It may have been no small feat to collapse first- and third-person views together like this, but for Madrid’s Out Of The Blue Games, the idea felt like a natural next step. While still developing their first game, Call Of The Sea, the studio heads decided they needed a second project that could be lined up to follow soon after. “For a small studio like ours, it’s good to keep doing games and not wait after you release the first one,” Tatiana Delgado, studio co-founder and creative director, tells us. They called a meeting of the design team and the core of what would become American Arcadia was spawned in that session. “Sometimes the magic flows,” as Delgado puts it.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1713437535/articles/XRlm8dGVd1713444562670/pENE6vKZT1713444950628.jpg]
Initially, they were keen to make a side-scrolling game, a desire that merged with a shared interest in dystopian escape films such as The Truman Show, Logan’s Run and The Island, and TV series The Prisoner. Yet their experience with the firstperson Call Of The Sea also led them to wonder if they could incorporate that perspective somehow. “We thought, ‘OK, what if you have someone inside this dystopia and someone outside helping that person?’” Delgado recalls. “And everything came together.”
Among those cinematic influences, one in particular would really help to shape the scenario. One of American Arcadia’s two main characters, Trevor Hills, resides in an enclosed city, in which residents’ lives are filmed and broadcast around the clock; he’s a very ordinary citizen, and unaware of the reality beyond Arcadia. So much has changed since Peter Weir’s 1998 dissection of reality TV, lead designer Alvaro Gonzalez notes, that the question for Out Of The Blue was always: ‘What if The Truman Show happened today?’
The biggest shift to consider here, of course, was social media, in its many forms. “We have streamers who broadcast their lives, voluntarily, almost 24/7,” game designer and writer Alfredo González-Barros says. “We’ve grown accustomed to that, but it’s crazy, so it’s something we wanted to reflect on.” Since social media puts us all under the microscope to some degree, one big difference is that, rather than focusing on a single unaware star, all of Arcadia’s residents are being filmed. “Nowadays everything has to be public – you have to show everything to everybody, you need the approval of everybody,” GonzálezBarros says. And while Truman’s appeal stems from being a wholesome everyman, for Trevor, his all-too-normal life becomes a problem. The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, as Oscar Wilde once said, and for Trevor that’s very literal – he’s simply too dull to catch anyone’s attention, leading the show’s producers to try to get rid of him.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1713437535/articles/XRlm8dGVd1713444562670/3173838748.jpg]
The TV-show framing helped the team introduce the notion of multiple perspectives, creating space for additional thematic layers. In short, you’re as much a viewer of the events as the player. “As a game it makes you responsible for the actions you perform," Delgado says. "So that's a way to help you live the situation and be a participant in the facts." Yet this also makes you a voyeur, and at times American Arcadia draws your attention to that - not least in one scene late in the game where Trevor's escape goes viral and the action is embedded in a social-media feed, churning out comments about your efforts. "We wanted people to ask questions about how they consume media," Delgado says. "We've watched streams of people playing and they realise, 'Oh, this is happening because of me, because I'm watching this and I'm enjoying Trevor's [plight]'."
Yet another narrative layer is introduced by this story being presented in the form of a documentary, made after the fact, splicing playable sequences with commentary from Trevor and his outside accomplice Angela. Other developers may want to take note here as, according to González-Barros, in some ways that format made building the game significantly easier. "There's an issue with sidescrollers," he says, "in which you just press the right key and an area you spent three days decorating is gone in ten seconds." A quick cut to a talking head, followed by a time skip, can save a lot of work, then and that goes double for scenes that would have required complex effects and animations. "There's a lot of cheap tricks, where there's an ellipsis," González-Barros says. "For example, you see Trevor explaining that he crashed his car, but you never see the crash."
Before everyone rushes to chop their games together with character interviews, though, it's worth noting that it brought extra challenges as well as shortcuts. For a start, Gonzalez says, "We wanted to make every level different, because it's like a movie you're presenting to the spectator." And some of the cuts and transitions, segueing from action to interviews, or in edited sequences, were harder to make in game form than they would be in film. "The slide [transition] was a real technical challenge for us," Gonzalez explains, "because you have to display two different levels at the same time. We've played a lot of games and never seen anything like it, but it helped us to tell the story." The effect was especially useful in an early montage of Trevor's mundane daily routine, which otherwise felt too short on movement for this kind of game.
For all that, though, the most important layer above the sidescrolling action is that represented by Angela, the activist American Arcadia employee watching and guiding Trevor from her office monitor. Each time we take control of her, the game changes from third- to firstperson, from inside Arcadia to outside. But Angela’s viewpoint wasn’t the only way contrast was created, as she and Trevor were written as opposites, creating a kind of odd-couple buddy-movie vibe. The aim was to push both characters out of their comfort zones, González-Barros explains: while timid, geeky Trevor spends much of his time running and jumping, savvy yet spiky Angela has to stay calm, using stealth and tact to gain access to systems blocking Trevor’s path. In doing so, he feels, they become more relatable: “Every time you see a character fail, that’s a human thing.” These roles would also ensure cooperation, a philosophy clearly close to the writers’ hearts. GonzálezBarros notes that you may spot a copy of real-life book The Evolution Of Cooperation in Angela’s house, which explores how “cooperation between humans is the only way to survive.”
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1713437535/articles/XRlm8dGVd171344456...
It may have been no small feat to collapse first- and third-person views together like this, but for Madrid’s Out Of The Blue Games, the idea felt like a natural next step. While still developing their first game, Call Of The Sea, the studio heads decided they needed a second project that could be lined up to follow soon after. “For a small studio like ours, it’s good to keep doing games and not wait after you release the first one,” Tatiana Delgado, studio co-founder and creative director, tells us. They called a meeting of the design team and the core of what would become American Arcadia was spawned in that session. “Sometimes the magic flows,” as Delgado puts it.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1713437535/articles/XRlm8dGVd1713444562670/pENE6vKZT1713444950628.jpg]
Initially, they were keen to make a side-scrolling game, a desire that merged with a shared interest in dystopian escape films such as The Truman Show, Logan’s Run and The Island, and TV series The Prisoner. Yet their experience with the firstperson Call Of The Sea also led them to wonder if they could incorporate that perspective somehow. “We thought, ‘OK, what if you have someone inside this dystopia and someone outside helping that person?’” Delgado recalls. “And everything came together.”
Among those cinematic influences, one in particular would really help to shape the scenario. One of American Arcadia’s two main characters, Trevor Hills, resides in an enclosed city, in which residents’ lives are filmed and broadcast around the clock; he’s a very ordinary citizen, and unaware of the reality beyond Arcadia. So much has changed since Peter Weir’s 1998 dissection of reality TV, lead designer Alvaro Gonzalez notes, that the question for Out Of The Blue was always: ‘What if The Truman Show happened today?’
The biggest shift to consider here, of course, was social media, in its many forms. “We have streamers who broadcast their lives, voluntarily, almost 24/7,” game designer and writer Alfredo González-Barros says. “We’ve grown accustomed to that, but it’s crazy, so it’s something we wanted to reflect on.” Since social media puts us all under the microscope to some degree, one big difference is that, rather than focusing on a single unaware star, all of Arcadia’s residents are being filmed. “Nowadays everything has to be public – you have to show everything to everybody, you need the approval of everybody,” GonzálezBarros says. And while Truman’s appeal stems from being a wholesome everyman, for Trevor, his all-too-normal life becomes a problem. The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, as Oscar Wilde once said, and for Trevor that’s very literal – he’s simply too dull to catch anyone’s attention, leading the show’s producers to try to get rid of him.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1713437535/articles/XRlm8dGVd1713444562670/3173838748.jpg]
The TV-show framing helped the team introduce the notion of multiple perspectives, creating space for additional thematic layers. In short, you’re as much a viewer of the events as the player. “As a game it makes you responsible for the actions you perform," Delgado says. "So that's a way to help you live the situation and be a participant in the facts." Yet this also makes you a voyeur, and at times American Arcadia draws your attention to that - not least in one scene late in the game where Trevor's escape goes viral and the action is embedded in a social-media feed, churning out comments about your efforts. "We wanted people to ask questions about how they consume media," Delgado says. "We've watched streams of people playing and they realise, 'Oh, this is happening because of me, because I'm watching this and I'm enjoying Trevor's [plight]'."
Yet another narrative layer is introduced by this story being presented in the form of a documentary, made after the fact, splicing playable sequences with commentary from Trevor and his outside accomplice Angela. Other developers may want to take note here as, according to González-Barros, in some ways that format made building the game significantly easier. "There's an issue with sidescrollers," he says, "in which you just press the right key and an area you spent three days decorating is gone in ten seconds." A quick cut to a talking head, followed by a time skip, can save a lot of work, then and that goes double for scenes that would have required complex effects and animations. "There's a lot of cheap tricks, where there's an ellipsis," González-Barros says. "For example, you see Trevor explaining that he crashed his car, but you never see the crash."
Before everyone rushes to chop their games together with character interviews, though, it's worth noting that it brought extra challenges as well as shortcuts. For a start, Gonzalez says, "We wanted to make every level different, because it's like a movie you're presenting to the spectator." And some of the cuts and transitions, segueing from action to interviews, or in edited sequences, were harder to make in game form than they would be in film. "The slide [transition] was a real technical challenge for us," Gonzalez explains, "because you have to display two different levels at the same time. We've played a lot of games and never seen anything like it, but it helped us to tell the story." The effect was especially useful in an early montage of Trevor's mundane daily routine, which otherwise felt too short on movement for this kind of game.
For all that, though, the most important layer above the sidescrolling action is that represented by Angela, the activist American Arcadia employee watching and guiding Trevor from her office monitor. Each time we take control of her, the game changes from third- to firstperson, from inside Arcadia to outside. But Angela’s viewpoint wasn’t the only way contrast was created, as she and Trevor were written as opposites, creating a kind of odd-couple buddy-movie vibe. The aim was to push both characters out of their comfort zones, González-Barros explains: while timid, geeky Trevor spends much of his time running and jumping, savvy yet spiky Angela has to stay calm, using stealth and tact to gain access to systems blocking Trevor’s path. In doing so, he feels, they become more relatable: “Every time you see a character fail, that’s a human thing.” These roles would also ensure cooperation, a philosophy clearly close to the writers’ hearts. GonzálezBarros notes that you may spot a copy of real-life book The Evolution Of Cooperation in Angela’s house, which explores how “cooperation between humans is the only way to survive.”
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1713437535/articles/XRlm8dGVd171344456...
You're reading a preview of
Edge Uk (Digital) - 1 Issue, June 2024