SRG: So, when people get this art book, they will be seeing actual material you were using to create the game?
Roger: Yeah, yeah. Definitely. It's a huge art book. It's really big. There's a lot of concept art, photos from notebooks, cool pencil sketches, animation frames, things from level design, character design, from every area of the game. Because all our animation was done frame by frame, when you see the frames all together that’s one of the things I like the most. Seeing how the character transforms into the cube for example, each frame next to the other looks super nice.
SRG: Was there ever a point where it seemed like you had hit a wall, and thought maybe you would have to give it up, or it wasn't going to work?
Roger: Adrián and I have been working on games for 10 years, so we know when something is difficult, we know when something is way too ambitious. We didn't want to go for an open world multiplayer game. We were clear that it was going to be a short game, it was going to be very polished, so we made some decisions at the beginning that paid off.
For example, there's no text in the game, there’s no dialogue. That means that, not only do you not have to do it, you don't have to hire a script writer, but you also don't have to care about localization. That was huge for us because not only were we able to save money, but it also makes sense with the game. Because our idea was to make the art shine, the art is king, put the art upfront. We didn't want a block of text appearing in the middle of that. But that also helped us keep the scope under control.
We still did delay the game and told Devolver that we needed a couple of months more just to polish. And they were completely fine with that, because we told them way in advance. So in terms of production, it was always pretty good. Of course, we did hit some rocks.
One issue in playtesting was that people didn’t know exactly where you could stand and where you could not, what's floor and what's just art. That's something we worked a lot on, trying to make sure that the language was clear. We had the luck to have a really good level designer. He was an architect by trade. Again, never worked on games, but he was really good at helping us while keeping in mind that the art was always the ruler, the king of the game.
Another decision that we made, and we thought about it many, many times, was the fact that you cannot die in the game. It's very complicated to design a puzzle platform game where you cannot die and still make it challenging. Since the art was king, that made it harder. Sometimes Conrad would say something like, "Hey, I want a composition of rocks rolling and you have to jump from rock to rock." Well, what happens if you fall? Then we need to provide the player a way to go back to the rocks but without breaking the artistic compositions. You cannot just put some stairs in the middle of the rocks.
There were two or three times in the game when we wondered, "Should we just kill and respawn?" But in the end, we just pushed through. Worked around the problem, and offered different solutions for the players. We wanted them to be able to not die. We wanted it to be a journey and enjoyable, not frustrating, It may be more difficult or less difficult depending what you do, but you cannot do it wrong.
SRG: Can you talk about the sound design? How did Berlinist get involved doing the music?
Roger: Oh, it's crazy. Again, people who never worked on video games before, we just met them randomly through Twitter. Turns out they were our neighbors, which was very convenient.
I think it was Conrad, if I remember correctly, who saw a post on Twitter about them. And he just messaged them, "Hey, this is very cool what you do. Would you like to meet one day?" So, they went for a coffee and just made contact. Then, when we decided to start the game, we told Conrad that we needed some music composed. And he told us about Berlinist. "Yeah, I met this band who are really good. We could ask them." So, we connected with them, and found out that our studio was located literally two minutes from where they live. It was very convenient.
There were some scenes that we changed because of the music. For example, at the end of the red sandstorm the music was so good and so beautiful that we created a building afterward, expanded and developed the environment further than we had originally planned, just to accommodate more music. The music and art go hand in hand and are equally important for us in GRIS.
They're also very smart people, because we didn't really talk about this a lot but there's this concept of synesthesia, where different senses get linked. And Marco Albano, who is the main composer, had this idea about synesthesia with sounds and colors, since there's been studies about this for a long time. He did specific things composing along those lines, with certain chords linked to different colors.
Also, for the ending cinematic, we told Berlinist that we needed some music. I was like, "Just give everything." And Marco ran with that and told me, "Roger, don't worry. I promise you, I'm going to make people cry." I said, "Yeah, whatever. You're just overreacting." But he did. The man did it.