LogInCreative Director Hanford Lemoore and Environment Artist Mike Jasoni from Graceful Decay discussed the development of the new puzzle game Maquette, how they teamed up with Annapurna, and more.
The Birth of Graceful Decay
80.lv: Could you do a little intro into what Graceful Decay actually is, how did you guys come together, and how did you start building games.
Hanford Lemoore, Founder, Creative Director: Sure, Graceful Decay is a studio that I founded, basically to make this game. I came up with this game, the initial concept for it about 10 years ago, and I worked on it and thought about it off and on for a long time, and just worked on it in my spare time and whenever I could. And then in 2016 I met up with Annapurna, and Annapurna was like: “Let’s get this thing out”, and so at that point, I founded Graceful Decay in order to bring this game to life and we pulled the team together virtually, everybody works virtually, even before COVID everyone worked from home. We pulled the team together in the last couple of years, and I think at our largest, we were, 16 or 15 people, excluding small contractors here and there, so we had quite a bit of people, and just now we’re in the final phases of finishing it up. Do you think you can add anything, Mike?
Mike Jasoni, 3D Environment Artist: Just on the art side, we have a really terrific Art Director Tim Doolen who’s probably put the most thought and effort into the look of the game, him, working alongside our principal Concept Artist Eddie Hinostroza who designed most of the spaces and the architecture, and then it was my job along with a handful of really talented environmentalists as well to craft those ideas and concepts, and bring them to life in 3D.
The Team
80.lv: How many people are actually working on the game right now? Do you have a team that is set, or do you hire just outside for specific purposes, how do you scale in numbers?
Hanford Lemoore: I started it thinking it would be a small-team game, I thought it was going to be myself, an artist, and a sound designer. And as the game got bigger and bigger, I brought people on, and it has scaled, like I said, we’ve had 5 or 6 artists but currently, I think we have only 2 artists, 3 programmers, and 2 sound designers on the project.
Mike Jasoni: Yes, that’s the beauty of a remote studio, we have people come and go, when they are needed, when things ramp up and scale down.
Hanford Lemoore: I originally didn’t know whether or not Graceful Decay was going to sustain more than one game. My goal wasn’t to make a studio, my goal was to make a game, this game. So I wanted to start small, and I know that running a studio is hard beyond one game, cause right now I have people working full time, what would my other artists be doing and what would other people be doing, I think you have to have another project or at least something to give them. So, I scaled it back and said: “Alright, we’re just coming together for this one game”. And it worked out good but of course, it’s tough because you bond with your teammates and then some of them moved to other games as we didn’t need them anymore. So, It was originally like a one-game studio idea.
80.lv: But you all guys had experience in game development before, right?
Hanford Lemoore: Yeah, most of us have had probably a good 10 years of experience in games. It was really magical, this project brought us together from all over the world, and most of us had never even met each other in person. And we worked really well together, I think it shows in the game, it was a real passion project for all of us.
80.lv: When you did the original prototype was it just blocks and cylinders or did you actually have some environment with the initial start of the visual design? Or was it very schematic?
Hanford Lemoore: I built it over two weeks, and it did start with blocks and cylinders, and it grew very quickly. The very first thing I noticed was that if you don’t put a roof over the small world, you can trust yourself. The first thing that I realized, I picked up an object and I carried over the small world and I instantly hit the player with a giant object, and I thought: “If I stick a roof over this, it will be fine”. And I made a little dome, a very, very low-res dome, and that dome has stayed in the game since 2010-s, like the dome that you see that’s featured in the trailer, it’s still a dome, it’s a much more innate dome, you know, it’s been flashed out. But a key to this, and I think Mike will be able to talk more about this, is that you need to be able to recognize the small world as being the same as the large world. And so, the architecture in the game had to be really unique, and the artists were always working to make sure that one of the first things that you see is a castle, and we have palaces and whatnot, and a huge part of that was really easy identifiable architecture that you can see in one level of recursion and say: “Yeah, that giant building there is this tiny building there”. And that evolved very quickly, I learned very, very quickly in the prototype that if you use just squares and cylinders, you can’t even tell that the small world is the large world.
80.lv: When you did the original prototype was it just blocks and cylinders or did you actually have some environment with the initial start of the visual design? Or was it very schematic?
Hanford Lemoore: I built it over two weeks, and it did start with blocks and cylinders, and it grew very quickly. The very first thing I noticed was that if you don’t put a roof over the small world, you can trust yourself. The first thing that I realized, I picked up an object and I carried over the small world and I instantly hit the player with a giant object, and I thought: “If I stick a roof over this, it will be fine”. And I made a little dome, a very, very low-res dome, and that dome has stayed in the game since 2010-s, like the dome that you see that’s featured in the trailer, it’s still a dome, it’s a much more innate dome, you know, it’s been flashed out. But a key to this, and I think Mike will be able to talk more about this, is that you need to be able to recognize the small world as being the same as the large world. And so, the architecture in the game had to be really unique, and the artists were always working to make sure that one of the first things that you see is a castle, and we have palaces and whatnot, and a huge part of that was really easy identifiable architecture that you can see in one level of recursion and say: “Yeah, that giant building there is this tiny building there”. And that evolved very quickly, I learned very, very quickly in the prototype that if you use just squares and cylinders, you can’t even tell that the small world is the large world.
80.lv: Could you elaborate on the environment design, because it seems like a lot is going on in there so it’s not really like a little piece or a modular kit that you reuse time and time again
Mike Jasoni: To Hanford’s credit, he put a lot of work into really flashing out his prototypes so before he ramped up the entire art team, he brought on Tim as our Art Director, and he did a lot to find a style that would be performing and be able to get done in a reasonable amount of time with a small team. And Hanford’s prototype really was the foundation for the art because we could come in and see that over here was a castle, over here there are these two towers, over here there’s a Ferris wheel, and it was about giving it a facelift. So, we already had a good footprint to it to work with, it was just about concepting what it actually looks like with our style.
Maquette's Environments
80.lv: Could you elaborate on the environment design, because it seems like a lot is going on in there so it’s not really like a little piece or a modular kit that you reuse time and time again
Mike Jasoni: To Hanford’s credit, he put a lot of work into really flashing out his prototypes so before he ramped up the entire art team, he brought on Tim as our Art Director, and he did a lot to find a style that would be performing and be able to get done in a reasonable amount of time with a small team. And Hanford’s prototype really was the foundation for the art because we could come in and see that over here was a castle, over here there are these two towers, over here there’s a Ferris wheel, and it was about giving it a facelift. So, we already had a good footprint to it to work with, it was just about concepting what it actually looks like with our style.
80.lv: Could you talk a little bit about some of the specific decisions that were made by your art team that helped craft that particular look of the game?
Mike Jasoni: I’ll start with the lighting. The lighting was probably one of the biggest challenges for us. We have a really talented lighting and environment artist Olly Skillman-Wilson who figured out we wanted each space to have its own time of day and its own lighting, but everything was constantly covered by the dome so even if you go to the bigger and bigger world, there’s just a bigger and bigger dome, so there’s no sky, how do you interpret a light source then? So, we opted to treat each area as its own stage and give each area its own giant spotlight and so the lighting is really theatrical and I think ties into telling a story.
80.lv: It’s nice that you say that because it reminds me of a theater play.
Mike Jasoni: Yeah, right, I mean the name of the game Maquette, it’s like a scaled model of the world and we’re literally shining a light on it, yeah, a lot of challenges came with that. The color, going back to Tim’s prototype, he also already had a full story flashed out for us when we came on, so the art was always meant to serve the story and kind of reflect the state of the relationship between the characters in the story, or even what the characters themselves are feeling, so every little thing in the game is part of a metaphor for the story.
The Plot
80.lv: What was touched on in the story? Could you give us a little snippet of what’s going on in the game and how is your story presented?
Hanford Lemoore: Sure, you know I came up with the mechanic first, as I mentioned, and when I decided I really wanted to do something with this game and not just make a bunch of puzzles, I wanted to add a story and actually early on I added very videogame cliché stories to it, without really thinking about it. And those stories are fine, and they are cliché for a reason, but it sat there on the game while I was figuring out puzzles, and when I went to get to the story-telling part, I realized I really didn’t have any passion for the story, it wasn’t really happening. And it was because I had just picked the story without really thinking it through.
I spent a lot of time, I went back to story-telling and just writing stories for myself. I keep a sketchbook/journal and I just started writing stories again, and I wasn’t trying to come up with a plot for the game. I was just trying to remind myself what I like about stories and story-telling. And at one point I hit on this love story and I really liked it, I could see the story ark for it, and I remember thinking: “This is too bad that the story doesn’t work with this "world within a world" idea cause I like them both – I like the game, I like the story but they wouldn’t go together.” But then I started exploring more about the story and about the game world, and I started drawing more connections between the two, and for me, that was the key that got me excited about this game and about telling a story in it.
The idea was to tell this love story and on the surface, the love story has nothing to do with the world within a world. And in fact, that’s one of the things, I hope, the players have a fun time discovering as they play through the game, how this world is connected with this story, and as the story unfolds the players will put that together. But when it comes to storytelling, that actually influenced big parts of the story as well because one of the ways we connect the world that you are playing, and the love story is with a sketchbook they share. And early on in the game you hear them talk about drawing a castle in the sketchbook, and you see the castle in the game world, and so right away there is this connection of “Ah, maybe the world I’m walking around in isn’t just their love story but it’s also the drawings they shared in the sketchbook”. And it was, honestly, as much for the story as it was for the game. It was the first dotted line I got between the love story and the game. And it just continued from there. I don’t know if we’d shown it, you get a little bit of it in the trailer that we have out but there are these illustrations that appear, I think our first trailer had a castle that you see very briefly.
80.lv: Yes, in the beginning.
Hanford Lemoore: Yes, that’s actually kind of an unfinished prototype that I did that made it into the trailer. But in the final game, you will see that we have the cinematics that are all done with sketches that kind of float in 3D, and they kind of connect this 2D story-telling style to the 3D world and you will see more of that very soon.
Setting Up Puzzles
80.lv: You mentioned that you were working a lot on different puzzles so I’m wondering what’s you process there, how do you come up with these puzzles, how do you connect them with the level design and the environment design and how do you test them?
Hanford Lemoore: My design for puzzles was to build the engine and play around with it, I also actually wrote out some puzzles that I thought of on paper, and some of them actually did work when I went to build them in the game and some of them didn’t. You know, the thing is this game is all about “Aha!” moments. For example, one of the first puzzles you get to is taking a tiny key and making a bridge and that’s an “Aha!” moment for the players, and so, to make puzzles for this game, you build the ending and you start playing around with it, and as the designer, I have my own “Aha!” moments when I saw the repercussions of this recursive engine. And you actually bring up a very good moment about tying it with the environment, I built these spaces in the prototype form, but I built them to serve the puzzle. And, you know, I’d make it look like a castle or a palace, but I spent the bare minimum time I could to make the building look unique, and then the artists challenged, my challenge to them was that you can’t change any of the proportions or details that serve the puzzle. For example, the gap where you place the key has to be the right size, if you change the size of that, the key’s not going to fit anymore. So, I would hand it on to the art team and tell them that they have to keep these things the same but go wild with everything else, and that’s where I thought they did an amazing job at extending that and having the art still serve the puzzle. Mike, maybe you can talk more about this, when you do solve the puzzle, you can go back and look at the art and see that the art was almost telling you how to solve it in a way.
Mike Jasoni: In all honesty, that’s the kind of thing that you want in this kind of game as an artist, with a puzzle game, in particular, you want the boundaries, you want things set in place, you want the gameplay to be solid and done and grey boxed. It could be really frustrating as those puzzles weren’t flashed out before we started doing the art and we find out that we have to move things around and change things, you know, that’s when things start to get a little dicey, so working off of that prototype, it was challenging but it was also good to have those parameters to work within so it’s kind of a double-edged sword.
Hanford Lemoore: Yeah, but I should say I have to give credit to our team because I do think that they brought a lot to the puzzles, not just the art but to the puzzles themselves, and the art actually makes the puzzles better and reinforces the gameplay.
Mike Jasoni: There’s always a fine balance between form and function, you want everything to look good, but you also have to give the player hints, so there’s a lot of visual hinting that we do, and you always want to have kind of signaling for players throughout the game so that they learn one thing and they can carry it to the next puzzle, you know, and there’s a lot of visual cues in there that we have to come up with. But again, we had a lot from the prototype to work with on that, it was just about being creative with what it actually looks like.
80.lv: I really like this idea that you start with a certain amount of restrictions and I think that’s a perfect place to start with your creative idea and try to build on that.
Mike Jasoni: Yeah, I think that having limitations to certain parameters forces creativity sometimes, you know, when it’s a blue sky, if it’s an open-world game and it was all about designing the art, then it could be whatever we wanted but we have these very particular cubic spaces to design within so we couldn’t go too tall or we would hit the dome, and we couldn’t go outside of the walls, yeah. It was a really fun challenge.
Hanford Lemoore: Early on I wanted to make a more open game, and those are some of my favorite games, but the challenge with Maquette is that every puzzle in Maquette is only puzzling until you solve it and once you have that “Aha!” moment, whatever you did to solve that puzzle is no longer a puzzle, it’s just a tool in your repertoire. For example, taking a tiny object and making it big to be a bridge, that’s one of the first things you learn. But then from then on out, any other time you come across a gap, the first thing you will think is what tiny object do I have to make large, and so from that sample, the game and those “aha” moments restricted me as a designer to say: “Okay, these puzzles need to be solved in order so that we are not throwing a puzzle in front of someone that requires some knowledge from another puzzle”. And it was a cool thing as a designer myself, it was a fun challenge to design a game out of puzzles that evolve in that way, each one building of the knowledge of the previous one.
The Scope
80.lv: How big is the game? You mentioned that you’ve been actually working on it for a while, I’m wondering since you took so much time, is it a larger project or a smaller project? How much content did you manage to press into it?
Hanford Lemoore: Well, you know, it’s a world within a world within a world, it’s a really small project as well as a really large project. I don’t really know how to answer that. I guess the easiest way is to say that early on I was really worried, like before I had the story…to me it was like puzzle, puzzle, puzzle, puzzle, how many puzzles I can come up with. And when we got the story we wanted, I started to see the story ark and when I realized: “Okay, what we actually need is to tell the story correctly, you know, this is how many scenes we have, and within each one of those scenes each scene has a mood that fits the story ark, and each one of those areas needs to have puzzles”. And so, finding the story actually really helped me to dial in the length of the game. I think without a story I would’ve been, you know, trying to just come up with level after level. And that is a great way to design puzzle games, and I did a puzzle game a long time ago that had like a hundred levels in it. But we’ve broken this up into chapters, and each chapter has a handful of puzzles that explore that theme, so, you know, and I think we have seven chapters, and each one dabbles in a theme, and then you move on. So, that was the thing that I…you know, I have talked to a few other designers…Martin Walsh, and I talked a lot about, like, do you want to an exhaustive exploration of every possible mechanic you can apply, like a game The Witness has, or do you wanna do a little bit more of “Hey, explore this area, let the player taste this, get used to this, and then move them onto this aspect of the mechanic, and then move them onto that aspect of the mechanic”. And that’s the approach we took.
Teaming Up with Annapurna Interactive
80.lv: I know that you’re working with the publisher. Could you talk about how did you meet with these guys from Annapurna, how did you develop this relationship, and how the partnership looks like on your side?
Hanford Lemoore: Well, Annapurna got in touch with me right when they started to do games. They had Annapurna Pictures, and they started a new branch, I called Annapurna Interactive, and they got a hold of me, and they remembered my game from GDC 2011, Nathan Gary and James Masi from Annapurna Interactive got in touch with me and said: “Hey, are you still working on this game, we haven’t seen anything about it recently”, and this is right when they were getting Annapurna Interactive up and running, they hadn’t published anything, but I met Nathan once when I was doing a playtest for “What Remains of Edith Finch” which was still at Sony at that time, and I think Nathan was at Sony. So, they came to me and basically said: “Hey, Annapurna is doing Annapurna Interactive and, you know, we like your game”, and we had a discussion about what I wanted to do with it, they thought it was a match with what they were thinking, what they wanted to do, so I signed with them and took that leap. We didn’t know at that time who Annapurna Interactive was gonna be, and it’s been great working with them, this game couldn’t have happened without Annapurna. And I don’t know, I can’t speak for other publishers, they had been incredibly supportive of what I wanted to do, and when I came to them, I didn’t have any of this art, I didn’t have cutscenes, I didn’t have any of the finished art, so most of what I was pitching to them haven’t been made. And in retrospect, it was pretty ambitious, cause as I said, I thought I was gonna get a small team. Yeah, Annapurna has been really great at just supporting what the vision is and saying: “Yes, we support you and we gonna do everything we can to allow you make the game you want to make”.
80.lv: When do you think we gonna see the game? You’re saying it’s 2021, but is it the first half, the second half? Do you have any estimates of that?
Hanford Lemoore: We can’t say, really, right now the official word is 2021. I wish I could say more, we hope to have an announcement for you soon about that.