LogInState of Play's Luke Whittaker has told us about the development behind South of the Circle, a narrative adventure set in Cold War Antarctica and a Games for Change award nominee for Best Narrative, discussed software and the game's visual style, and shared some advice on working with actors.
Introduction
80.lv: Could you give us a little introduction to State of Play? What is your studio all about? What kind of games are you making?
Luke Whittaker, Creative Director at State of Play: State of Play is an indie game development company based in the UK. We make games with a human touch, and sometimes that means hand making an entire model city out of paper and cardboard for the set of the puzzle adventure Lumino City, sometimes it means working with actors and motion capture to create a narrative game like South of the Circle. We have a deep love of story and its ability to connect with people, and try and imbue our games with a humanity in which people can find meaning.
80.lv: What's the secret of making an engaging video game today?
Luke Whittaker: Stories are universally engaging, and I think this is one of the ways games can connect with a wide audience. The secret to that is creating believable and compelling characters and placing them in a fascinating situation. It’s something people expect of film, literature, theatre, graphic novels, but only recently come to think of as relevant to games, and perhaps these things are harder to sell in the games market because someone will always ask well, how does it play? So the secret to making stories compelling in games is to find that way people can live it. I think that’s the real strength of video games, you can connect with people in a more direct way and make different points than in books, TV or film, when things are always happening to someone else.
As for making games relevant for the market, I think this is the key, to make sure you have both something compelling about the story and something compelling about how you interact with it.
South of the Circle
80.lv: Could you tell us a bit about the way South of the Circle was born? What is the underlying inspiration?
Luke Whittaker: Going way back, it was a novel I read called The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Klay. It deals with politics and the identity of two migrants leading up to World War 2. There’s one section set in Antarctica where one of them comes across a stranger on the ice and is called upon to make a life or death decision, to shoot or not to shoot, and I thought it was an incredible set up for a game. The original idea was setting it in the age of exploration, around 1910 – 1920, but incredibly I discovered a family friend was part of the British Antarctic Survey in the 1960s. After seeing his incredible photos, I knew we had to set it in that time period. Many of his experiences have made it directly into the game, like the time he would be going out hunting with an ancient World War 1 rifle, the times he had to rescue sick colleagues and radio for help, and the time he survived a plane crash in a blizzard.
We also wanted to push what was possible with interactive dialogue, and games like Oxenfree and Firewatch were of inspiration here. We wanted to create interactive dialogue you really felt like you lived. I kept a review of the film Before Sunrise in mind as the kind of feeling we wanted to provoke: ’it’s talking, but it’s as exciting as a thriller.’
The Software
80.lv: Could you tell us a bit more about the technology you've been using to produce the project? Were you using Unity or Unreal Engine?
Luke Whittaker: We used Unity for South of the Circle. It’s not our first Unity game, our previous games KAMI 2 and INKS were both made in Unity, but it is our first game set in a 3D environment, the first using motion capture, the first with a cast of a dozen actors, the first with such a huge script. There were a lot of firsts.
It meant we were sometimes learning on the job, and so were some of the experts in their field. We were doing things like five-minute motion-capture takes with facial animation and voice recording, many actors at once. The actors loved it – they could treat it like they were doing theatre – and I really believe it was essential to capture the best performances because recording body and face separately in small chunks is never going to have the same feeling. But recording it all at once, it’s a lot of data to record, process, and fix. It meant delays whilst glitches were ironed out.
Another challenge was the research, with the game set in Antarctica. I didn’t want to design by Google and guess at what it felt like to be out there. So I travelled to Antarctica with Steffan, our other artist. We spent three weeks travelling around the coast on a research vessel, making landings when we could, and drawing and making prints of what we saw. Some of those environments, like the sunken volcano of black sand called Deception Island, made it directly into the game.
The Game's Visual Style
80.lv: What were the main choices you've made in term of visual style? How does this style support your story?
Luke Whittaker: I wanted the style to feel appropriate to the 1960s period the game was set, whilst also having a timeless quality. Going for photorealism was never a goal, instead I started looking at screen prints and illustrations of the period, using a limited colour palette to match the kind of prints made at the time.
When we married this to the motion captured actors, it created this hand-crafted yet lifelike look and feel. It helped the story by allowing me to focus the design and lighting of each scene on only those things which were important – the chair you’re sitting on, the radio, the characters, the peak of the mountains up ahead. We didn’t need to worry about making sure every tiny extraneous detail was photorealistic, instead everything was focussed on delivering that story in the most impactful way.
Working With Actors
80.lv: Could you talk a bit about the way you've been working with the leading actors and big talent? Any interesting stories there?
Luke Whittaker: It was such a privilege to work with actors like Anton Lesser from Endor, Gwilym Lee from Bohemian Rhapsody and Olivia Vinall from The Woman in White. The depth of emotion all the actors brought to the game was incredible, it wouldn’t have been the same had we not had them, and had we not used the methods we did.
We made sure we had plenty of rehearsal time so actors were free to experiment and had time to understand and become their characters. I remember one day when a small scene wasn’t working in rehearsal, an argument between your character’s parents, and Claire Calbraith, who plays the mother, stopped us and wondered what their relationship had been like twenty or thirty years ago. We spent time working out their relationship history in detail, and when we went back to rehearsal it was magical, the performances were transformed. It’s about working out the stuff that isn’t in the scene, and yet absolutely IS in the scene. This was the great joy of working with such wonderful talent, teasing out these very human moments.
Conclusion
80.lv: What were you biggest learnings from this project in terms of business, development, and storytelling?
Luke Whittaker: We’ve learned that motion capture is still very expensive! At least in the long-form way we needed to use it. But in terms of the results, it was absolutely worth it. And we learned a lot about how to design a workflow for this kind of game to be sure. In terms of storytelling, it proved to us that this approach works, that you can use interactivity to see inside the mind of a character and also in a sense become them, and it opens up all sorts of storytelling possibilities for the future.