#10 - Button City and the Power of Friendship

Explicit content warning

08/05/21 • 30 min

If you only go in from the outset of Button City thinking its core theme is being a love letter to games, you wouldn’t be that far off. Subliminal Gaming co-founders Ryan and Shandiin Woodward certainly helped shape Button City with that motif in mind. But there’s another aspect too that feels instrumental to what Button City is about at its core: friendship.

“A lot of their tactics to try to save the arcade just don’t fully help, honestly,” says Ryan Woodward. “I think that was something that we kind of wanted to be like, ‘Hey, sometimes, things are a little bit bigger than just you, you know’. But I think it’s really more about the friends you made along the way or something like that.”

Adds Shandiin Woodward: “I hope people are able to see the characters and find characters that they resonate with. We tried to really make a very colourful, diverse cast. People with different family structures, characters with disabilities, characters with different personalities and dynamics. And I hope people find someone that they can relate to or latch on to.”

Several years after development began, next week, Button City will release into the world. Here, the Woodwards go into detail about how it was shaped, its themes of friendship, the slice of life influences and more and how the power of friendship shines through the game.

[NOTE: This is a change in a previously-advertised episode on Skatebird. That will, however, arrive next month just before the game launches]

Links: Play Diaries|Twitter|Facebook

[NOTE: This is a change in a previously-advertised episode on Skatebird. That will, however, arrive next month just before the game launches]

Links: Play Diaries|Twitter|Facebook

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#9 - Tunic’s Secret Legend

In 2017, an adventure game was shown to the world for the first time at The PC Gaming Show at that year’s E3. Then initially known as Secret Legend – shorthanded by certain players as ‘Fox game’ – it was given new life under the name of Tunic. Numerous showings of Tunic at various events and multiple trailers have given it many comparisons to The Legend of Zelda with an adorable fox.

But Tunic director Andrew Shouldice wants you to come away with the thought that it’s more than merely just its Zelda inspiration.

“Occasionally, you’ll see someone say like, ‘Oh, I sat down to play this cute game and I was pleasantly surprised that it was not what I was expecting,” says Shouldice. “‘It is challenging, it is mysterious, it is not putting all its cards on the table at once’. And that’s great. That’s what we want.

“Occasionally, people will see it and be like, ‘Oh, I thought that this would be a game that I could sit my four-year-old in front of and just have them have no problem with it’ and they might be a little bit disappointed about that.

“I wonder if people will see it and think, you know, ‘breezy Zelda clone’. And what I hope is that they are able to experience it on its own merits and be excited to explore a challenging, mysterious world full of secrets around every corner.”

Ahead of its impending launch soon...ish – a release timeline isn’t forthcoming when we talk – Shouldice talks in part of how Tunic intends to charm the world through adventure, mystery and more.

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#11 - A Game Director's Story

When you’re in AAA, you usually go from one game to the next. It’s a cycle that lasts every four or five years, if not longer.

At BioWare Edmonton, Fernando Melo was coming off the back of working on Mass Effect: Andromeda and hopping on to the next Dragon Age game currently being made. But as production wore on, he started questioning whether another four or five-year cycle was worth it anymore.

“When we got to EA’s greenlight towards the end of pre-production [of the next Dragon Age], things are looking pretty good. That went through, that wasn’t a problem or anything,” says Melo.

“But it’s when it really kind of hit me if I was prepared to sign on for another four or five-year dev cycle. And I realised that my heart just wasn’t quite into that as much as I think it needs to be to take on something like that.”

He decided to up sticks in 2019 to break out from the AAA mould, start a new studio and pour his – and other people’s – experiences from the AAA scene into Game Director Story.

Here, Melo talks of the pressures of the AAA scene, how he’s putting those into Game Director Story and how he hopes players will come away from Game Director Story with a better understanding of what game development is actually like.

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