How Barcelona’s Piccolo Studio is crafting After Us

The Game Awards confirmed us the way forward for gaming, and one in every of titles coming is After Us. Piccolo Studio is making the exploration journey sport and Take-Two Interactive‘s Private Division label is publishing it.

The title arrives within the spring of 2023 for PC on Steam and on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. It’s a phenomenal sport with an fascinating narrative and inventive strategy.

I spoke with the sport builders — Alexis Corominas and Jordi Ministral, two of the founders of Piccolo Studio — about their strategy. They selected to set the sport in a post-human world, which often isn’t a pleasing premise for a online game.

But whereas it’s devastating to consider what brought on the apocalypse, the creators view their title as being about “legacy and hope.” The demo featured no phrases, very like an expertise like Flower. It has the same sort of spirituality about nature, however this sport is far completely different in the way it appears.

You play as Gaia, the Spirit of Life, to carry hope to a damaged planet in a surrealistic, post-human journey. You’ll traverse environments and save the souls of extinct animals and harness Gaia’s powers to struggle the risks that plague a scorched Earth.

After Us options Piccolo Studio’s model of delivering impactful storytelling and combines it with compelling exploration and journey. Gaia should soar, glide, sprint, wallride and swim to evade lethal obstacles and enemies. As the embodiment of life, she has the facility to assist restore and reconstitute the planet. By emitting bursts of sunshine, Gaia sparks new plant development revealing new paths for traversal.

After Us depicts a incredible world wrought by the harmful actions of an unbridled society, skilled by the participant throughout ten completely different biomes. Players be taught the ultimate fates of varied majestic creatures, such because the final whale harpooned, the ultimate eagle caged or the final deer hunted down, earlier than resurrecting their spirits to return life to the world. Each new atmosphere presents new challenges for Gaia and tells the tales of those animal’s closing moments earlier than their climactic second of rebirth.

A studio with ardour

This title has a number of ardour, and Corominas jogged my memory in our interview that we had talked earlier than about how that happened.

Corominas and Ministral are transplants within the gaming business. They labored collectively in promoting for 20 years. Over time, they began creating extra interactive experiences for giant manufacturers like Nike and Coca-Cola. They had been creating wealth and successful awards. They began their very own firm to get away from the crunch work, however then they felt like one thing was lacking.

So they shut down the advert firm and determined to pursue their childhood ardour of constructing video video games. And they began Piccolo Studio in Barcelona together with Oriol Pujado in 2015.

“We were over 40, and we were having our middle-age crisis,” Corominas advised me in 2019. “We were looking back in our lives at what we always wanted to do. Advertising was having its own middle-age crisis. Especially after the economic slowdown in 2008, it was data driven. Creativity was getting cornered. We were still making money with advertising, but it wasn’t fulfilling anymore.”

In 2019, the group was ending work on Arise: A Simple Story, which was revealed by Techland on the consoles and on the Epic Games Store on the PC. It’s about an previous man who dies after which awakens in limbo. He positive aspects the flexibility to look again on his life and relive it.

The founders had been pleased with the chance they took. They constructed a profitable sport with a group of round 15 individuals.

“It was crazy. But we decided that if we’re going to fail at something, it might as well be something we are passionate about,” Corominas mentioned. “With all these people, we were ready to start working on our first game. Our main goal of our company is to touch people. To make people feel. Human emotion. We said we would not make games; we would craft them. Even our logo is a needle and a thread, about crafting.”

When you have a look at these origins, it’s simple to see the commonality between the studio’s beginnings, the Arise sport and the most recent After Us title. Arise received a stable 81 out of 100 on Metacritic, which aggregates sport evaluate scores.

“Arise was reflecting our personal situation. We had a middle age crisis. We started to look back and decided to quit advertising and create a video game company,” Corominas mentioned. “For our next game, After Us, we decided to look forward look ahead instead. We have grown older, we have become parents. So we started thinking about the ideas of legacy. What are we leaving behind us? Not just your children or grandchildren, but as a generation or as a human species.”

They crafted a story about legacy, with a sport that begins in a desolate and somber world, the place all life on the planet was extinct by the hands of mankind.

“We cover some hot topics about environment. But we find that there’s a lot of negativity around that. So we wanted to go the other way and make this game about hope, to be positive,” Corominas mentioned.

The sport has a number of exploration, platforming, puzzles and fight. But it’s a journey that has an uplifting sense of hope, Corominas mentioned. The wordless nature of the sport was meant to indicate that folks of any tradition might play it.

“That’s what we want two people to feel at the end of the game,” he mentioned.

They made the primary character highly effective, as evidenced by the identify Gaia. But she can also be small and weak in an enormous hostile world. She throws her coronary heart on the atmosphere and brings again life to animals and the world.

“We are about emotional rewards. We have more than 100 spirits of animals that you can retrieve in this world,” Corominas mentioned. “They start populating the world and roaming around.”

An even bigger effort

The studio has now grown to about 30 individuals, or greater than double in comparison with when it was engaged on Arise. And it has been making the brand new sport for about 2.5 years. It will value $30, and that lower cost displays which you could end the sport in a number of days. You can dash by way of it or spend a number of time lingering within the atmosphere.

“Ultimately, the game is talking about the different sides and faces of humankind. And what we want to tell with this game that we know that humans are agents of destruction. But at the same time, we’re agents of hope and love,” Corominas mentioned. “And there’s a statement that we love from a physicist from Barcelona. We like it a lot. It says that humans are the only animal that kills for pleasure. At the same time, it’s the only one that writes the most beautiful poetry.”

And whereas the sport has a message round local weather change, the studio doesn’t need it to come back off as being too preachy.

“That’s not our job. Our job is just to tell stories,” Corominas mentioned. “So we are telling a story with the main character and things that happened in that world, which is an allegory of Earth. It’s very fantastical and surreal. We’re not an NGO. We make games this is a game.”