Dev Diaries: 1000xRESIST part two | February update!
We’re back with another dev diary, where we get to update you on how and what we’re doing. This is not the graphical update dev diary that was promised in our last blog – we’re still working on that and we’ll share more soon. In its place, we’ve been sent some questions and our Creative Director, Remy Siu, and Narrative Designer, Natalie Tin Yin Gan will answer them. Let’s go!
How have dance, theatre, film, and other new media inspired and been implemented in 1000xRESIST?
R: It’s hard to say, “we took this from dance, we took this from theatre, we took this from film.” A lot of it is just baked into our background and experiences working in those various mediums.
When we’re not entirely sure how we want to depict a scenario or engage with the storytelling in any particular chapter, we fall back on our experiences in these different mediums where we can, like, reference works and seek ways of thinking about material that could help.
N: I think Remy’s background in music composition also informs a lot aspects of the game, particularly in storytelling structure, ie. the order/duration/drama of scenes and chapters.
There’s quite a bit of cute dancing in this game if you’re looking for it. It’s not capital D dance–as in traditional, formalized dance–but I think that speaks to what we value and enjoy when it comes to contemporary movement/dance aesthetics.
R: There’s more joyful dancing in this than anything we’ve ever made, maybe?
N: Maybe.
R: Well, because most of the characters are oblivious to their circumstances. So they get to be happy.
N: Haha, uhh not that joyful or carefree dancing is only reserved for the oblivious...
A scene from Devised Narratives: A 1000xRESIST Mini-Documentary
What films and games did you look to as inspiration for 1000xRESIST?
R: The first ones obviously on our list are NieR: Automata and the original NieR. Their playfulness with video game form and vocabulary is pretty influential to us. They showed me that there’s enough history in video games now that we can use that history, and all of the memory involved with those kinds of vocabularies, and create meaning out of it, as opposed to say, like, I don't know, the very first Doom game. Or Wolfenstein 3D, Maze War–those were maybe one of the first first-person-games ever, so there was really no history yet. So when you went into first person, it was really a novel thing. Now, there's many games we can reference like Gone Home, Tacoma, Firewatch, all of these other first person story games that didn't exist then.
The other one is Kentucky Route Zero. Not that we have similar content, but Kentucky Route Zero doesn't care that it's a game, so to speak. Sometimes it feels like it really just wants to do what it wants to do, and lets all of the expectations about what video games should be fall to the side. And it's always changing and shifting to depict the various aspects of the story.
I can also add one more thing: I grew up playing point and click adventure games, and those were narrative games that also didn’t 100% care about fail states. There was a real time where the fail states were not a big part of games, and would prioritize telling a story or letting you know about the characters living in that world.
How much has 1000xRESIST changed over its development lifetime? Have you stuck closely to the original design idea?
R: The game is way beyond anything that I originally imagined, at this point. The original demo did involve some elements, like the high school, Watcher, and the whole conceit of going back into memory and reliving this past while feeling alienated by something that is very much present day for us.
In terms of how the whole thing developed in how it looks and plays, because we have the whole team on the game, it has changed a lot over the cycle of development. A lot of things like the time mechanics, the different player controllers, different viewpoints, characters, the ways the chapters unfold, that kind of stuff that I don’t think I would have been able to do by myself for various reasons, like just not knowing how. So shout out to [Senior Programmer] Colin, [Art Director] Kodai, [Producer] Natalie T, and everybody else who has contributed to making those things I just didn’t consider possible and feasible.
N: That makes me curious–is there something that was in the original concept that you had trouble letting go of from your original prototype?
R: That’s not a spoiler? Let me think.
There was a time when Secretary talked only with kaomojis. I thought it was funny that you wouldn’t really get great instructions from them, like, you would still have to interpret their instructions. It was probably too much for their overall role in the game. So our compromise was that we made Secretary be voiced by a 12-year-old boy.
What inspired the particular locations for the game?
R: When Kodai was working on the main hub of the game, something that we would always say is that it’s transitcore, in the sense that we were really interested in these liminal public transit spaces across Asia and North America–in Vancouver, Japan, and Hong Kong.
There’s a lot of Umeda Sky Building, there’s a lot of metro stations, and there’s a lot of these kinds of public-like spaces kind of crammed all together. We tried to fit as many of our favourite types of these kinds of transit public spaces.
N: There’s a lot of airport.
R: Yeah, airport as well.
Those rail-like sky corridors that you walk in the main hub are straight up Umeda Sky Building. If you Google, you can see them. The foliage is very Hong Kong as opposed to North America.
What are the unique challenges of designing a game that shifts so frequently between 3rd person adventure, visual novel and first-person walking sim?
R: The writing had to shift a lot with each character and perspective, like the way we were delivering the story was very different.
N: Oh, for sure. Perhaps not so much in the dialogue, but you’re right. I don’t necessarily think that was challenging as much as it was treating every chapter as its own specimen, like its own ecosystem. It has its own tone and texture, that’s what I would say.
Tell me about it from a design perspective.
R: From the beginning we wanted to lean in on what we were comfortable with and experienced in, and part of that was narrative, story, affect, and form, in lieu of traditional game mechanics. But it turns out that this is actually really hard because we just have to keep making unique content throughout the game. And that was a huge challenge. Like, every conversation is new, every event is new and unique. Every chapter is designed in a different way than the last one, or organized in a different way than the last one. Our main mechanic is time travelling, or time skipping, and we just had to keep finding ways to use it in different ways as well, to inform how we could tell the story. So it has felt like building three, four, five games instead of just one. Colin has done and is doing a really good job of keeping that all in check.
If the Sunset Visitor team were given roles a la the Sisters of the game, what would your roles be?
N: This would be my pick. You, Remy, would be of a Knower type–you kind of got that eldest sister poker face. You roll your eyes at the youngins, people with too much expression and not enough grit. And I would say that obviously, you know––
R: You can stop there, yeah.
N: Colin is a Fixing type. They’re pretty unfazed, really keen to figure out bugs, curious about why and how things work, and tries to make things better. A lot of the time we look to Colin, when troubleshooting, to lead our team. I think Kodai is an ALLMOTHER type. He has fire and youthful gusto.
R: He does sometimes say he has, what is it called? “Yellow demon spirit,” I think from Japanese folklore, like exactly what you’re saying. Funny enough, the ALLMOTHER’s colour is yellow.
N: Yeah, yeah like a poetic, brooding type. I think he’s got that heart as an artist.
I think for me, [Producer] NT would be a great Principal. Like, always dressed immaculately, and really quite grounded, [she] has a thousand yard stare that could really beat you into submission, is really holding the fort, [and] can focus on what’s in front of her but can also see everything behind her.
I would be of the Healing variety; a real big heart and weeping all the time, humanitarian inclinations, can read the room emotionally, and wants everyone to feel better. A big empath.
So those would be my picks. How about you?
R: I agree with you. I agree with your picks.
N: Do you?
R: I think it’s funny that we have nobody for Watcher and BBF. Those are the two that we don’t really have.
What led to the decision to work with two composers? Was it a stylistic choice?
R: There was just a lot of music required, and very early on it occurred to me we had to make the time shifting very clear–you know, you want visual feedback, you want some audio feedback as well. And it turned out it was great to also have some music feedback. So for every level or scene, we don’t have only one piece of music, we may have 5 or 10, or 12.
Something that I’ve always believed in, is that it’s very hard to sometimes just pretend yourself out of your own compositional voice. Having two compositional voices would allow for this difference to be felt, in a way that’s hard to describe. And for the composers, they can have a lot more fun, I think, to continually find different parts of their voice as opposed to us forcing them to use somebody else’s voice which is never good–you don’t always get good process out of that.
Anyone in particular you’d like to shout out from the voice/dialogue team?
N: Natalie Tan, who has put in hundreds, thousands of hours of labour doing immaculate take selection. We have many, many, many characters, and––
R: 15,000 lines.
N: 15,000 lines, and many of them hand crafted, and hand-cut, like Moodles by NT. And when you play the game, those voices make such a big difference in terms of amplifying affect and really making the story compelling.
R: If you calculate 15,000 chosen lines, then there’s at least like 100,000 takes that have probably been listened to at this point, and recorded.
What is your favourite feedback you've received to date about the game?
N: When the demo was out, I remember the hashtag #justiceforjiao showed up on Twitch. Jiao is really near and dear to my heart and I spent a lot of time writing into her lived experience. So the fact that people got passionate about how she’s treated feels very rewarding. How about you?
R: We were on a top 10 of 2023 list on Giant Bomb, which is great because we haven’t released the game yet. But [the author] Meghna Jayanth said the game is a” lucid dream, handcrafted for you,” I think. I’m pretty happy about that.
And there’s another person, Andrew Plotkin, who called it “compelling, overwhelming and agonizing.”