Post Script

Nathan Vella, co-founder and president, Capybara Games

Below was announced at E3 2013 during Microsoft’s press conference, with Phil Spencer sporting a Capy-branded T-shirt for the occasion. It’s been a long and bumpy road from there to the game’s eventual release, with the studio openly admitting its struggles. Here, Capy president Nathan Vella reflects on how the studio found the soul of its deepest, most richly systemic game to date. Why did you decide to add thirst and hunger mechanics to Below? Everything in the game was meant to be a pretty distilled version of itself, a distilled version of a Roguelike – and I’m air-quoting because it’s not literally a Roguelike, and people will slaughter me if I say that it is – but a distilled version of survival, a distilled version of UI, tutorials, story. Everything kind of filtered down so we could focus on clarity, tone, atmosphere, on being hard but fair. The survival elements were always meant as primary or secondary motivation to get you doing something or to drive you out of not doing anything good. Hunger, thirst and, to a lesser extent, cold were always these pieces that, if we could distill them enough – make them manageable – might drive you towards breaking off a known path, going back to the room you were in to try another door, as opposed to just moving in one direction. You would look around your screen and think about what you see outside of enemies. The visual aesthetic is marvellous, if frustrating. How did it come together? That’s a very touchy subject, because as much as you see in the game there’s probably that much [again] on the cutting-room floor. It was a Herculean effort by a very small art team and one graphics programmer, with a few other programmers helping out. Some of it worked very well very quickly – the tilt-shift effect was in our creative director’s initial pitch. But for example, the game becoming darker, being about light and shadow, being accentuated by half-shadows, giving the player a light source that casts long, dense shadows – that all came in much later after we decided to shift the majority of the game from 2D to 3D. So it was a very long process. Some of it we knew from the beginning and it was about homing in, and other parts, like what the shapes of rooms feel like, how we make procedural generation feel artist-driven instead of programmerdriven, came later. The sense of scale drives how small you feel in the world. How did you arrive at the correct balance? We knew people were going to say, ‘Oh, this character is really small’. In reality the character is not that much smaller than in tonnes of other games. It’s just the impression of scale, and the lack of really simple UI rules that videogames have followed for a long time with small characters – we just kind of didn’t do those. It’s single-screen rooms, so the camera is not tied directly to your character, which makes everything feel different. We had to play around with how we lit the game, putting lights on the character, the degree of post-processing that goes on. If you turn off postprocessing in the game, it’s just an unbelievably different vision – the colours, the depth, the scale just changes so drastically. And almost all of that work was done by programmers to approximate how our artists wanted it to look in their concepts and vision pieces. Your games often riff on Zelda. What does that series mean to you, as a studio? I think there are a couple of different angles to that. There’s the process that series has gone through – some of the things we find most interesting about Zelda are from the original NES game. That just complete lack of knowing what the hell to do, where to go, and the joy when we discovered that if you push this tombstone, or you go down this staircase – those places where the game, either due to restriction or by design, wasn’t telling you what to do. That was always a big discussion point for us. But then moving forward there was a core group of us who adored Wind Waker, loved the combat in Wind Waker – it’s fast but you can decide not to play it fast, you can be guarded and methodical. That was inspirational in a weird way, though you perhaps can’t really see it in Below. And then all the way through to Breath Of The Wild, when they focused on cooking, and we were like, ‘Ah man, we’re doing cooking too’, but then at the same time, ‘ Zelda’s cooking, we’re cooking, let’s get more cooking in videogames’.

I think in general Zelda’s evolution is so interesting, and there are pieces of each game that are either foundational for us as a studio, or foundational for games as a whole. In general, I think if you were to ask developers, ‘Oh, did Zelda have an influence on you?’ – anyone who says no is lying. It’s the backbone of so many concepts and systems, things that everybody just does. I think some of the people who dislike the game probably dislike Below because it’s not enough like more recent Zeldas. It is inspired by Roguelikes, it is a survival game, it is very challenging in ways Zelda has never been. I think some people have that vision, they see top-down dungeon-crawling stuff, and they think ‘ Zelda’ and it’s impossible to get away from that.

“As much as you see in the game there’s probably that much [again] on the cutting room floor”