Post Script

Simon Flesser, co-founder, Simogo

Simogo multi-hyphenate Simon Flesser is responsible for the direction of Sayonara Wild Hearts’ art, sound and music, as well as level and character design. Here, he discusses the five-year journey behind the studio’s most ambitious game to date.

You started out with a different genre of music in mind. When did you realise that pop was a better fit? We were going for this ’50s, ’60s vibe mixed with more mysterious elements – we were experimenting with blending surf rock with more world-music stuff. Daniel [Olsén, sound designer/instrumental composer] lives and breathes taiko drums, so we were trying to include those, too, as well as Ethiopian-inspired elements. Basically, I was just playing the prototype – we had a playlist of pop songs on in the background, and we just changed direction there and then. I think it was Chvrches’ Empty Threat that came on.

Did the change to pop influence the art direction? We can’t imagine those pinks with that soundtrack.

The characters were mostly the same but environments were much more sparse and dark, with everything covered in a black mist. And the shading was quite different. So yes, the change influenced a much more colourful style.

Did it affect the design of the stages, too?

For a long while you couldn’t fail at all. I’m not sure the change influenced that direction, but certainly the more upbeat music felt like it needed more tension over mystery.

So did the idea of score targets come in quite late? Yeah. Basically you’d just get scored on elements like passing stuff, and so on. There were no pickups. This is really obvious stuff, but sometimes you need someone outside to help you see these things. We had a friend at Nintendo play the game and his feedback was that the game would only tell you that you were doing poorly; there was nothing to tell players they were doing good. So a lot of people came off the game not having a positive experience to match the euphoric vibe of the music.

In some respects it feels like challenge wasn’t really your main aim for this...

Yes and no. I wanted to find a balance where everyone could enjoy it and finish it, even if they haven’t played a game before. But I also wanted to do some really devilish designs, and adding a lot of these pickups allowed for that.

When designing stages, did the music come first and then you’d arrange the level around it? Or vice versa? For the pop songs they mostly were written before, with small alterations. You can hear on ‘Inside’ that there was a bit added to the end, as we couldn’t quite fit in everything we wanted, and the song needed to climax a bit more. For many of the instrumentals I would often ask Daniel for a specific vibe, or even bpm, as I had some ideas in mind. But overall I’d say the songs were all done when I started building stages based on them.

You describe it as a “pop album videogame”, and it feels like you’ve really thought a lot about the track listing. Did you have an order in mind from the start? At the very start it was just going to be a little EP of a game, with five pop songs only. We basically arranged everything around those five early on, and that order was kept on throughout. I think at one point we shifted the order of Mine and Dead Of Night, but that’s about it.

The tarot theme naturally leaves plenty of room for personal interpretation…

At the start I was thinking much more consciously about interpretations, and had my own ideas. As we went on, and we decided to not use a six-card spread but the entire major arcana, I started to think about it in much broader terms. Sometimes just literally. For [The Chariot] I really just wanted to make an OutRun stage. (laughs)

“I also wanted to do some really devilish designs, and adding a lot of these pickups allowed for that”

Do you write stories about heartbreak because most people can relate to it?

Partly it’s relatable, partly it just came for free with everything being based around pop songs. Jonathan [Eng, musician/lyricist] and I would often joke about wanting to write songs that would make you want to dance and cry.

When did Annapurna get involved?

I think we had one stage finished at that time, about a year in or maybe more. It allowed us to expand the team a little, and do things that would have maybe been out of reach otherwise. Like the Queen Latifah thing.

Yes, we were going to ask about that. Did you have a wishlist for narrators, or did Annapurna say, “We can get hold of Queen Latifah for this”?

Actually, it started as a joke. We had submitted a build to QA, and I was chatting with Nathan [Gary] from Annapurna. I had just gotten home after meeting a friend, I’d had one beer and was feeling suitably… jovial. We were talking about how it was a shame that we never got a narrator for the text parts, and I said it would have been fun to have an unexpected voice there. Nathan asked me, “Like who?” And as a joke, I mentioned Queen Latifah.

And he just said “leave it with me”?

Something like that. I think at the time I thought he was probably joking!