The Making Of...
How a midlife crisis spawned Piccolo Studio’s debut game, Arise: A Simple Story
Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One
Developer Piccolo Studio
Publisher Techland
Origin Spain
Release 2019
Piccolo Studio’s enchanting debut begins with an end. As the flames of a funeral pyre burn brightly against a starry sky, the old man resting in peace on top subsequently awakens – or rather arises – in a pristine, white limbo. Over the next four or five hours, he looks back on his life across a series of fantastical vignettes – some hopeful and happy, others quite the opposite.
In some ways, it mirrors the journey its creators took to get it made. That, too, began with an ending of sorts, and a period of reflection. It was four years ago, and for three fortysomething Spaniards, working in the advertising industry had become just another job. After 20 years in the business, Jordi Ministral, Alexis Corominas and their colleague Oriol Pujadó needed something to reignite their creative passions. “A middle-age crisis, you could call it,” Ministral laughs. “Alex and I had been playing videogames since college, so basically we decided to create one. It was as simple as that.”
Inevitably, what followed wasn’t nearly so straightforward. Sure, the trio had a digital-production company, so they knew plenty about running a studio, having long since grown accustomed to deadlines and milestones. And for the next 12 months, they did extensive research, while looking for the right mix of industry professionals for their team. They eventually assembled a core group of 15 staff, including veterans from Tequila Works, and pre-production on the game could begin in earnest.
But finding investment – and a publisher – took a good deal longer. “That was the most difficult part, to find financing for a startup company,” Corominas says. “Because publishers are reluctant to invest in a company that doesn’t have any proven record of developing games.” Ministral estimates that 90 per cent of the approaches it made didn’t lead to a direct pitching opportunity. “Even if they like the materials you send, when they ask if you have experience building videogames and you say no, they won’t even let you pitch to them. So it was almost a year of just travelling the desert, as we say in Spain, before finding one who would publish the game.”
Still, confident that someone would eventually bite, Corominas and Ministral used that time wisely. “Jordi and I got our hands on the engine and talked a lot with everyone in the team and started working on the game,” Corominas says. By then, the pair had decided their game would be “an emotional journey”. Since they’d reached a stage where they were naturally reflecting on what was missing in their lives, they began to consider themes of memories and time, and how their game might explore them. Hence, a story about looking back with a character for whom nothing lay ahead. “Many games start with a young hero, with the promise of better times and saving the world,” Corominas says. “We wanted something completely different, because we wanted our game to stand out.”
Having chosen a starting point, the pair knew they needed a hook – a mechanic that would fit the idea of looking back. On a summer’s day, the two were chatting over Skype and Ministral suggested manipulating time. Corominas shot back with the idea of sunflowers bending towards and away from the sun as the day moves from morning through to evening. 20 years’ experience of brainstorming creative ideas led to a feverish 20-minute back and forth, wherein the pair came up with several twists on that central mechanic between them – four or five of which wound up in the finished game. “We knew we needed an original idea with the X factor,” Corominas says. “That precise moment was the epiphany.”
By that time, Ministral and Corominas had already agreed that Arise would tell its story wordlessly. “We wanted it to be as universal as it could be, so that anybody, of any age and cultural background, could understand the game. It’s a personal challenge for us because it forces you to find solutions that sometimes are not easy – but they also have to seem easy to the user, because that’s the magic.” As such, the pair considered games such as Inside, Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons and Journey for examples of how to tell an interactive story without dialogue. Yet they spent more time looking outside videogames for inspiration. The protagonist, for example, is based on the grandfather from ’70s anime Heidi: Girl Of The Alps, directed by the late Isao Takahata, best known for Studio Ghibli heartbreaker Grave Of The Fireflies.
Another animated tearjerker proved crucial: the devastating opening montage of Pixar’s Up was the analogy the pair used while pitching the game. “We wanted Arise to be like that flashback but stretched to five hours, while portraying similar emotions,” Corominas says, while Ministral suggests that it helped make for a more distinctive sell: “We believed that bringing something from other mediums would feel a bit fresher than using videogames as references.” By this stage of the pitching process, those sunflowers were in place, swaying to and fro with nudges of the right analogue stick. Another idea, using rising and falling rocks as platforms, eventually transformed into the game’s third chapter, Away, which takes place during the 20 seconds immediately following an earthquake. These demonstrations of how the time-lapse mechanic would work were enough to help convince Techland, which finally gave Piccolo the go-ahead.
The rest soon began to fall into place: two decades of experience spitballing ideas gave the two directors the confidence to throw concepts at the wall to see what would stick. It’s evident in the finished game, which wrings impressive variety from what might seem a limited central conceit. “When you work in advertising, you are given the idea of the product that you have to sell, or the message that you have to get across,” Ministral says. “The only difference in this case is that we got to choose the idea that we wanted to communicate to the user.”
“WE WANTED IT TO BE AS UNIVERSAL AS IT COULD BE, SO THAT ANYBODY COULD UNDERSTAND THE GAME”
The story for the game, meanwhile, began with nothing more than a single paragraph: “Just a list of feelings and emotions,” Corominas says. He and Ministral knew that the game’s score would need to do a lot of the emotional heavy lifting, and so, upon the enthusiastic recommendation of one ex-Tequila Works staffer, they contacted Rime composer David García. García was extremely keen once he’d heard the pitch, though there was one problem – his day job was at Ninja Theory. Happily, the Cambridge studio gave its permission for García to work on the music for Arise in his free time. “It’s incredible – we didn’t have to worry about anything, because he’s a genius,” Corominas says. “He not only composed the music, but also implemented it in the engine, which I don’t know if any other composer can do.”
García and Piccolo were on the same page from the start: of the hours of music he created for the game, only two or three short passages had to be changed. The rest he got right on the first attempt. “Jordi and I deserve no merit at all for directing him because he directed himself,” Corominas laughs. His colleague agrees: “We only gave him very high-level instructions – ‘This level is about this theme and has to convey this emotion’ – and he nailed every single one.”
If, as Ministral says, “the environments and the soundtrack were our language”, a great deal of feeling is communicated through animation, too. There’s a tangible weight to the protagonist’s movements that speaks to his advanced age. When he falls from a certain height, he gingerly gets back to his feet. His jump is reliable but short – he’s no Mario in that regard. And when reaching for a handhold on a sheer cliff, there’s a brief pause that feels like he’s building up to it: he’s no Nathan Drake, either.
All of this was planned from the start, Ministral says, as a way of creating an empathetic connection to the old man. But the balance between emotional response and input response proved tricky – early complaints that the old man handled too sluggishly resulted in a post-launch patch that made him more satisfying to control. Yet while he may be a shade nimbler than before, Piccolo was keen to retain some of that inertia. “For us it was a very important narrative layer,” Corominas says. “We didn’t want to lose that, even if for some players it took longer than expected to reach the top of a wall – it’s important that he takes that time, because he’s not
a superhero.” He still feels old, in other words, just not quite so creaky as he did at launch.
The other negative feedback they received was way beyond a quick patch – and the studio wasn’t about to act upon it anyway. Arise’s fixed camera, which became an unlikely bone of contention, gives Piccolo control in how it frames the environment, an important consideration for both story and systems. When it pulls back, the landscape feels more expansive, and in the darker moments, it engenders a feeling of solitude. And, in this three-dimensional world, it also allows the player to discover the way forward by manipulating the fourth. “Let’s say you’re standing on a giant mushroom, and you move the right stick to explore time,” Corominas explains. “By doing that, a bee appears on the screen and you realise that’s the solution. But if you can move the camera, you see the bee without moving time and that feeling of discovery will be lost.” He also acknowledges that players could get stuck by failing to notice something because they were looking in the wrong direction. Yet if Arise’s solution feels like the right one – at least for this particular game – it has taught the studio a lesson. “We learned that players have strong ideas of how a game is supposed to be played and how a character is supposed to move,” Ministral says. “You have to be very careful, because people have little tolerance for changing things like that.”
On the subject of expectations, how about that subtitle? In an industry preoccupied with size, where everything has to be bigger, better, more, it’s an unusually humble moniker – particularly, dare we say, for a game created by ad industry veterans. “We wanted it to be modest, because we didn’t want to pretend we were talking about the meaning of life, or addressing deep philosophical questions,” Ministral says. “Some of the topics that we cover in the game are very heavy, but we didn’t have pretensions to be perceived as a philosophical game.” It’s partly about putting the player in the right frame of mind, too, making it clear that at heart, this is a human tale. “This old man didn’t live an extraordinary life. He didn’t save the world,” Ministral continues. “We really wanted to stay away from all those clichés from other videogames where everything has to be larger than life. We needed to make it clear that it’s just a story of an ordinary man.”
The results speak for themselves. Though one or two sequences stray towards being overly
manipulative, there’s a sincerity to the game that ensures it tugs at your heartstrings without lapsing into mawkishness. And the feedback from players who’ve been moved to tears by its ending has been music to Piccolo’s ears: with Arise, after all, it’s in the business of selling emotions. “It’s like when you watch an advertisement about bathrooms, for instance,” Corominas says, unexpectedly. “There’s no product, really – it’s all about communicating the experience, the feeling. And we’ve been doing that for 20 years. So it all came quite naturally to us.” The modesty may have slipped for a moment, but the pride in their work is well-earned.