Studio Profile
How the BAFTA-winning indie gravitated from paper towns to the Antarctic coast
Meet the team at State Of Play, the studio that puts real-world craft into the art of game development
Developers often go to great lengths to make a game, but this is the first time we’ve spoken to one that’s travelled to the end of the Earth. State Of Play’s latest release is South Of The Circle, an elegant and mournful Cold War psychodrama that begins with a plane crash in Antarctica. While making it, the studio embarked on a real-life expedition to the continent, accompanied by the game’s scientific adviser John Dudeney – father of a friend, and former head of the British Antarctic Survey during the 1960s.
“You fly to Chile, and then you take a smaller plane to a volcanic island, which is the scariest landing you’ll ever have because it’s on gravel,” State Of Play co-founder and creative director Luke Whittaker recalls. “Landing in an aeroplane is scary anyway, but when there’s stuff pinging off the windows, yeah, that was freaky.” After the plane flight came an eerie sea voyage aboard a Russian vessel carrying a mixed payload of scientists and sightseers.
The trip, which was self-funded, lasted three weeks. It was an expensive gamble, but the payoff is obvious in the delicately varied moods of the game’s locations – volcanic shorelines set against sweeping icefields under a rose-coloured sky. “I had these preconceptions from the pristine images we have of Antarctica – the icebergs, that sort of magisterial vision,” Whittaker notes. “You do get those moments, but sometimes you just can’t see. Sometimes you’re just completely marooned in fog, and there’s no sound. There is that extra sense of isolation. You’re not constantly in awe out there – there are also these bizarre and surreal moments.” At one point, while wandering the deck, he saw an 18th-century sailing vessel appear out of the mist. “I thought, am I now actually hallucinating?” (The wraith-like vision proved to be a tourist enterprise, crewed by cosplayers reliving the feats of pioneers such as Alexander von Tunzelmann.)
Antarctica is a fascinating setting for a game for less obvious reasons. It is the first and, so far only, demilitarised continent on Earth, as stipulated by a 1959 treaty signed by the USA and USSR. The game treats the continent as a site of tentative reconciliation, but it keeps one foot in the past, navigating a history of institutional sexism in flashbacks to the shady aisles of Cambridge University.
In a similar way, while South Of The Circle is a massive departure for State Of Play, it also continues a theme. It’s the studio’s first halfway ‘realist’ cinematic story, fully motion-captured and
“FOR ME TO GET A SKETCHBOOK AND
START DRAWING IDEAS, IT JUST FEELS
LIKE THE MOST NATURAL THING”
shorn of the puzzle elements that appear in its other games. But it is born of the same ideals that make State Of Play such an inimitable force: an almost perverse love of physical materials, and a desire to forge connections between artist and player, whether in the form of a story about adventurers or in the way blemishes reveal a creator’s mind as much as beauties.
Whittaker and director of development Katherine Bidwell founded the studio in 2008.
The pair started out making Flash games for Moshi Monsters and MiniClip, but quickly realised they needed more artistic freedom. Their first independent project, 2011’s Lume, was a puzzle-platformer set in an environment fashioned from real-life card and paper. “Luke and I are from an artistic background and weren’t too au fait with the programming side, so we decided to make a physical set for that game and film it,” Bidwell explains. “We’ve always been working with our hands, drawing and sketching and painting – that’s just what we knew. And when we animated our character Lumi moving across the set, it just kind of clicked for us. If we needed to add a shadow, we could just shine a light!”
Lume was the prelude to Lumino City,a BAFTA-winning 2014 game for which State Of Play built an entire cardboard metropolis, brought to life by miniature lights and motors. Whittaker’s coding skills weren’t up to the challenge, however, hence the hiring of Bournemouth graduate Daniel Fountain as programmer. (Fountain has since gone on to launch his own, so-far-unnamed studio.) “We’d worked freelance with people before and we knew we could expand a bit and contract when we needed to,” Whittaker says. “But that was when we got our first full-time employee.”
For State Of Play’s founders, working with physical materials isn’t just a house style but a distinct (and quietly rebellious) artistic ethos. “It’s kind of a way of breaking barriers because in game development, the scariest thing is a blank screen. Like, a screen is so polished!” Bidwell laughs. “It just makes you feel like, oh, I’ve got to do something amazing. Whereas for me to get a sketchbook and start drawing ideas, it just feels like the most natural thing. We constantly try to capture that feeling.”
Where many studios aim to iron out all sign of the labour that goes into a project, Whittaker wants State Of Play’s audience to “see us in the game”, much as they’d glean a painter’s mind from an eye-catching pattern of brushstrokes. “We’ve always made stuff by hand, even for the Flash games. Sometimes it was like, you know, putting a paper texture over stuff, trying to get that sense of being handmade into it, but it was also this act of embracing something real, where you can really see the craft in there and the person behind it.”
The studio’s interest in physical materials means that it frequently works with people from well outside the traditional game industry – model-makers, architects and set designers, to say nothing of polar surveyors. The studio encourages its collaborators to experiment within their briefs. “[We want] to create an environment where everyone feels they contribute,” Whittaker says. “We’ve never run it like, ‘Right, this is
what we’re going to do – we’re going to employ people and tell them to do this.’”
Which is not to say that State Of Play’s projects are works of uninhibited daydreaming. To fund Lumino City, which took over three years to complete, the studio was obliged to release a smaller game, mobile puzzler Kami, in which you unfold origami paper to cover the screen. “When we were making Lumino City, we did what we called Google Fridays, because it was an idea taken from Google – on Friday, we do whatever we want to do,” Whittaker explains. “And through that, Kami came about. Daniel was working on this idea of filling the screen, I was working with some folding paper, and he was like, ‘OK, we can do something.’”
Prior to Kami’s launch, State Of Play considered selling Lumino City to a publisher. “We’ve always tried to say stay self-funded,” Whittaker says, “[but] Lumino City was getting more and more ambitious – we were running out of money. I was looking into some publishers, but I wasn’t that keen – I wanted to maintain control.” Whittaker’s overtures proved fruitful, but not in the way he expected; he received some sage advice from an unnamed investor.
“They said, ‘We’re willing to invest in Lumino City, but have you got anything else?’ Just on the off-chance. And I said, I’ve got this little idea for a paper-folding game. And the guy said, ‘Don’t take our money – I think you’re going to make your money with this. You don’t want me telling you what to do. Go put this out – you’ll make your money off Kami and make Lumino City’. An unscrupulous publisher would have taken them both, but he gave them both back to us. And it was great to hear that someone believed in what we were doing.” After Kami came Inks, an intoxicatingly messy game created by splattering Indian ink over watercolour paper and working the results up into pinball tables.
The spark for South Of The Circle was an Antarctic encounter between a Jewish sailor and a German scientist in Michael Chabon’s doorstopper novel The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay. “These are two individual people,” Whittaker says, “but you know, they belong to countries – what do we do when separated from all that?” The ’60s connection, meanwhile, arose from John Dudeney’s tales of his youthful exploits and in particular, his accounts of the technology used by Antarctic explorers during the 1960s: WW1 rifles, scout huts, Morse code. “You think of the ’60s as quite developed, but out there it really wasn’t,” Bidwell says. “That’s what we found fascinating about
John’s stories – it was literally like going to the Moon when he was 22.”
The game’s visual direction takes inspiration from closer to home: it’s based partly on screen prints created by Whittaker’s grandfather. While the game’s locations aren’t physical constructs this time – we’d love to meet the modeller mad enough to rebuild Antarctica in an office – creative producer John Lau argues that its motion-captured animations are born of the same, roughedged spirit as Lume and Lumino City. “Kathy was describing the notebook process, being able to just draw and make mistakes – the way we worked with actors involved a rehearsal process, in which you could do precisely that. You could give actors the opportunity to try different readings, and have readings of the scenes emerge which would then go into the actual shoots. If you’re just trying to bang out 20 pages a day without a rehearsal process, you wouldn’t be able to tease that stuff out.”
“In Lumino City, we wanted to keep in things like the glue marks, the slight tears that weren’t meant to be, and the feedback we got is that it felt more real because of those things,” Bidwell adds. “And that’s exactly the same in the development of South Of The Circle, you know, even in the script. So often, with videogames, the way you can talk to each other feels really unnatural. People seem so sure of their intentions, but when you’re having a conversation in a café with a boyfriend, it’s all about the nuances. It’s
“THE FACT THAT SOUTH OF THE CIRCLE
IS COMPLETELY DIFFERENT IS QUITE A
STATE OF PLAY THING AS WELL”
something we really wanted to capture.” The dialogue system foregrounds such nuances by presenting dialogue options as shapes linked to bundles of emotions. This encourages you to read your character’s mood, rather than just pick the optimal text response.
As for what State Of Play will do next, another expedition to the big ice seems unlikely, but the studio is keen to keep venturing into uncharted waters. “The fact that South Of The Circle is completely different is quite a State Of Play thing as well,” Bidwell notes. “Because we always want to design and create at the edge of what we’re capable of doing. I guess the easiest route for us would have been to make Lumino City 2, and I know there was a market for it. But we kind of said that we want to make a game, learn from it, and then see what else is out there.”