The Making Of… Ori And The Blind Forest

Precision engineering forged with a passion for Super Metroid resulted in a sensational debut

You may already view Ori And The Blind

Forest as something of an anomaly among Microsoft’s Xbox One portfolio, but you don’t know the half of it. It was 2010, and Thomas Mahler and a small team of colleagues had assembled a prototype for a game called Warsoup, a hybrid of firstperson shooter and realtime strategy game, inspired partly by Mahler’s spell at Blizzard, where he worked within the cinematics team on StarCraft

II. The project attracted the attention of several publishers, but of all the interested parties, Microsoft seemed the keenest. It then offered a piece of advice you could never imagine hearing during any videogame publisher’s E3 showcase: ditch the guns.

Mahler was surprised, but respected the guidance. “They said it was probably a bit too crazy to take on, and if we wanted to do an online firstperson shooter, there were tons of other studios doing that,” he tells us. But it was obvious Microsoft had recognised the potential talent within the group. Encouraged by the interest, Mahler went back to the drawing board and began planning a game inspired by his love for the Metroid and Zelda series. He made the first prototype for what would eventually become Ori in early 2011, pitching it to the three other members of the fledgling studio: animator James Benson, programmer David Clark, and co-founder and producer Gennadiy Korol. “I said, ‘Let’s work on this for a couple of months, see what happens,’” Mahler says. “And then we showed [Microsoft]. We already had the double-jump and an early implementation of the Bash [ability], and it was just really fun to play. Even though it was just greyboxing with a simple 2D model running around the world, they completely got it, and said, ‘Yeah, we want to fund this – this could be something great.’”

Already his bold decision to leave Blizzard seemed to have been validated. During his time there, Mahler had been inspired by the success of Castle Crashers and

Braid (“It was like there was suddenly a market for indie games,” he recalls) and told his bosses he was moving back to Vienna “because rent is much cheaper than California”. But while Moon Studios now had Microsoft’s money to hire more staff, Mahler was keen for the studio to remain relatively compact and agile. “I’m a big fan of how John Carmack led Id Software at the beginning,” he says. “He kept it really, really small. That team, even when they made

Doom and Quake, was like ten people. But with that kind of structure you know the atmosphere, you know exactly what everybody is working on, you can structure everything to be extremely efficient.” It did, inevitably, come with a cost. By the time the ‘i’s had been dotted and the ‘t’s crossed, it was September 2011. Development

“WE’RE VERY LUCKY THAT THE ENTIRE TEAM HAVE SIMILAR TASTES. WE ALL UNDERSTOOD HOW IT SHOULD BE BUILT”

took another three-and-a-half years, with Ori finally going gold in March 2015.

As the game’s director, Mahler set himself a steep challenge. “For all the prototypes that I make, my starting point is, ‘Let’s make something where what you’re playing is better than a game that’s already on the market,’” he explains. The target in this instance? Super Meat Boy. It’s obvious Mahler has a great deal of respect for Team Meat’s breakout hit, but quickly he was convinced that his team’s early prototype felt even better to play. “If you get to that point, and it already feels great, then you’re in a really good position.”

Absolute precision in the controls was the first and most vital ingredient to Mahler, who’d been raised on Nintendo games and wanted to achieve similar standards. “I’m amazed with a lot of [contemporary] 2D games,” he says. “Like LittleBigPlanet, for example. I loved it when I saw it in previews and so on, but then I played it and it was laggy and didn’t feel quite right, and it ran at 30 frames [per second]. That can completely ruin a game for me. In the 8- and 16bit days, you had 60 frames as the norm, and these really precise controls. I just wanted to make a game for other people who appreciated that.”

Mahler knew what he wanted, but he didn’t know that the genre he’d chosen would soon become oversaturated. “Right now, it’s like, ‘Argh, Metroidvanias!’ Every indie studio is making a Metroidvania,” he laughs. “But when we started with Ori, that wasn’t necessarily the case. After Nintendo made Metroid: Zero

Mission in 2004, there was a real drought. Sure, there were games like Aquaria out there, but I mean, I’d grown up playing Super Metroid. And holy crap, I loved that game.” As development continued, and Mahler realised Moon Studios was hardly filling a gap in the market, he still believed there was room for a really good one. “There aren’t many studios that understand how to build that world: the progression, the flow of everything, and how that all fits together. We were very lucky that the entire team all have similar tastes, and so we all understood how it should be built.”

It took 18 months of development time to finesse the controls until Mahler was completely satisfied with them. Though the game contains physics objects, he insisted that Ori’s movement would be completely hand-coded, to give the designers complete control over every aspect. “Even down to the gravity and how fast you fall, we didn’t let the physics engine do anything because we wanted the ability to say, ‘This doesn’t quite feel right: this jump should be delayed for two frames here’. We’d go through it frame by frame and measure it.”

In giving the player such a degree of fine control over Ori, Mahler was confident that the team would be able to ramp up the challenge without frustrating anyone too much. The game’s Ghibli-esque visuals belied a difficulty level that was a direct response to what Mahler saw as rampant oversimplification in games. “I think

Dark Souls did a lot for the industry,” he says. “If you remember the scene back then, everything was going crazy with overtutorialising and dumbing things down. “The pinnacle for me was

Prince Of Persia 2008. It looked amazing, but

The game was originally called Sein, the German word for ‘to be’, but it had already been taken, so Moon Studios decided to go with Ori instead, the Hebrew for ‘my light’