Studio Profile
The Monument Valley maker on the benefits of putting platforms and people first
Monument Valley maker Ustwo Games on putting platforms and people above all else
Ustwo Games’ offices look exactly as we imagined. On our way into the building, we’re led through a peaceful courtyard that feels completely out of place in the city. Picnic benches surround a large tree at the centre; strings of garden lights are stretched overhead. It’s straight out of Monument Valley.
Inside, the theme continues. Wooden floors sweep through an open-plan office, the white walls dotted with pastel-coloured concept art and neon Post-Its. People stretch out on an orange sofa; it’s lunchtime, which usually means some experimental PS2 game is on the go (the flavour of the month is Japanese kissing adventure Chulip). On the other side of the building – into which the studio has recently expanded – the colour palette leans cooler, the turquoise furnishings and stylish lamps picked out by the studio’s operations lead with help from the studio’s artists. There are plants everywhere.
The workspace reflects the games it produces: welcoming, purpose-built and instantly attractive. The studio is clearly comfortable – not just in terms of soft furnishings, but fiscally. Ustwo Games is part of Ustwo Fampany Ltd, a software development studio founded in 2004 which today spans digital design, services, investment and videogames. When Matt Miller and John Sinclair started the company, design was the focus: one of their first big projects was working on UI design for Sony Ericsson. When the iPhone came along, and the App Store followed, they sensed an opportunity to carve out a niche as a company that didn’t just make things look good, but feel good, too. Big companies were less concerned with the newfangled apps than they were websites.
Miller and Sinclair pitched the benefits of big companies working more closely with the agency they were commissioning, integrating development teams so that programmers, artists and UX designers would work together. They also began experimenting with coding their own apps. MouthOff was the first success, a silly digital toy that picked up vocal inputs and animated a cartoon mouth accordingly. It led to work making an app for clothing retailer H&M – but the real development was that Ustwo’s founders decided, and were able, to allocate more time and budget to experimental, non-client-facing projects.
Peter Pashley had left Frontier Developments in the summer of 2009 and, after a period travelling, returned to the UK and spotted a job opening at Ustwo. Developing iOS apps, he felt, would be a perfect part-time gig while working on his own games. “I went along for an interview, and they were like, ‘So we’re actually interested in making games.’ But they weren’t really gold-hunting, I don’t think,” Pashley says. “They had all of these [things], like, ‘It makes us look good as a company, it inspires people within, it helps us to pitch clients and build skillsets.’” And so Pashley became the first person to be hired to make games at Ustwo. “So we spent a while figuring out: ‘How does a design agency make games?’”
A few people at the studio, none of whom had any formal game-design training, had cobbled together an endless runner in Flash and released it to little fanfare. Heading up the next attempt, Pashley envisioned something different. He wanted
SEVERAL AWARDS LATER, MONUMENT VALLEY HAD CEMENTED USTWO AS ONE OF THE MOST EXCITING STUDIOS AROUND
to make a game inspired by the flight of small birds: “They do this thing where they flit out their wings for a bit, but then the rest of the time they’re just kind of falling in a ballistic arc.” This became Whale Trail: its success was such that Pashley was hired full-time. “It was very much messaged to us as, ‘This is experimental, this is reputational, this is inspirational, and if we get money out of it, cool.’ And I think we probably did indirectly, in terms of the company being able to get work that maybe it wouldn’t have gotten otherwise – but we weren’t turning a profit. So we didn’t have a lot of pressures that most people have when they’re making games, which I think is pretty foundational to why we’ve been able to make the things that we’ve made.”
Puzzler Blip Blup was next, the brainchild of Manesh Mistry, an aspiring game developer brought over from Ustwo’s design side. The game was an exercise in getting the team familiar with using Unity. Designers were used to creating 3D assets, for example, in Cinema 4D, and not having to worry about the performance issues too many polygons would bring. “With programmers it’s the
same thing: games are a very different mindset. So we realised we needed to get some people who had experience in games. That was, I guess, the point where Ustwo decided: ‘this is a games team.’”
New hires grew the team from six to ten, including Hello Games’ former producer Dan Gray – now studio head of Ustwo Games – and Ken Wong, whose art portfolio ensured his arrival during the studio’s next prototyping phase. Wong had always wanted to make a game about architecture, so he drew a tower in Photoshop, discovering that the isometric perspective lent itself to impossible angles. “And out of that was born this idea that, actually, it’s cool that it doesn’t make sense,” Pashley recalls. This would become Ustwo Games’ breakout hit, Monument Valley. Two weeks later, the first iteration was in the hands of agency colleagues. “They made little noises of pleasure while they were playing it,” he laughs, “and it was immediately clear that the combination of this tiny world in your hand and mind-blowing, Escheresque connections was worth pursuing.”
Miller’s desk was right next to Pashley’s, and so he was aware of what they were working on. The greenlight meeting, then, was more of a room full of interested parties agreeing on this idea being the most suitable, given it was “aimed at people like the people in the studio – the design community, because it has those aesthetics and sensibilities.” And while there was no overt pressure on the team’s latest project, Pashley says, the lack of profit made so far meant that “there was definitely a feeling that this might be the last bite of the cherry. ‘If this doesn’t go well, things might change.’”
As the BAFTAs winking at us from a shelf make clear, things went well. Several awards and millions of downloads later, Monument Valley had cemented Ustwo as one of the most exciting new studios around. “We’d get people emailing in saying, ‘I played this with my grandmother and
it’s the first time she’s played games’,” Pashley says. “Almost more important than money or numbers was the fact that we’d made something that people shared with their families, and we can give these experiences to other people. I think the Apple Design Award was probably the first time where we were like… I guess we didn’t have that much understanding of the relativity of that. ‘Like, does every game that releases feel like this?’”
A sequel was inevitable – although not before Pashley headed up development of Land’s End for Samsung Gear VR, after having been impressed by the headset at 2014’s Nordic Game conference. The creation of a VR exploration game was driven by the studio’s platform-first philosophy: just as Monument Valley was designed to be “a coffeetable book for your iPad,” Land’s End hoped to make virtual reality an accessible prospect for different kinds of people.
But there was no ignoring the many comments on the App Store. Then a freelance game designer and artist working in Germany, senior game designer Lea Schönfelder was one of the people who wanted to see more Monument Valley.
“I pretty much got into gaming when I got into game development,” she says. “I saw the medium as something really interesting to bring ideas and social or artistic views to an audience. Monument Valley wasn’t made for gamers specifically, so I guess I was the perfect target audience. And it was also the audience that I wished I could make games for.” She headed to London for an interview with the studio, and was asked to pitch designs for levels in a Monument Valley sequel. “I was surprised how easy I found it – not to sound arrogant,” she laughs, “but when you open the game, everything seems so clean and genius, and you can’t really imagine how they built that. But if you actually work on a grid, it’s quite logical.”
They had the engine and tools: it was the concept that took time, before they landed on the idea of a mother-daughter dynamic. But pressures were few, and she felt at home at Ustwo. “It feels a bit like still being in art school. Not in terms of, ‘You can play games and drink all day’ but in how a lot of things depend on yourself. Like, no one gives me a task list when I enter the studio in the morning. People don’t tell me, ‘Here’s the brief, deliver on it’ – everything is a conversation. Obviously there are boundaries and we have certain company goals, but since I feel aligned with those, it almost feels like the work I’m doing here is what I would naturally do.” That sense of belonging led to Schönfelder heading up the creation of the studio’s latest release, Apple Arcade visual-novel-cum-fixer-upper Assemble With Care.
The harmonious feeling around the place – no doubt further encouraged by the annual, subsidised company-wide holiday – is such that in 2015, Ustwo was renamed Ustwo Fampany Ltd, ‘fampany’ being a portmanteau of ‘family’ and ‘company’. (Recent accusations of union-busting levelled at the studio by a former employee would suggest that things at Ustwo are not always as fairy-lit and fancy-free as they appear, although the studio isn’t able to comment for legal reasons beyond expressing sadness at how the situation unfolded.) “I’m a bit on the fence with that word,” Schönfelder says. “It has that flavour of, ‘Yeah, since it’s my family I can just work the whole week.’ But it’s a very fair working place, and I do feel like I’m friends with my colleagues. And I guess the more we grow, the more professional it becomes.”
Programmer Kirsty Keatch has flourished at Ustwo. A recently graduated indie developer specialising in dynamic audio, she was brought on to help port Land’s End to Oculus Go, then worked on the music for Monument Valley 2. Now, she’s helping lead Ustwo Games’ next release, working alongside senior art director David Fernandez Huerta on the studio’s most ambitious game to date. Although the scope of the project, the pastoral art for which decorates the new half of the office, goes far beyond Ustwo Games’ usually ruthlessly streamlined titles, the studio philosophies remain. “Like, ‘Make it personal, but don’t take it personally’. David and I were really lucky to have similar backgrounds, we have similar influences, and have similar understandings of a hobby or a mechanic,” she hints. “It’s intrinsically a very personal game, so when you get to the cutting process it’s hard. But it does help, ultimately, with an understanding.”
“IT’S SUCH AN EXCITING TIME FOR US, WHERE WE’RE BREAKING AWAY AND SEEING WHAT ELSE WE CAN MAKE”
Ustwo Games’ horizons look set to expand, with three projects at various stages of development. “I think it’s such an exciting time for us, where we’re breaking away and seeing what else we can make beyond Monument Valley. Sure, we had Land’s End, but what else do we do in the mobile space?” Keatch’s pet hobby is creating AR face filters, an Instagram phenomenon she believes to be a brilliant basis for a game. “And now we’re in the stage where there’s new prototyping happening.” The studio’s willingness to use the resources afforded by the ‘fampany’ to attract and develop different kinds of creative minds stands it in good stead. “We’ve got two rooms full now of really creative people,” Pashley says, “and they’re brimming with ideas. So you want to chase those things, and not waste the lucky position that we’re in to be able to actually take the risk.”