The Making Of...
How sketches and an obscure language were used to create eerie expedition Mundaun
Format PC, PS4, XBox One Developer Hidden Fields Publisher MWM Interactive Origin Switzerland Release 2021
This is a game of grey areas. Figuratively, in the mystery and cloudy morals of its horrorfilled spaces, but also very literally, given that each of its vistas has been sketched in with pencil. Other games incorporate manual crafts into their aesthetic, from Plasticine models to paper cutouts, but Mundaun stands out because it finds the friction in this encounter. Its rural weave plays in the smudges between artisanal application and digital trickery, between everyday reality, whispered folklore and sheer fantasy.
It’s not surprising, then, that its creator has his feet planted in both old and new media. Michel Ziegler studied computer science and worked as a software engineer but, finding himself more and more attracted to the medium of comics, went back to university at the age of 25 to attain his second degree, in illustration. It was here that his crossover experiments began.
“My bachelor’s project started as a comic about a virtual world,” Ziegler says. To help realise the comic’s setting, he created a model of the world and its inhabitants in a game engine. The result captured his attention more than the comic it was made to support, and so he refocused on making it into a game prototype, The Colony, which in turn inspired him to create a full game.
When Ziegler began work on it after graduation, he had decided only on a tone (“rather dark and strange but also beautiful”) and a setting: Mundaun, a remote municipality in the Swiss Alps. It was a decision inspired by a personal connection to the region – Ziegler holidayed there regularly as a child and saw it as a second home. “It’s very sparsely populated and just an amazing place to go on adventures and let your fantasy run wild as a kid,” he says. “Since my biggest fascination with games is their ability to provide players with a place and a world to explore, I felt this place was perfect for that.”
If this all sounds a little idyllic for a game about demonic pacts and headless wandering goats, Ziegler also saw a dark underside to the serenity. “The sparseness of the population and buildings evokes a sense of isolation,” he says. “You feel lost in this nature with the tall mountains looking down at you, casting enormous shadows. It’s archaic, and to me that is one of the biggest sources of unease.”
It took time, however, for Ziegler to decide what to do with this location. “One idea was to have a sort of exclusion zone similar to STALKER,” he says. “I also played with the idea that the player needed to take care of a strange organism while doing their daily routine work as a farmer in the mountains. ‘Eraserhead meets Farming Simulator’ was the gist.” The concept kept evolving, following multiple paths up the mountain that proved too ambitious. “Early on I was playing with the idea of a dynamic day-and-night cycle,”
Ziegler says. “The idea of paintings that would allow you to change weather and seasons to solve puzzles.” Remnants of these earlier concepts, such as the Muvel farming vehicle and day-night shifts that are now tied to plot points, are still visible in Mundaun – leftover signs of Ziegler’s eagerness to forego planning and commence the craftsman’s labour. “I’m very much the type of person that needs to just jump into it and see what happens,” he says. “Some of my favourite moments were the results of pursuing ideas I had when wandering through the work-in-progress game world. I would never have had them on a white sheet of paper.”
And besides, those sheets of paper were needed elsewhere. Mundaun’s hand-drawn textures are central to its eerie atmosphere, evoking for Ziegler an aesthetic of old photographs and illustrated books of folk tales. At the very outset of development, Ziegler experimented with other media, primarily black ink, before settling on the soft pencil that gives Mundaun its distinctive look.
“I really was in the mood to do a lot of pencilling,” he says. Which was a stroke of luck, because the process he landed on was painstaking. Ziegler first created 3D models from concept sketches, then UV-unwrapped the meshes and printed them out, before tracing outlines, sketching the textures and scanning them back in. It was worthwhile labour, though – so much of the game’s atmosphere emerges from this technique. “The pencil textures can be pretty realistic or very abstract,” Ziegler says. “The range that the drawings have on the micro scale of each texture is also what I tried to achieve with the game as a whole. Some moments are pretty well defined and scripted, and other parts are more freeform.”
Pencil is also an ideal medium for tricking the eye or hiding objects in plain view. “Secrets are an important part of the game,” Ziegler says, and that’s reflected in the way the visuals can blur elements together. “One example for this would be the stony huts near the lake, which are almost indistinguishable from the surrounding rocks.”
There is a downside to this, of course – we often rely on bold lines and colour to orient ourselves in games, and Ziegler didn’t want players getting too lost. “Not having colour as a tool, I relied on light and shadow to guide the player where needed,” he explains. “Also, one of my design philosophies was to not go overboard with set dressing and visual clutter. That drastically reduces the need to highlight explicitly what can be interacted with.” Other means of guidance, Ziegler reminds us, are more diegetic. Signposting is achieved through – what else? – signposts, while protagonist Curdin is himself an illustrator who might perch on a bench overlooking the valley and sketch out a map of the area.
This act of amateur cartography is one of the routines, like brewing coffee or using the toilet, that feed into Mundaun’s shifting atmosphere. “The mundane, very grounded activities in the game hopefully heighten the strange and creepy moments,” Ziegler says. “It’s about having a palette of different moods.” Indeed, these everyday routines rub against the game’s more mysterious cultural references, folklore and superstitious rituals, such as sleeping with a spiked board on your chest for protection. Here, Ziegler drew on various legends, old pictures and pure invention. “It was always clear to me that I had
“NOT HAVING COLOUR AS A TOOL, I RELIED ON LIGHT AND SHADOW TO GUIDE THE PLAYER WHERE NEEDED”
this rich tradition of folklore to draw from but wouldn’t be constrained by the need for everything to be historically or culturally accurate.”
Mundaun’s monsters are a prime example. Assembled from a mishmash of sources, all that connects them is that they made sense in the world Ziegler wanted to create. Only the main antagonist, the old man, was directly inspired by genuine Swiss folklore. “The devil often appears in human form in folktales, which I always liked a lot,” Ziegler says. But even this character was refracted through the lens of another medium: an old postcard Ziegler found, the photo on its front depicting a company of soldiers standing on a glacier. “There was one figure that wasn’t a soldier, and from the hand-colouring of the monochrome photo his face looked inscrutable,” he recalls. “That’s where I had the idea of the old man as some kind of wandering man. Also, the soldiers in the snow gave me the motif of the war and the pact on the snowy summit.”
While playing fast and loose with tradition in some ways, Ziegler insisted on accuracy in others. He decided to have the whole cast voiced in Romansh, an old Latin-derived language still spoken in the region. Once again, though, authenticity wasn’t his only motivation. “I think more importantly I wanted the world of Mundaun to feel as foreign as possible. And a distinct language that is only spoken by relatively few people really reinforces that you are in this unique and specific place.”
Ziegler doesn’t speak the language himself, but that wasn’t a major obstacle. A local organisation called Lia Rumantscha helped with finding voice talent, and he could communicate in German with the actors and director during recording. “It was great to hear the game come alive when I first implemented the recorded lines. Suddenly those strange pencil people were talking.”
Ziegler eventually sought assistance for other parts of Mundaun’s audio track, too. He met sound designer Eric Lorenz in 2019, during GDC, where Ziegler was showcasing an early build of Mundaun. “I’d seen some stills of Mundaun on Twitter before so it was really exciting for me to come across it and meet Michel in person,” Lorenz tells us. “We became pretty good pals over the week.” Lorenz got involved in playtesting Mundaun on Discord, offered some feedback, and told Ziegler he wanted to do more. “I felt very passionately about helping the game feel as polished and immersive as it can be,” he says.
“Michel agreed, and we started working together almost immediately.”
Many effects were recorded on location, as the pair visited the Alps and made noises with everything they could find. “We went on hikes to capture the ambience, poked around and rattled wood sheds,” Lorenz says. “We even went to an antique regional museum that housed a wide variety of antique tools that we were allowed to touch and record.” To these field recordings, Lorenz introduced a sense of the uncanny – even down to the doors, which have a hyper-real quality to their audio. “I used many samples of old rotten and swollen wood to heighten the antiquity of the doors,” he says. “I added some samples of cactus spines being bowed, but also animalistic screeches, calling just enough attention to themselves that the player can’t help but notice them.”
The trickiest task was to recreate the ambient sound of the Alpine environment itself, because there’s very little of it. “High up in the Alps on a nice summer day, the mountains are so unbelievably quiet,” Lorenz explains. And the one sound they could hear didn’t exactly suit the game’s vibe. “There were a lot of cows,” he says. “Just about every recording of ambiences on the mountain contained some semblance of cowbells that I would usually have to process out.” The solution, for Lorenz, was to manufacture the sense of stillness another way. “What I ended up doing to help sell that feeling was to use a number of soft and subdued ambient winds that play off of each other and sound like they come from different distances.”
It’s one more way that the old and new marry together in Mundaun to create unease and surprise. You’ll find the same contrast throughout the game’s aesthetic and lore, and in the play experience itself, which plaits scraps of action genres – driving, firstperson shooter – into rural and pagan rituals. “It was very important to me to create a game that didn’t feel like you were walking through a museum and interacting with a few static elements,” Ziegler says. “I think the feel and philosophy of Mundaun was more inspired by Mario 64 and No One Lives Forever than recent horror titles.” Naturally, integrating more systems meant more work, but it’s clear that Ziegler relishes the challenge. Take the Muvel, a rickety vehicle that had to function on very uneven terrain, where it may even get stuck. “The possibility of ‘breaking’ or glitching an aspect in the game in certain conditions wouldn’t be a reason for me to not have it.” he says. “Sure, it needs to work but I think a hyper-focus on polish and removing all edges from a game can really limit creativity and experimentation.”
Looking back, Ziegler seems at peace with his patient, hands-on approach to game development. “Some design principles that crystallised for me while developing Mundaun will probably find their way into a next game,” he says. Not least its peculiar blend of production practices. “I want to experiment more with combinations of handmade techniques and 3D.” Like the pencil marks of Mundaun, it’s about what sparks – perhaps unexpectedly – when traditional craft meets technology. “Honestly,” he says, “I can’t wait to start work on finding the next world.”