The Making Of...
How Creaks progressed from student project to a proud part of the Amanita Design portfolio
One thing you’re pretty much guaranteed when playing a game from Amanita Design is an abundance of artistry. The Czech studio has spent the past 18 years straddling the divide between videogame design and traditional art techniques. And Creaks is no exception. It’s a puzzle-platformer about things that go bump in the night – or simply when the lights flicker off and on. However, what really stands out is the way its ornate world is brought to life with a combination of oil painting and puppetry.
That’s no surprise, perhaps, given how the project began. “The concept and basic design came from my diploma work at the Academy Of Arts, Architecture And Design in Prague,” lead designer and artist Radim Jurda tells us. “A lot of Amanita’s games originate from this same animation studio.” Samorost, the studio’s first release, was the diploma project of founder Jakub Dvorský, while Botanicula was created by fellow alumnus Jaromír Plachý.
There aren’t many art schools in the Czech Republic, Creaks co-creator Jan Chlup explains, meaning that many projects are naturally interconnected thanks to students working with each other, as well as creators sharing a lot of interests and inspiration. The history of Czech animation and renowned animators such as Jirí Barta and Jan Švankmajer loom large over almost all of Amanita Design’s projects. Amanita’s input would come later, though.
“With Creaks, I started with the theme,” Jurda explains. “I was interested in the visualisation of our imagination, and fascinated with this idea of interpreting visual things in the wrong way. There could be a silhouette in a dark room that looks like a monster, but when you turn the light on, you realise it’s just a harmless piece of furniture – just a coat stand with some clothes on it. This idea seemed visually potent, and also had great potential in terms of game mechanics.”
For much of Creaks’ development time, the game went by a very different name: Blik. The Czech word for ‘blink’, it refers to the role light plays in the game, where ambiguous furnitureshaped enemies can move in the dark, becoming stationary under the harsh truth of a beam of light. When the world blinks, the toothy furniture hiding in the shadows becomes temporarily animated. Jurda is quick to point out that the working name had to be Blik specifically, rather than its English counterpart, because of the
latter’s proximity to ‘blinkat’, which in Czech means ‘to vomit’.
“We considered hundreds of names,” Jurda says. “Pareidolia was one of them. This refers to the tendency to see living things in unliving objects or patterns. This was essentially the principle we used with our monsters. But we also had a huge document of hundreds of name ideas, some really strange ones like Wild Wild Nest and Hassle In The Karl The Cruel Kiwi Castle. In the end, we liked Creaks the best. When I hear that word, I imagine myself in a dark corridor, listening to strange noises, my imagination running riot.”
Shortly after he came up with the initial concept, Jurda was joined by Chlup, a friend and visual artist. Together they created the first prototype. “We created this huge, detailed storyboard, which was a great tool in terms of guiding us, and I have to say we managed to stick to it pretty closely,” Jurda says. A notinconsiderable feat, given that Creaks was in development for eight long years.
Jurda remembers the first half as the most difficult period. “We were going slower than expected, and I was honestly a bit worried if we’d even make it.” Chlup agrees: “There were definitely some difficult moments when it seemed as though the end was nowhere to be seen. You saw what you’d done, compared it with the storyboard, and got the feeling that it was impossible. It was only as we got a lot closer to the end that we started to see the light at the end of the tunnel.” Jurda says the game’s announcement, in 2018, was a big relief. “Even though the hardest part was actually still ahead of us, I was suddenly a lot calmer.”
Over such a long development period, it’s only natural that things would change. “The original concept was more of a puzzle-platformer but, as we explored, it turned more in the direction of a logical puzzle game,” Jurda says. And even with that lengthy development time, Chlup says, “we simply didn’t have time to realise all of our ideas.” One of the things left on the cutting-room floor – perhaps fortunately, if you’re of a nervous disposition – was “a suicidal moth monster that flew into the light and then automatically turned into a footstool.”
Jurda also had hopes for a cubism-inspired world, and a ’90s-style point-and-click minigame. “We even had a prototype for this one, but we just couldn’t fit it in. We had to stop production so I could concentrate fully on the backgrounds for the levels! At one point there was even the possibility that we might lose the entire basement area of the game. But we didn’t want to let it go – it was part of that original script, and so I think the experience would have felt incomplete.”
“WE HAD SOME REALLY STRANGE IDEAS FOR NAMES, LIKE HASSLE IN THE KARL THE CRUEL KIWI CASTLE”
In the early days, working on Creaks as his diploma project, Jurda was keen for Dvorský – who had made Samorost in similar circumstances before founding Amanita – to give official feedback on his thesis. “He refused because he didn’t have the time, but we went for a beer several times to discuss the game, and he ended up liking the project so much he decided to take us under his wing. Jakub really helped us build the team up, and supported us so we could work on Creaks full time.” After they joined Amanita, Dvorský helped Jurda and Chlup pin down a more precise art direction for the game and connected other team members, including Creaks’ tech designer Jan Jirsa and animator Pavel Pachta, who had worked extensively with puppets.
Despite being in a different genre from most of Amanita’s other titles, which tend to be more traditional adventure games, there was still a feeling of some shared essence. “A lot of things you find in Amanita games still exist in
Creaks – it’s hand drawn, the story is told wordlessly, and there’s a strong emphasis on the music and sound,” Chlup says. “For every Amanita game there’s a very talented and distinct musician that gets selected – Hidden Orchestra, in the case of Creaks – and they always work very tightly with the rest of the team.”
The pair have nothing but praise for Amanita’s way of working. It’s a small studio where artists work in parallel to each other, and are given freedom and independence as well as mutual support. Once a year, they all gather in a cottage in the mountains to play and discuss their projects. Jurda credits much of Creaks’ “essence” to the advice of Dvorský. “I remember him telling us that it would be easier to tell a story without the use of words because then there’d be no need to translate the game into different languages. It would be universally understandable. It also offers more space for interpretation. We are mostly trained as artists, and so often we express ourselves better through image and sound.”
There’s no better example of this than in Creaks’ collectibles. Nestled away in the dusty, cobwebbed corners of each level, you’ll find incredibly intricate wind-up oil paintings, occasionally with an entire clockwork minigame attached. They help to vary the game’s pace and push the player to explore every little nook and cranny of Creaks’ vast mansion. “There was a painting hanging on the wall in one of the first prototypes, and someone pointed out that this could be used to teach players about the previous inhabitants of the mansion,” Chlup explains. “At this time the game concept and storyboard weren’t final, so I was trying to add ideas by painting sketches. Some of these were done in oil – baroque-like portraits of ancestors that lived in the mansion. At that stage there was no other work for me to do, so I got right to it!”
He didn’t land on the wind-up nature of the paintings immediately, though. “At first we just had static images, but it didn’t feel interactive enough for a game. We looked at various ways to implement some more interactivity, and finally decided on adding strings to turn the paintings into small music boxes. A little later, after another batch of finished paintings, we felt that they might be a bit repetitive.” Dvorský suggested adding some kind of lever or button to trigger a visual change in the image. “We tried to implement this into the existing paintings, but quickly realised that the best way would be to create brand-new
ones,” Chlup says. “Starting from scratch allowed us to add in the interactivity – it’s just a pity we didn’t notice this right away.” At the end of development, Chlup returned to his earlier musicbox efforts and, using the experience he’d gained working on the minigames, incorporated new moving elements to bring them closer in line with the more elaborate paintings.
For all that Creaks evolved over the course of development, it’s still very much rooted in its artschool origins, just like those other Amanita projects which blossomed at Prague’s Academy
Of Arts, Architecture and Design. And, as with those games, the fact it has been made by artists whose backgrounds lie outside of games shines through in the fresh ideas and creativity on show.
Chlup and Jurda both see their art background as a benefit. “We often like to say that we want to see our favourite art techniques and approaches brought to life,” Chlup says. “Making games is a lot like this.” Before working on Creaks, he says, they’d never had any experience of using a graphics tablet. “But it brings a lot of advantages to the process. Everything is quicker, and when you find out that you need to change something, it’s almost painless when compared to doing it the old, analogue way. On the other hand, there’s something powerful about making a mistake in a drawing when you’re unable to simply take it back.”
It also works the other way, he says, as games are able to help broaden an artist’s abilities and vision. “As artists, you tend to explore and develop in various ways. Working on a game widens your field of possible approaches compared to more traditional media, and as games have programmable content and are based on player inputs, it brings forward a lot of new visual opportunities for an artist. Working on Creaks was a very different experience to what I’m used to. It reminded me of how nice it was to produce art when I was younger and approached everything more lightly and freely. Coming up with all the ideas for paintings and backgrounds was very satisfying, and so much fun.”
“Yes, I think it’s really important to have interests outside the field you’re working in so you can bring something new to it,” Jurda adds. “I was interested in games during high school, and was constantly trying to make them during school projects and assignments. It was a bit frustrating that my teachers only really cared about the visuals! Luckily that changed at university, and I got great support there. Looking back, I’m happy I spent those years working on stuff not directly connected with games. It gave me something unusual that I can now bring to them.”
Playing Creaks, as it exists after all those years of development, it’s difficult to argue otherwise. The game’s rickety mansion teems with magic and mystery, from the sprawling hand-drawn environments to the strange wind-up minigames and the way everything moves with an eerie puppet-like judder. The game is anything but conventional, and it’s all the better for it.