Develop 2009: While attending the Develop conference, Platform tracked down Jenova Chen, creative director at thatgamecompany and the visionary mind behind Flower, to talk dreams, motion control and teamwork…
What inspired you to create Flower?
Jenova Chen: Well, basically inspiration. When people ask someone what inspired him to do something, it’s usually what he sees or experiences in his life. Flower was pretty much the last six years of my life, going around in the United States, seeing different kinds of cities, different kinds of landscapes. I was impressed by the endless green grass fields, the crops and the windmill farms in California. I’d never seen those things before. I grew up in a metropolitan city in Shanghai, China. I rarely ventured out to nature. I love the skyscrapers, but when I saw the endless green I felt something the people who lived in the city have missed.
So, I was thinking, is it possible to capture that feeling of being surrounded and overwhelmed by nature? [What’s] the best possible way? I can paint, I can write a poem about it, I can do a video about it. Then I thought “I’m probably better at doing an interactive experience” – to not only describe this nature experience, but also contract, abstract and even exaggerate that feeling – to over expose that sensation. That’s, kind of, how I started, but ideas evolve. It’s not just one thing that inspires you. It usually takes about a hundred to two hundred good ideas, and you finally drive your game to the end. So, initially I was just overwhelmed by the nature scene.
People have often referred to your titles as “Zen-like” experiences. Is it fair to say that motion control has had a lot to do with this interpretation?
JC: We didn’t really start with Zen as a goal, because… we made two games and people think “oh, they appear Zen-like,” so they call us the “Zen game.” But really when we first started Flower we wanted to create that feeling of a home-like, warm, safe and peaceful environment. If you want people to feel peaceful you don’t what them to move their joystick every half a second. We tried all kinds of different controls and I felt the tilt, the motion control, is the most intuitive. Also, from basic cognitive signs, when you move a joystick – the joystick has a spring built in – you will feel a feedback by pushing it. Humans [are like] this huge sponge of feedbacks. If you sense any feedback you want to [repeat that action] a lot.
So, people like to move joysticks, but when you start to use motion sensors there’s no feedback. You tilt; nothing happens to your hand, there’s no pressure coming back. In that way we don’t encourage people to move very frequently, and I think that fits with the game better. Did I know all these things before I made the decision? No. I was just trying all these things and then realised the motion control is probably a better fit for this particular experience.
Compared to your previous game, flOw, there is a visible story in Flower. How much focus did you place on this story?
JC: A lot of people think that thatgamecompany games have nothing to do with story, but both Kellee [Santiago] and I graduated from film school, we took screen writing together. We’re pretty familiar with the typical Hollywood-style of three act structures, how you create suspense, twists, a climax and relief. For Flower we just tried to do a very simple arc. You have the beginning, the twist in the middle, and then you have a very low moment, then boost up to your high moment to create a climax and [finally a] relief. We didn’t really spend that much effort creating the story, [instead focusing] on creating an emotional arc. We wanted to deliver a feeling, rather than a very complex character arc.
The visual style for the cinematics seems reminiscence of a watercolour film. Did one of your artists suggest this?
JC: Yeah, we work with our artists very closely. It’s kind of interesting, because personally I [like] the bright colours, the dream-like positive imagines, but our art director, Hao [Cui], he was more into the dark stuff. There’s no way we can make a game that’s both dark and bright, so it’s easier to create a contrast. When you play the game it is in the dream of the flower, so it’s positive and colourful, but when you are [watching] a cinematic – that is more of a reference towards the thing that the flower was afraid of – we would go with a much more noisy and dirty kind of a feeling.
Also, we had a technological limitation, which is the cinematics are pre-rendered, but if we run it with 1080p it would be so large, you know, it would be larger than the game. So, we decided to only use half of its resolution, but when you scale up the half-resolution the film looks kind of low quality, which is actually what we wanted, anyway. The [in-]game [visuals] are very crisp [and] we wanted to create that contrast [between them and the cinematics].
Each of the game’s seven environments is host to gameplay elements that reflect its natural sentiment. Painting the grass different colours, for instance. Can you describe these elements?
JC: Each flower has a scene. The first level is about awakening life; bring flower into the world. The second level is about spreading colour. [The] third level is about bringing the wind and creating motion. [The] fourth level is about creating light and also encountering the darkness. The fifth level is about suffering through the darkness. And the sixth level is about everything you’ve created – life, colours, wind and light. The last one is about seeing the stars.
In the colour theme… as game designers we wanted to have mechanics related to colour, so painting the grass seems to be a very natural idea. The lights… turning on the lights is also very direct. Windmills and wind and speed. So, it’s just like constructing a poem, because you have a structure, you know which level you want and the emotional arc, so it’s more like just filling the crossword puzzles over time.
You mentioned “seeing the stars.” Does that have anything to do with thatgamecompany’s next game?
JC: [Laughs] the next game probably will have the stars, because I thought the stars I did in Flower weren’t that great. I want to do a better version of it. Yeah, but the new game really has nothing to do with Flower or flOw.
Upon its release, Flower was heavily praised by critics for its implementation of motion control.
JC: We started the control with the [analog] stick and ended up with the tilt. We didn’t imagine we would be [using] tilt, but it just ended up there. I can’t have a complete vision of what the game’s going to be before we actually work on it. Usually the game becomes alive halfway through and then the game starts to tell us what needs to be there. The more we listen to the game, the more coherent the game will become and the better the game is in the end.
The arrangement of audio in Flower is also part of what makes it so unique. How did you go about creating the sound effects and music?
JC: This is mainly the work of Vincent Diamante, who is the composer, and Steve Johnson, who is the sound designer at Sony Santa Monica studio. I have no music background, so I first tired [this approach] in the flOw game, when I was working with Austin Wintory, the composer. He’s a film composer, he does do any games. So, we came together, I [told him I wanted] the sound effects in the game to become part of the music, rather than just being a sound effect. Every time food goes through the [creature’s] body, each segment needs to make a sound, and the sound needs to be random, because if it’s repetitive it’s going to be boring. [However] if it’s random how can you make this sound work well with the music? Austin went back and he came up with some crazy idea, it was some music series… which I don’t understand, but with the sound he gave me, I implemented this algorithm that works pretty well.
So, I know that sound effects can be done with the music. When we got to Flower, I brought this up to Vince. He came up with a different system compared to Austin but it works pretty well for Flower. Usually [with] games, sound designers and composers are separate. But in both flOw and Flower, we [asked] the composer to come up with these sound materials. It’s not the sound designer just randomly creating some sounds, but the composer actually gave them instruments and notes that they felt will fit with the music. And then the sound designer will work on top of that, so that [the effects] standout a little bit [without getting] buried in the music. For Flower the music and sound went through a lot of iterations. We’ve redone a lot of music and sounds. I think Vince is probably mad at me [laugh], but I think the result is good.
Will you be working with Vincent Diamante on your new project?
JC: The next project we’re going to work with Austin [Wintory] again, the composer for flOw, because the style of the game… his music is a slightly better fit. I really like Vince’s music, but for this particular game it is a different feeling, so… maybe we’ll work with Vince [on a future] game.
What advice on game development can you offer students?
JC: There’s a lot of advice I can give based on disciplines, but universal advice is make games. If you’re an artist [that] makes beautiful paintings, that’s great. But you need to make games, because in games you will run into a lot of constraints that you wouldn’t run into if you just paint beautiful pictures and make beautiful 3D models. Also, by working on games in teams you get to practice your teamwork skills. Fifty percent of the quality of the game comes from your teamwork skills, rather than your professional skills.
I was really bad at team working, as a matter of fact, but I just keep working on games with people [and] slowly I get to learn and improve myself. I’m pretty good at doing the art things; I can write code, but how you work with others is very, very important. And it’s also very satisfying if you work with a group of people on a project – when you work really hard and you finally finish it. That kind of satisfaction, you wouldn’t get it just by working by yourself.
And teamwork also allows you to [meet] other people. If you want to build the best game, you need the best artists, the best programmers, the best designers – you can’t have a half-assed team and hope the game will be great. So, the more people you work with, the better chance you’ll have of running in to [individuals] who are really good, and in the future you might get to work with them.
Breeze over to thatgamecompany to find out more about this unique studio and its games.
Aaron Lee
Photo: Bastion, Chris Smith
Tags: develop, flower, jenova chen, thatgamecompany
