enough. This philosophy was an important one to the team.
“The other key decision we made early on was the
structure of the game being so free-form, being so open. You can finish the game now, or you could not. That was a structure that we wanted from the get go for players, because choosing to finish the game is a really nice thing to have. We tried to be respectful of people’s time. “But the other thing that allowed us to do is be
freeform with our development. Sable is a series of short stories, every quest is a side quest. The only things you have to do are the beginning and the end of the game, and we’re quite clear about what those actually are in terms of narrative. Doing that meant that the middle bit could be really loose. It meant that we could plan for double the content and cut half of it out, and it would have no real impact in terms of production. “Whereas if all those pieces were interlinked, it would have been very difficult on a number of levels to just take anything out. You know, let’s say [in the narrative] you had to go to a certain town before you went to the camp or whatever. Not only do we have to design those limitations in the game, but if we wanted to change that up, if we couldn’t afford to make the town, we’d then have to go back and redesign that whole sequence. So being able to be flexible in that regard allowed us to finish the game I should say. Because I feel like it would have been very easy to spend years and years longer on it and never get out the door. And that was something that we really didn’t want to fall into.” Thankfully, Sable avoided development hell. After four years of full-time development, the game released in September 2021 to strong reviews. As well as the spirit of freedom at the heart of the game, the game’s art and animation style drew significant praise – with Sable’s world inspired by artists such as Jean Giraud, and by the works of Studio Ghibli. Their influence over the game’s world is clear, but what is arguably more interesting is how they influenced Sable’s animation itself. As the player moves through the world, they’ll immediately notice that her walking animation is somewhat jerky, running at a visibly lower FPS than the game around her. This, Kythreotis explains, was the team’s desire to intentionally pursue imperfection. “We wanted to make a 3D open world game, but we wanted the style to feel as two dimensional as possible. Part of that was just introducing a sort of imperfection into the art of the game. So for limited frame animation, we could smooth that out and make it look really perfectly animated. But when you look at how artists actually animate in 2D, they have to do it
per frame and you get those jumps. “It’s a style we embraced, and tried to introduce that level of imperfection into the textures. More or less all of the textures are hand drawn. We tried to make sure that we left a little bit of roughness to it, a feeling that, ‘yeah, this was made by hand.’ And the same is true even for the geometry, we tried to kind of wobble the lines a little bit and make it look like someone had kind of drawn them by hand without a ruler. Because computers are really good at making perfect lines, and you can duplicate that million times. And usually when you make something by hand, you always want to be as perfect as possible, because you’ll always naturally create the imperfection yourself. Whereas when you make something on a computer, I think you’re actually doing the opposite. A lot of the time, you’re trying to introduce the human touch, we wanted everything to feel like it had our fingerprints on it.”
KEEPING THE LIGHTS ON
Building a game without combat and with intentionally jerky animations is certainly a risk. It’s not the kind of game you can make without support. Kythreotis praises publisher Raw Fury for their support of the project and their faith in the team, though their support wasn’t the only one helping to keep the Shedworks lights on – as the team landed a deal that saw Sable launching day one on Game Pass. “We were de-risked throughout development on the financial side, just because of the Game Pass we had. Once we knew we had that deal in, we knew more or less what our budget was for production. And that was incredibly reassuring. I don’t know what impact that has in terms of sales and stuff like that, but in terms of development it just gave us that assurance. It just means that anything else is a bonus.” Thankfully, these risks paid off – Sable has attracted some devoted fans, and even nabbed a few award nominations already. Not too bad for a shelved passion project. “It went really positively, for the most part. We knew
there would be people who didn’t get on with the experience, and we were fine with that. We stand by pretty much every creative decision we made on the project. And I think the people that it hit, and people who got what we were going for with the narrative, it seems to have really gone down well. When you’re a smaller team, you’re never going to please everyone. But If we can please the people that we were targeting with this, people like ourselves in a lot of senses, then we’re happy. And I think we achieved that”
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