off on anything visually it’s been through a great deal of work to get it to look that way and I trust that if he’s happy with it then I’ve done my job.
WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNT FROM MAKING SILT THAT YOU’LL TAKE FORWARD INTO FUTURE GAMES? Tom: Making games is hard, but incredibly worth the hardship it takes to get to completion. Next time around we will of course have experience in what’s to come, so that’s going to be a big difference moving forwards! We will be approaching things as games developers this time so I imagine there will be much more awareness of how to tackle challenges. Dom: I’d really like to make something that has more replayability and keeps players playing for longer. Silt is very linear and when it’s over it’s over. I like games like this, but sometimes I think about how we took three years to make roughly three hours of content. That is the nature of the kind of game that Silt is, we knew this from the beginning, it was very much a deliberate choice to do it like this. But it is a very labour-intensive way to make an hour of gameplay. I’d really like to do something a little more systemic next time, that gets a little more reuse out of everything we build, or at least gives players a reason to play it multiple times. The problem with Silt is that we get so little reuse out of the art that if we wanted to make another hour of content for it now we’d probably need another year!
WHAT WAS THE HIGHLIGHT OF MAKING THE GAME FOR YOU? Tom: I had a great time designing all the creatures, especially the “Goliaths” which were very fun to come up with ideas for. For me, pre-production will always be my favourite part as that’s the time for endless ideas, concepts, writing and more. Dom: This whole thing has been a dream come true for me to be honest, I got to make something of my own and get it out into the world. I really wanted to ship a game, and we have done that now and I’m really proud of that. I hope we get to keep doing this for a long time.
ARE THERE ANY DECISIONS THAT YOU WISH HAD BEEN TAKEN DIFFERENTLY, OR ANYTHING YOU WOULD GO BACK AND CHANGE? Dom: The “Goliaths” in the game were enormously difficult to make. Really complicated animation rigs and thousands of lines of unique animation control code for each one. We built each Goliath several times over as initial attempts perhaps just didn’t work the way we needed them to, or that we couldn’t quite pull off the big flashy thing we designed, so we had to find other ways of using the rig that would come off better. By the time we had built all four Goliaths we had this big list of mistakes to avoid and best practices to follow. We ended up spending one entire milestone (three months) re-designing, re-rigging and re- coding each one. I think one of our biggest mistakes at the start of development was underestimating the development time these things required. Tom: I think there’s always going to be things that you would like to change in any given project. At some point though you have to let go and move on and learn from what you have made. Easier said than done though, of course!
WHAT HAS THE RESPONSE BEEN LIKE FROM PLAYERS - SILT’S VISUALS ESPECIALLY? Tom: We have had an incredible response from the visuals of Silt, I have been so happy to read the praise from the aesthetics. It’s not often that you read opinions about your work from so many different outlets and countries so it’s truly lovely to see that it has resonated with people. It gives me a lot of hope for the future as we have got many more ideas for future games. Watching the streamers also has been fantastic, and we have all really loved seeing the different reactions from players around the world. The response in general has been really great. We know we didn’t make a game for everyone but the people who are into it seem like they will be with us for the long haul which is really lovely to see. That’s exactly how it’s been with my art since day one, so it’s really exciting to know there’s a future for our kind of surreal weirdness in the games industry.
August 2022 MCV/DEVELOP | 61
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