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Prey For The Gods, the colossus of Kickstarter
Meet the team behind a spiritual successor to Shadow of the Colossus striding onto PC in 2017.
Flying high in Prey For The Gods
© No Matter Studios
More than a decade on from its original release, the shadow of Shadow of the Colossus still looms large on the gaming landscape. Team Ico’s seminal PS2 game, which sees you as a wandering adventurer taking down a series of enormous, mythic beasts with nothing more than a horse, bow, arrow and sword, still remains one of the most critically acclaimed games of the 21st century so far; it’s proven such a difficult act to follow that its developer still hasn’t released another game yet.
A lot has happened in the industry and the medium since then. An entire console generation has come and gone. Gaming’s got bigger, more expensive, more mainstream, more controversial – even more nuanced, sometimes. Still, seldom have designers dreamed bigger in scale, or mixed beauty with ambition so astutely. As for a sequel? Forget about it; Team Ico are still slaving away at The Last Guardian.
One tiny team of indie developers are hoping to correct this grievous injustice however, with an ambitious game clearly indebted to Shadow of the Colossus. Prey For The Gods, due for release on PC, Mac, PS4 and Xbox One, stormed Kickstarter this summer with its bleak vision of one woman alone on a barren, wintry isle, taking on behemoths that wouldn’t look out of place at a housewarming party for HP Lovecraft. You might even go so far as to call it godforsaken, save for the fact that it’s the stomping grounds of giant gods you’re tasked with slaughtering, or being slaughtered by (hence the homophone in the name – geddit?).
It sounds like a lot for just three people working out of a basement to pull off, but Seattle-based No Matter Studios – Brian Parnell, Hung-Chien Liao, and Tim Wiese (not the German goalkeeper turned professional wrestler) – have the expertise between them to pull it off.
“We first met while working at [Facebook and social game developer] Tencent Boston over seven years ago,” Parnell tells Red Bull Games. “As a company this is our first project, however we've been making games for 12 years. Titan Quest, Immortal Throne, Rock Band 2, Rock Band: The Beatles, and Farpoint, to name a few. We began working together part time around July 2014. The idea of the game was still pretty fluid but we knew we wanted to make something that had a tight scope and focused around a giant and a hero. We knew with three developers we had to focus on a few things and make them great, rather than stretch ourselves over a number of little things.”
“After about a year part time, we felt we had something we were proud of and before spending another year on it felt we should make a trailer just to see if anyone was interested. We simply throw it up on YouTube, and created a Twitter account to post a link to it. Honestly, we were hoping for 1,000 views and maybe a press blurb if we sent off some write ups. I'll never forget the next week, it was really overwhelming. Having been doing this for 12 years, we realized we had something very special and we began to make arrangements to quit our jobs and go all in. Chien and Tim were both engineers at a mobile studio called Fun Plus, and I was working at Impulse Gear working on the VR title FarPoint.”
Surprisingly, Parnell says that he didn’t play Shadow of the Colossus before work began on Prey For The Gods. “It's funny, I never had a chance to play SotC,” he admits. “I didn't have a PS2 growing up, but my friend did and always talked about it. For me, as a kid, I always wanted to take on a giant boss and climb them. Who didn't!? Since I didn't have a PS2 I figured there were many others that missed this chance to play the game and as an indie studio we could bring that type of gameplay to an entirely new audience on the PC.”
It's not all sunshine in Prey For The Gods
© No Matter Studios
“So when Chien, Tim, and I got around to discussing what kind of project we should or could do, I brought up that we should focus on scope. Start with a hero and a giant boss to make the battle compelling and memorable. As a three man studio, if we could pull that off, we wouldn't have to add a billion small features like an AAA studio is typically forced to do.”
This vision – a series of majestic and superlative boss battles with copious amounts of Dark Souls-style forward rolls – enabled No Matter to raise more than half a million dollars from 14,738 eager Kickstarter backers this summer. Parnell says, however, that the scope has expanded beyond this since, perhaps in part due to the team more than doubling their initial funding target.
“The giants we've shown are a large part of the game, but they aren't the only thing,” he reveals. “We intend for the player to explore the island while surviving the many dangers they will encounter so that they can piece together what’s going on. You will also encounter minions and they definitely don't want you on the island.” This month, No Matter also revealed that the game would be open world – a seemingly innocuous addition for those reared on AAA blockbusters, but a daunting (Hell, colossal) task for an indie studio. Other studios require entire divisions to hide the loading times required for this.
“A big reason people avoid open world development is to do with the sheer amount of work that’s required to build the levels,” Parnell explains. “Thankfully, Tim has set up a system that allows multiple people to work in areas on the island and check them in without fear of overwriting each other’s work. This allows for flexibility, and an ability to move faster as large areas won’t need to be locked off.”
Parnell is leading design and artwork on the game while Chien and Wiese work on the tools, graphics and levels, and provides some insight regarding the creation of the gods you will be taking on – the trailer promises a floating spectre, a giant troll and enormous Oh No They Didn’t dragon/griffin hybrid which you might slay high above the game world while holding on for dear life.
Creating something a little different
© No Matter Studios
I like to combine creatures that look fantastic but still feel oddly familiar,” says Parnell. “Since we're initially shipping with five bosses, we wanted there to be variety in silhouette. A simple way to do this is with locomotion or rig. I start with a locomotion/rig type (bipedal, quadruped, winged, etc) and then begin thinking about what kind of creature we would expect to see surviving in a frozen world. I'll start to look online and really just about anywhere that makes sense (Zoos, nature books, and so on). Dark Crystal [the fantasy film directed by Jim Henson and Frank ‘Yoda’ Oz] was one spot I looked at quite a bit for one of the bosses. Coming up with the initial ideas is fairly quick. We'll then discuss some gameplay ideas and continue to throw the ideas back and forth. In that time, the look of the giant starts to solidify.”
“We want each battle to feel impossible and intimidating and while size can be a way to get that kind of reaction, it's not the only way.”
Hold up, though. We’ve seen this play out before. Team of earnest and visionary developers pitch up on Kickstarter, promising the (open) world, only to crash and burn under the weight of the commitments they gave and the boxes and boxes of branded keyrings they swore blind they’d be able to post, even to backers working on remote outposts in the Antarctic. Remember Clang? Yogsventures? Ouya? Is Parnell prepared for the intense back scrutiny that comes with Kickstarter funding, and prepared to deal with delays if they occur?
We were getting to a point that people were able to post a drawing and get millions of dollars on Kickstarter
“I think failures are going to happen with any platform,” he says. “We were getting to a point that people were able to post a drawing and get millions of dollars on Kickstarter. That's foolish, and honestly I'm upset about those things. However, I'm happy to see backers now expect more planning, explanation and actual development from newer Kickstarter Campaigns. This will hopefully force developers to have a little more prepared with their project helping them reduce risk for themselves and their backers.”
To that end, No Matter didn’t just come to Kickstarter with cap in hand – they brought a clearly functioning, if pre-Alpha, build of the game. The team streams their progress on Twitch several times a week in one of the most transparent gaming Kickstarter projects we’ve seen. And Parnell is not afraid to admit the date might slip, if quality is put into doubt.
“We will do everything we can to build confidence,” he says. “We have 15,000 backers, that's a large number of people that believe in us, and we want to do our best to create a game that will meet our goals as well as their expectations. A surprisingly large number of people have reached out to us telling, if not demanding, that we not rush the project. They want us to take our time, and if we need extra time to use it. They don't want crap. That means a lot to us as we are committed to quality, and creating the best game we can. That's something we've been very up front with as well, and while we feel like we can get the game to our backers in 2017, it's not worth it if we have to cut corners or rush. To hit a date for the sake of a date is a recipe for disaster and not something we are willing to do.”
Does Parnell feel any temptation to feature creep, or to deviate from the original plan after such a successful Kickstarter campaign? The team also hit stretch goal targets, and are actively working on recording a live orchestral score for the soundtrack and the creation of an underground cave system to explore.
It's easy to add things, but we know that while $500,000 may look like a lot it really is a tiny budget for what we are creating
“Of course!” Parnell says, frankly. “It's easy to add things, but we know that while $500,000 may look like a lot it really is a tiny budget for what we are creating. We have a number of plans in place as we like having alternatives if we need them. We'll do what's right for the game, if we need more time to polish we'll make that happen. Rushing the game is simply not something we want to do."
For that same reason, don’t expect the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game to appear at the same time as PC – a Steam launch is currently planned for December next year, with console versions to follow later.
“We are doing Windows and Steam first, and then we’ll release on consoles after,” says Parnell. “We'd love to do a day one multi-platform release but we're three people, and we'd rather release this as responsibly as we can.”
That massive To Do List for the next twelve months has not stopped Parnell from showing his support for Team Ico and his own project’s source of inspiration, however. Parnell nods vigorously in assent when we ask if he’s planning to play The Last Guardian, the much-delayed, much-anticipated puzzle platformer from Fumito Ueda and the team behind Shadow of the Colossus.
“Of course! I bought the Collector’s Edition.”
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