A screenshot from inside the house of What Remains of Edith Finch
© Giant Sparrow
Games
Designing what you see in What Remains of Edith Finch
Celebrating the magic that makes a game special, we chat to the people behind the design of What Remains of Edith Finch to find out how it all came together.
Written by Adam Cook
6 min readPublished on
To call What Remains of Edith Finch 'a hit' might be a bit of an understatement. As developers Giant Sparrow’s second game, the previously released The Unfinished Swan had already garnered widespread acclaim for its interesting ideas and motifs, as you literally paint the world to life. The emotionally driven narrative first-person adventure What Remains of Edith Finch, however, launched the team into the stratosphere, with multiple awards for best storytelling, best indie game, and many more. Now available on Nintendo Switch, if you’re yet to witness its charms, there’s no time like the present.
But when you play a game and are enraptured by every second of it, you’d be forgiven for thinking about the masterpiece before your eyes as a whole. The truth is, of course, multiple members of a team come together in their various departments to make what you eventually play so special. Speaking to Chris Bell, lead game designer, and Brandon Martynowicz, art lead, we wanted to find out just how things work at Giant Sparrow and how they created the look of What Remains of Edith Finch.
What’s the day-to-day process of what you do on a game?
Martynowicz: As the art lead on Finch, my day-to-day tasks included a lot of modelling, texturing, set decorating and lighting. I was also creating task lists for other artists, communicating with design on certain aspects of the game and figuring out how to build everything necessary to make the game great.
What’s the most difficult part of your job?
Bell: Leading and managing the expectations of our team, our partners and our players. Expectations matter a lot, so maintaining a healthy consistent level of communication across all parties is important.
A screenshot from an imaginary world within What Remains of Edith Finch.
A colourful, vibrant, imaginary world© Giant Sparrow
What does your job involve during the different elements of production?
Bell: Generally speaking, in pre-production we’re exploring the core concepts of the game and doing all sorts of prototyping and iteration to flesh out the range of experiences we see the game having and the sorts of feelings and moments we want the player to have.
In production we focus on these experiences and build them out further, enriching them with systems and technology and structuring and restructuring them until they feel like they’re of the right shape and are having the right effect on players and player dynamics.
QA overlaps with the polish phase, where we’re going across the game and ironing out bugs.
Once the game is launched, we’re focused on bringing it to any new platforms we could target but weren’t able to have ready for launch and getting the game into the hands of more players, either through advertisements or sales promotions or trade shows. At this point, I’m usually off working on the next project.
What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever got into the environmental design of a game?
Martynowicz: By far the strangest thing – and I've modelled a ton of stuff – would definitely have to be the (spoiler warning!) vagina interior during the finale of Finch.
Bell: In an effort to help people see things they don’t understand in a new light, my goal as a designer and storyteller is often to build something that appears strange on the surface, but ultimately can be reflected upon, learned from and understood, so that we can all move forward.
The Finch house is an embodiment of this. Said to be cursed, it’s a layered accretion of illustrative rooms, obsessive designs and exhaustive mementos sealed behind seeping doors. At first, that’s odd and overwhelming. But over time, this pattern reveals a relatable history of people dealing with issues like death and identity struggling to deal with it all.
A screenshot from the comic-book in What Remains of Edith Finch.
What Remains of Edith Finch has so many art styles© Giant Sparrow
How often do you put Easter eggs into your work? Can you give us some examples?
Martynowicz: Easter eggs are a fantastic part of game development and I personally love them when done right. Hidden throughout every game I have worked on, I leave some sort of personal touch. I have left friends’ and family members’ birthdays scrambled somewhere on certain textures. Some hidden little creatures with their eyes peeking out of a box, or a funny picture mixed in with other imagery are a few Easter eggs I have left behind.
Bell: I personally don’t include Easter eggs often, never if it will hurt the integrity of the game world and that ‘overall idea’, but subtle eggs fit in nicely and I’ll often use them to celebrate loved ones. For example, throughout the Finch house are detergent bottles, books, and wine with references to various family members of the development team. A sticker for my dad’s plumbing company sticks to the air conditioner in the Finch attic, while my dog looks out at the horizon in a photo atop the Finch staircase.
Is there one game you wish you’d worked on?
Bell: I don’t dwell on things I have no control over, but there are many games I’d have loved working on, mostly for the opportunity to witness developers, designers and artists I admire, as they were tackling complex problems or making big breakthroughs. Some games like: Super Mario Bros, The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario 64, Pokémon Blue & Red (Gameboy), Goldeneye 007, Ico (PS1), Shadow of the Colossus, Counter-Strike, Half-Life/Half-Life 2, Second Life, Wii Sports, Minecraft, The Witness, Rocket League, Pokémon Go, Super Mario Odyssey, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
A screenshot from the swingset in What Remains of Edith Finch.
Light and shadow create a believable world© Giant Sparrow

What are you most proud of with your work on the game?

Martynowicz: For me personally, I am most proud of the lighting and colour composition created for each character throughout the house. The ActPass colour method I came up with was something that I found to be a very creative and clever way to create colour harmony that worked well with each character’s bedroom/story for the game.
Bell: Ultimately, I’m most proud of the relationships I was able to develop and grow with various members of the team over the course of the project, the trust I was able to earn and our resolve to come together in the spirit of our collective values when things were messy and not so clear.
How important is colour and light to what you do?
Martynowicz: Colour and light are extremely valuable in what I do. Each bedroom of the Finch house had a very specific colour pallet and lighting direction. This is a way to help lead the players eye through the environment.
How often does something get designed, only to be torn down and restarted?
Martynowicz: Towards the beginning of the project, things would get iterated on quite a bit. This is somewhat typical for game design.
A screenshot from the house in What Remains of Edith Finch.
What Remains of Edith Finch’s house is intriguing© Giant Sparrow
How will the new generation of consoles enable you to push even further with your ideas?
Bell: Next-generation consoles supporting raytracing will allow for more beautiful looking games and more dynamic simulations and environments. VR and AR will continue to provide interfaces that more closely resemble natural human-to-human interaction online.
Above all, however, I’m most anticipating how dynamic server architectures and faster internet speeds will enable thousands of more players and entities to experience the same persistence space and dynamic objects together. (Right now, this stuff happens at a small scale, or is faked to look like it’s what’s happening).
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