If you’re a fan of beautiful looking puzzle games and haven’t heard of Shadowscrapers, you’re either not doing enough research or need to read more Edamame Reviews…😉
Shadowscrapers is essentially a puzzle game about using shadows to create paths, move objects, and clear seemingly impossible stages. If you enjoyed Monument Valley, chances are this is a game you’ll want to check out.
See “Shadows” in a new “Light”, check out our original review here.
Before we start, we’d like to thank the Sky Pulse Team for participating in our interview, and for spending some of their valuable time answering our questions. Thanks guys!
Now without any further ado, our interview begins.
Our Interview with Jarom “Solar” Norris, Producer and Community Manager for Shadowscrapers
Ok first up, why did you decide to make Shadowscrapers?
All of us who worked on the game were actually students at The University of Utah, and in our Entertainment Arts and Engineering (EAE) program, your senior capstone project is to develop a game. So all of us went into our senior year intending to make a game, and we all liked Evan Jackal’s idea to create a puzzle game using solid shadows.
We’re “guessing” Monument Valley played a major role in the inspiration of Shadowscrapers. Could you tell us a little about the creation of the graphics in Shadowscrapers?
Actually, Monument Valley was never really an inspiration for the game. The original concepts for the game were much closer to Portal, and we even played around with it being a first-person platformer game. It was kind of for simplicity’s sake that we made some early prototypes in an isometric view, and we ended up really liking the look and feel of that. And as soon as you make an isometric game with a minimalist design, you say “This looks kind of like Monument Valley.” And we all liked Monument Valley, so it kind of inevitably became a standard that we held ourselves to, even after we decided to try and do the modern skyscraper look.
Getting to our current aesthetic was a long process, though. Even once we got through initial prototyping and began looking for an art style, we went through several iterations and got a lot of feedback. We tried doing simple chunks of rock in space, we tried skyscrapers with tons of clouds and reflective windows, we tried levels that scrolled all over the place. The final look of the game wasn’t born through inspiration, but the result of a long process of trial and error. And we’re really happy with it.
How did you come up with the incredibly unique idea of making shadows act almost like physical objects?
That was all Evan’s idea. He wanted to do something completely new, something that had never been done before, and he looked at games like Portal and Braid that took something ordinary about the world and tweaked it. When you change a rule of nature, you get all sorts of interesting ramifications of that change. Then you can follow the butterfly effect of that change and how it affects problem-solving and other aspects of the world. The idea of shadows being solid objects came to him as a random concept, but as we started to explore the idea through this thought process, we started to realize the potential it had for a puzzle game.
Now for some geeky questions. What programming language and or software did you use in the making of Shadowscrapers?
We created Shadowscrapers using Unity 5.5 and the C# language. We also used Maya, GitHub, and a ton of the Adobe Creative Suite.
Ok, here is a difficult question. What was the hardest problem you needed to overcome when developing Shadowscrapers?
From a technical standpoint, it was definitely the character movement. Once we decided to go mobile we knew that we had to make the controls as simple for the player as possible, and that meant that we had to make it so that Lyt could move wherever the player tapped. Developing the initial tap-to-move system only took a couple of weeks, but making it feel good and work right took months. We were constantly having to figure out why the movement was broken on new levels, why we couldn’t move across shadows, etc. We watched as players got frustrated trying to move onto the buttons because they’d keep missing the tap by half a centimeter. I think the system we ended up with in the end works really well, but it took us a long time to get there.
Besides that, crashing, lag, and inconsistencies across devices are definitely problems we faced, but with a game as visually appealing as this one you kind of expect that on mobile devices.
Last question. Where do you get your inspiration or ideas from?
I’d say our ideas come from two main places. The first one is trying new ideas and seeing what sticks. Oftentimes we’d want to test something or throw an idea at the wall and so we’d prototype it really quick. And then we’d play with it, and maybe we’d discover that it was just too buggy and didn’t add much, so we’d cut it. But sometimes we’d say “this is really cool”. More often we’d say “this original idea we had doesn’t work, but this other thing that came up in the prototyping is really cool” and so we’d run with that. Oftentimes the team would argue for days about something before somebody would finally mock something up and we’d say “oh, now I see it.”
The second source of our inspiration is the games we already love. Our industry has so many examples of masterpieces that are universally loved, and I think it’s really insightful to take a good, analytical look at those and figure out what they did right. Figure out what people love about games like Portal and Monument Valley, or what the defining characteristics are of the mobile game market or the puzzle genre. Careful research and introspection can often yield breakthroughs in the design process.
A few words to Shadowscrapers fans on Edamame Reviews.
As far as Shadowscrapers goes, we’re not quite done yet. We’ve got a few more Kickstarter rewards to fulfill and some unfinished levels we want to work on. We’re hoping to release a free DLC update sometime this summer so people can play even more Shadowscrapers. We’re a finalist at the TERMINUS Conference in Atlanta at the end of June, so we’ll be attending that and showing off the game to people there.
After that though, our team is looking for our next project. We’ve all graduated from college and most of us are hoping to continue making video games and learning from veterans by getting hired! So if you know any open positions in video games and you like Shadowscrapers, be sure to recommend us.
Lastly a few words on how you feel about Edamame Reviews and our service.
I have a lot of respect for any group that’s trying to give publicity and attention to niche markets or indie creators. I’ve worked in journalism and game reviewing myself, and I know that while it’s almost always really fun, there’s a lot of struggle to make it work in today’s market. But you’re doing a good service both to the game creators and your audience, so stick with it!
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