The designer is a powerful influence of what happens between the player who touches your interface and interacts with your game. We are not here to force and bully you to do anything. “We want to make whomever is experiencing the feel they are in control. “The best design is a nudge, rather than a leash,” he says. The interactivity of a game, however, creates a unique challenge for designers not to weigh too heavily upon the frame - to guide, but not to restrict. “That pulse is what touches us emotionally.” “For design and for entertainment, it is all about that change of acceleration,” Chen says. As with any artistic medium, the creator has the power to help amplify feelings and guide people through a story - its rises and falls, surges and sudden stops. It’s this relationship between player and creator that Chen finds fascinating about games. “We are actually making changes because the habit of how people use their phone is changing.” But he also acknowledges the beauty in creating a game on a living platform. “This is the first time I’ve made a game where the control scheme was not finite,” Chen says. After Sky’s initial release and feedback from players, the team also added a two-hand mode to the game for those who wanted more of a console-like feel. That wasn’t the last of the controller changes, however. For extra guidance, Chen and team even provided subtle interface rings in each corner, which expand and contract to indicate range and speed control. They were constantly refining the game’s look and feel, including developing a custom Metal engine to render Sky’s ethereal scenes, all while making sure the game would perform well and preserve battery life on device.Īfter several years of experimentation - including, at one point, a fully-functional flight simulator - the team landed on a simple set of familiar controls designed to appeal to everyone. But to get there, the team had to iterate over multiple years of hardware and software updates. “Today, the iPhone is actually more powerful than the PlayStation that we developed for in the past,” Chen says, and Sky runs beautifully on both it and iPad. When the team began working on Sky in 2012, they were limited by the mobile hardware and screen sizes of that era - a far cry from the powerful Playstation infrastructure supporting their previous titles. The transition from console to iPhone and iPad was a challenge for the entire studio. In contrast, almost everyone owns a mobile device - it was the perfect platform for a multiplayer game that was open to all. Consoles are expensive, and families generally only have a single piece of hardware and a few controllers within their household. “When we design games, we should really think about accessibility and inclusion, to allow the game to be enjoyed by everyone,” he says. “It tries to evoke the bright side of humanity over the dark or the gray in an online game,” Chen says.Ĭhen was drawn to mobile gaming for Sky in part because of the approachability of iPhone and iPad. While solo play is possible, Sky shines when fellow players work together. Players fly across cloudy dreamlike spaces, solving puzzles cooperatively and socializing within an enchanting world. In Sky, players begin as a child of light, seeking fallen stars - the ancestral spirits of the realms. “It’s about connecting people and nudging them to do good for each other.” “At its core, Sky is a game about compassion and generosity,” Chen, the game’s creative director, says. Jenova Chen, creative director of Sky: Children of the Light We want to be the ultimate advocate for the human who plays our games. Though the artwork, controls, and story are new, the game’s spirit remains aligned with its predecessors: Make interactive art, designed for everyone. Their fourth game, Sky: Children of the Light, is the first created exclusively for iPhone and iPad. The studio’s first six years in operation resulted in Flow, Flower, and Journey, three award-winning games for Sony’s Playstation console. "But we are really now entering a new era… Everybody plays games.” “For the first 30 to 40 years, games were more designed for the core audience, the enthusiasts who embrace the new things,” Chen says.
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