(electronic jazz music)
(typing)
(modem buzzing)
- My name is Samantha Cook.
I work at Artifact 5, which is my studio
that I co-founded a couple years ago.
And we're in Montreal, which is the best city
for game dev, because it's full of
other awesome game developers.
- [Host] Right, loads.
What other companies are based out there?
- Oh, my gosh, who isn't based, some,
off the top of my head, we've got
Clever Endeavor, they made Ultimate Chicken Horse.
Super fun party platformer.
They used to be sitting as far away from me
as you are right now, so I can throw stuff at them.
We've got Kitfox Games, they made Moon Hunters last year.
Who else is around, Double Stallion.
- [Host] So you broke away from
more mainstream game development.
Is that something you've seen a lot of
your peers do over the past couple of years?
- Yeah, I think the Canadian context
has allowed that to happen more and more.
We have the Canada Media Fund.
So you can apply for this, and it's
government money to make games.
And they want you to be innovative.
They also want to make a return on investment,
but if you can say you think you're gonna make some money,
and you're really, really different and cool,
they'll want to fund you, ideally.
And that's really helped people who have
a lot of triple-A experience, 'cause
Montreal's full of, like, Ubisoft, EA,
it's had all these big studios,
so you have people with a lot of experience
who then can take it and run with it
to make their own games in heir own studios.
- [Host] So what did you pitch them?
- (laughs) Well, we've pitched them
a kind of out-of-the-box, surreal exploration game,
which isn't really a genre, but I think it should be.
So it's somewhere between what you might call
a walking simulator and an adventure game,
but adventure is such a broad term.
I feel like Myst, if you look at it these days,
is like a walking simulator puzzle game.
But you would never have called Myst that
back in the 90's, right?
So it's somewhere between psychological exploration
and almost movie storytelling.
At its heart, it's a story about mental health.
The protagonist, or the person you play as,
his name is Tyler, and he has gone through a trauma.
He's in denial about it, and you as the player
are playing as him, and you're going back
through his memories to try to figure out
what the trauma is, what happened to him.
The other main character in the story is his wife, Alina,
and she is this cellist, she is this really driven woman.
They've both moved to Montreal
to pursue her career as a cellist.
You have to kind of go where the work is
when you're in music, right?
Like there's only so many orchestra seats you can get.
So they go to Montreal, they're in this new place,
and she's, everything's going wonderfully.
But then there's an accident, something
goes wrong for her, and she can't play the cello.
And it's about this turn that her mental health takes,
because music is amazing, and it is
an amazing outlet for people.
I know a lot of people who sort of do
manage their mental health health through,
whether it's music or other hobbies.
Having that outlet, both professionally or as a hobby,
just emotionally, is really important.
And when that's taken away from her,
it's both, it's her livelihood,
it's her identity, it's her emotional outlet.
And underlying depression that she had comes up out of that.
So to me, it was really about making a game
that shows an experience of being someone
who loves someone who is depressed,
and is going through this really hard time.
I think that when people think games, they think fun.
Which is fair, and I'm not gonna say
that our game isn't fun, or can't be fun,
because I do think that our game is really interesting.
I think there's a lot of material
to dig your teeth into, or at least I hope so.
That's what we're trying to build,
the idea that you can go into this
and have a really interesting experience
that explores what it is to create an environment,
a game environment that you can walk through
and get a sense of a story without
having to be told through voiceover or text.
'Cause we're actually not using text or voiceover.
We wanna try to explore all of this through imagery, through
music, through art, really, tell this relationship story.
So that is definitely a slightly alternative
approach to making a game, and making
a game about mental health on top of that.
But, yeah, when it comes to making games
about mental health, I think that people
are probably nervous to do it.
Certainly people have.
I know Zoe Quinn has totally, Depression Quest.
So we're not the first people to do it,
and I hope we won't be the last, 'cause I think
people should be making games about this topic,
or these topics in general.
But it's not an easy thing to talk about.
It's not easy to talk about in everyday life,
and then you have to think about how to
show that in ways that are both true to life,
but still engaging in a storytelling perspective.
- [Host] And what you've gone for is this
surrealist world which is like
telling the story in an indirect way.
That must present its own fair share of challenges as well.
- Yes, yes. We like a challenge, though.
We like to call it rendering emotions, what we do.
So we wanna take the world and, if you, the character,
feel like your world is falling apart,
the world will literally fall apart around you.
So it's a way of making the literal metaphorical,
or the metaphorical literal.
In terms of depression, depression is so tough,
because it's not just being sad.
That's not what depression is, necessarily.
Depression is actually this progressive
lack of being able to feel much of anything,
for anything, or at least, in theory.
I think people experience depression
in multiple different ways.
So playing games, if you're depressed,
if you're having a hard time caring about anything,
then a game isn't necessarily going to help you,
but if it gives you something to look forward to,
and it gives you something to focus on that isn't
feeling bad that you can't get out of bed,
and you can play something on your phone or
on your laptop, that's fantastic.
And I don't know that it's even necessarily escapism.
Escapism has a negative connotation.
It implies that we're doing something we shouldn't be,
like we should be being productive instead,
or something like that, but I don't think that's fair.
I think that playing a game can be
just a joy for its own sake, and it doesn't have
to be a, it's not a negative, and
I know you're not saying it is.
- [Host] No, or the idea that, like, you're right.
People say that means being productive.
But they always mean that in the
capitalistic sense of being productive.
- Exactly. - [Host] Creating things, not
taking care of yourself, which is surely also productive.
- Oh my God.
I think playing games can be a great form of self-care.
Whether I'm playing Two Dots, and I'm just
making squares, which is great, or I'm diving
into Civilization, and I'm building something,
or I'm just playing a game about cats.
Whatever it is.
I think they're all really nice, different ways
to dive into something different.
- [Host] Tell me about your guys' work with virtual reality,
then, because that must add a new flavor
to what you're creating there.
- Mmm, yeah. VR is awesome.
I think VR is so cool.
Just being able to put on that headset
and be somewhere else is amazing.
Working with it is hard in terms of the dev stuff,
the technical stuff, getting the frame-rate right,
just all the optimization you have to do.
And then the game is kind of funky
because the mechanic is walking and looking.
So when you're playing the PC version,
you walk up to something, and if you
find the right part of the memory,
the scene'll shift, but it'll happen really smoothly,
and right in front of you, and you'll
look away, and it's a photo on the wall now.
So in VR it's, making that work has been
a really interesting technical challenge.
And some of the transitions really work,
and some of them, they're like, I wasn't so sure about that.
I think we're gonna keep testing that, and see what works.
So some things translate directly from PC to VR.
Other things, maybe we'll tweak 'em a little bit
to make it a more comfortable experience,
or just an experience that isn't
totally mind-bending in a bad way.
We wanna be mind-bending in a good way.
I wanna be the really, the good acid trip, you know?
- [Host] I guess, what are you hoping
that people who play Anamorphine will get out of it?
- I hope that they will come out of it
with a sense of how difficult it is to
be confronted with mental health issues on a daily basis.
And I don't mean that it's impossible.
We just wanna show that depression can take a toll
on the person who's experiencing the depression,
but also the people around them,
and how hard it can be to support the people you love,
but also how you have to support yourself
when you're trying to support the people you love.
You can't make people more empathetic,
but I do, but maybe you can.
Maybe I want people to feel a sense
of empathy for the characters in their game.
And there's only two, so that's probably not too hard.
But I want them to feel for both of the characters,
and for the very different struggles that they both
go through, both intertwined and individually.
I want them to come out and be like, oh, that's really hard.
I feel like sometimes people are like,
oh, you're depressed, well just smile,
get up, and pick yourself up and, like,
oh, go outside, go for a walk, you'll feel better.
It's like, no, no, no.
It's just so much more complicated than that.
And it's tied up with identity, and life
and capitalism, and whatever other factors, but.
- [Host] You guys have really picked
an easy topic for your first indie game.
- I know, right? (laughs)
We should talk about things, and it shouldn't
be like, we're talking about depression.
It's okay to talk about depression.
It's okay to talk about trauma.
We need to do that more.
(electronic jazz music)
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