Five Questions From Students: Tearaway Part 1

With the release of Tearaway, some of the students in my class who choose to pick it up.  After playing it, I reached out to the games creative lead, Rex Crowle, to see if he would be willing to answer some questions from a few of my fifth graders. Here are the first five questions from their interview.

A huge thanks to Rex for taking the time to answer these questions. Enjoy.  

R's questions

1. Does Tearaway use the same software as Little Big Planet?

No, it uses different software - we needed to create different software because this time we wanted to build a 3D world to explore, instead of the 2D world of LittleBigPlanet which was more like a race from left to right. We also had to put a lot of effort into simulating the paper, so it looked and reacted like paper, and thats not something our LittleBigPlanet software could do. 

But while making a game we use lots of software as well that is more common like Photoshop to make concept-art, diagrams and storyboards on how the game will look and work.

2. Was Tearaway difficult to create?

It was! It was very hard to make the world react and move like paper, and because games don't normally do that we had to invent how to make it happen, which took lots of experimenting and hard-work!

3. Is Tearaway based off of anything?

It's mainly based on just remembering how creative it was to play with paper at school instead of just using it for emails in a office (we're all very old now ;). Some of the influences also come from some of the old traditions of England, or other areas of the world. I originally came from a place called Cornwall, which has a lot of strange traditions, and lots of Valleyfold are based on those. Tearaways music by Kenny and Brian is influenced from folk music, and music from Scotland and South America. 

4. Who were the people (characters in the game) that talked to Iota along the way?

In Valleyfold they are called Mummers - they are based on an old tradition of people dressing up in disguise and putting on little plays, that they took from door-to-door. I really liked the way costumes for those events where created, and felt they would work well in paper. Stefan, who made them in the game, and Lluis and Mike, who animated them, made them come to life perfectly. Each one represents a different part of the natural world - some are like trees, some are like the fruit on trees, and some are like the animals that like eating fruit. 

In Sogport the characters are Mermen and Mermadames - they are fish that have come to live on the land, using the special yellow trousers they make to allow them to walk around. Half of the characters on Sogport are very traditional, they still stay by the sea in the harbour, and then the other half are more experimental and have decided to explore the world, and even outer space. They are the ones have have built the laboratory to study whats outside of the island. I thought it would be interesting to have some characters that like traditional things and some that like modern things - because lots of the story behind the game is about old things meeting new things. 

5. Did the prototypes look totally different from the released versions?

Yes, it started out with an isometric camera (a style that doesn't use perspective to make things get smaller as they get further away, unlike the real world) and it was more about exploring dungeons. At that point there wasn't the character of the Messenger (iota or atoi) it was just your finger, tearing into the world, with a little face drawn on it. I've attached a photo of how that looks, as its strange to describe! But as we experimented we found it was better to use your fingers for big dramatic moments, and then have a paper character inside the game, who you would control with the joystick.