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.
