Story: An In-Depth Q&A With Melos Han-Tani, the Co-Designer, Composer and Programmer of Even the Ocean
A fake interview/essay/story
Originally posted on Medium
An In-Depth Q&A With Melos Han-Tani, the Co-Designer, Composer and Programmer of Even the Ocean
(Disclaimer: while this interview is fictional, its content is real and accurate to Even the Ocean, though not all words were typed by me. See the bottom for more info.)
Welcome to another Kotako exclusive.
We’re about three months away from the launch of Even the Ocean (wishlist on Steam, now!), which means there’s a whole lot of pressure on Co-Creator Melos Han-Tani.
This summer, Han-Tani and his friend Marina Kittaka will spend their working hours finishing up and polishing Even the Ocean in hopes of getting everything as stable as possible before a possible mid-September release. They’ve still got a ways to go. While most of the design, writing and music is done, coding still needs to be done to connect the game, and there is quite the quantity of environment and NPC art to be finished.
Still, they’re over the hump, so to speak. Han-Tani was smiling when I sat down with him for a wide-ranging interview at Alt-F4 conference in Mundelein, Illinois last week. He asked how we were doing after recent news — we’re fine! — and he shared insights about design, the finer points of energy bars, and dealing with being a small developer. We also talked about what it really means to be a game made by Marina Kittaka and Melos Han-Tani. You can read the whole Q&A below.
Interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Miles Downings: We’re very close to launch… how are you feeling?
Han-Tani: I do feel like it’s in front of us now. The release is coming up soon. We still have much left to do on making the game itself, so until the actual day when we’ve got it out and there’s nothing left to do but wait for the release, I’m not gonna feel that it’s really done until that point.
Downings: I saw you released a new trailer, with some new footage. How was that?
Han-Tani: Well, disappointing, to be honest. You see, we’re trying to push the status quo in some ways with this game. But most press doesn’t seem to care! It’s like, here we are, we have this thing, that we want to get the word out on! But no, instead they just ignore us and cover another pixel art metroidvania or boring shooter. I think in some ways, people really don’t want good games. And it’s like, okay! We’ll pack our bags and like, go to some other industry, fine. I’m half-joking.
Downings: Ha ha, wow, that is a bit cynical.
Han-Tani: Well, it’ll sure make you cynical to see sites that won’t cover Even the Ocean, then cold e-mailing you asking for 25,000 keys for Anodyne, in exchange for no coverage or direct links to Even the Ocean. That’ll make you fucking cynical. To see an industry talking about the woes of GamerGate, then going straight into covering the same games. That’ll make you cynical. Don’t talk to me about being cynical.
(silence)
Downings: Um, uh… so from what I’ve heard, this is a game by a team of Asian-Americans, is that right? Does the game have anything to do with race?
Han-Tani: Right. Marina is Japanese, I’m Taiwanese and Japanese (and Irish). In terms of race politics… there’s some subtle stuff underlying the game. Most characters are people who are not of the color “white”, but there is not a lot of discourse explicitly on race. At least for me, by the time I became more interested in race identity and the like, it was a bit late to fit into this game. Still, there will be traces of that stuff throughout Even the Ocean, naturally.
And you can definitely expect more explicit stuff in our future work.
Downings: How much development is left? What stage are you at now?
Han-Tani: We’re really at the stage where we’re polishing up the final content and adding in some final art, and also the debugging phase is what we’re into now. We’re testing the game a lot ourselves before passing it off to QA volunteers.
Downings: How has the optimization been going? There’s so much going on and there are so many graphical effects that it must be tough to get a stable framerate on consoles.
Han-Tani: Actually, that’s a bit of a misconception! Optimization has been pretty easy. We’ve figured out ways to get a great art style with the most minimal of elements. And we’re not releasing on any consoles. Just Windows and Mac.
Downings: Now that Sony and Microsoft are both announcing new consoles, the Scorpio and the Neo, have you all been working with that stuff at all?
Han-Tani: No, we haven’t started anything… we don’t really have any plans. Maybe I’ll hire someone else to do it. But my priority is a platform where more people can play. Also, like, I have no ability to port things to those platforms.
Downings: That’s pretty funny. Do you think it’s cool? What do you think?
Han-Tani: I’m not particularly excited in terms of specs. I guess it has a lot of potential. But what would we do, add more particles? Even the Ocean doesn’t need more particles. It has exactly as many particles as it needs. Nowadays, game designers, they like, add more polygons or something. But there’s no point in lots of polygons till you have a good game. That’s why we we’re just finishing the art now. We made an amazing game first, and now we’re adding amazing art, so now there’s an, uh, amazing+1 game.
I guess though, for fans who prefer consoles, it’d be really great though if we could have Even the Ocean be something we can play on the current-generation Xbox One and PS4, also give them that choice that when the new, stronger-generation hardware comes out, to have them play at that level as well. I’d really like to be able give them that… I just don’t like it enough to care to port it myself, what with all the bureaucracy and standards.
I think you’ve probably got a 4K TV in your house, haven’t you?
Downings: (laughing) No, I don’t!
Han-Tani: It’d be really great if we could give people the option, so the people who have hardcore 4K TVs, they could play on those.
Just kidding,
the game wouldn’t look any different. Just play it on a laptop. Anyways, for the time now, we should play on the current generation. But if we need to play it on 4k, it’s probably fine. I’d just scale the game or something. Easy-peasy.
Downings: (laughing) Yeah, let’s focus on that.
Han-Tani: (laughing) Let’s all focus on the current generation. Jesus *fucking* Christ.
Schoeder: Have you thought about VR?
Han-Tani: VR? No. Also, it’s a 2D game. What are you getting at.
Downings: 100% right. My mistake. So we weren’t talking about optimization right now — but what happens if you get a month or a few weeks away from release and you find that you can’t get it totally optimized, would you decide to cut things? What would you do then?
Han-Tani: The decision I would have to make would very much vary depending on that situation. Though I can run the game fine at 60 FPS on my low-power mode on my laptop, so it’s looking really positive now to get both of those — the Mac and Windows version — done in the way we want them, so I think we’ll be OK.
One thing we definitely won’t do is change in any great way the game experience we’re providing. I think at the very last resort if we have to change something we may remove some particles. Maybe like a hundred. We have, like, 1,000 particles or something. I have to ask Marina. Anyways, we want to keep that level as much as we can.
Downings: So that airship, I just saw that this morning, it looks incredible.
Han-Tani: Airship? I think you mean energy bar.
Downings: Right, energy bar.
Han-Tani: You can move your energy bar anywhere you’d like, but you need to find an object to interact with. It’s not 100%, at your will, move your energy bar this way, move it that way, but we really wanted within the system we’ve created to give the player the freedom to move their energy bar any way, as freely as they could. There’s a great level of freedom they can get from that, just jumping into lasers or plant pods in the environment.
Downings: Was this developed with [Just Cause developer] Avalanche?
Han-Tani: No! M-a-r-i-n-a-k-i-t-t-a-k-a. Marina Kittaka. Does that sound like Avalanche… ?
Downings: Ha ha, my mistake. I’m not sure where that came from. Must be an Android bug on my phone right here. Have you watched people playing the demo? Have you seen any reactions?
Han-Tani: I’ve had a few friends play it myself. They all seem to like it. Easy to pick up. Interesting interactions. Not a dull moment! There’s no demo though. But somehow, you’ve played one…?
Downings: So I wanted to ask — in the first gauntlet, Fay Rouge, after some basic intro text, you never get any pop-up messages, even when running into new obstacles. I’m wondering: are levels gonna fall along that same style, where it doesn’t tell you what to do and you have to do it go it on your own? Or will there be more hand-holdy, puzzle-like rooms with only one way to get through?
Han-Tani: Really just the freeform style. You’re pretty much free to get through the game’s levels any way you’d like — high light energy to jump high, or high dark energy to run fast — and you’ve got lots of different ways to manipulate that bar. You’re sometimes slightly guided to a certain way to do it but we never waste words with explaining that. Levels are laid out so new objects are easy to learn how to interact with — like water geysers or large lasers you can bounce on— but for the most part, we tend to save the words for where they count.
Like the storyline and dialogue.
The original design for Even the Ocean has rooms that were at times designed to be beaten in certain ways, but this felt too puzzly. My life is a puzzle, why would I make people play more puzzles? Ha ha. Anyways, I hate designing puzzles.
Downings: Can you talk about how the energy bar system has evolved over the years? Can you talk about why you made some of the changes you’ve made?
Han-Tani: Right, so we put out that public demo at Indiecade 2014, right? Then we realized we were literally setting money on fire going to conferences. The energy bar hasn’t really changed since then. However, the level design has. Back then, levels were very tight, cramped. Hard to move around in. Kind of like this cafe we’re in, ha ha!
Levels were more like, a bunch of random shit thrown together. Easier to die. Confusing. We got rid of that garbage. Actually, it’s not garbage, but it’s not really what we decided to go for. That garbage is still in the game, and you can find it, but I won’t tell you how to find it. Also it’s not canon.
We decided to put the focus on the energy bar being something totally up to the player. You could play conservatively. Avoid getting hurt at all. You could play normally, and get hurt when you think the situation calls for it. Or be more risky and go full speed-boy with high dark, or captain moonjump with high light energy.
We kind of did that. Stripped down room ideas to single sentence descriptions. And put them into these power plants for you to enjoy. Each platforming section in the game is a composition of small poems. The poems are platforming rooms, of course.
Downings: Has your mom played the game?
Han-Tani: No. But Marina and I have. We really feel this is the next generation of design for these sort of more traditional games. You’ve got games — alt games — etc. — really pushing the barrier on avant-garde styles, narrative ideas, etc. We love those games. We like making those games, too. Even the Ocean is avant-garde in some ways. But more traditional in others.
That doesn’t stop us from really innovating in the design. We combine platforming with this very approachable energy bar mechanic that makes even the most plain space scream in enjoyment, and then stick that into an emotionally resonant story with fine-tuned, layered ambiences and feelings, and relevant themes to living in our world. Each moment of the game is a cake of Good.
The areas of the game are poems, containing small NPCs which are like their own poems. Except there are no poems. Well, there’s one.
The point is, Even the Ocean is literally like nothing you’ve ever seen. And we really mean it. Marina and I have been called (by myself) the Miyazaki and Hisaishi of game ambiences. We happen to be Japanese, too, but that has nothing to do with it.
There’s this one area, near a river. A small farming village. I almost cried, because of how well everything was working in tandem… yes. Even the Ocean is a game that will make you cry. At least once.
Downings: It feels like you two have been talking about the game a lot and showing a lot of footage, and you even do streaming. It’s really good to see that kind of transparency, but there’s also a worry that there are no more surprises left. Is that something you are concerned about? Are there still going to be surprises for people when they play the game?
Han-Tani: The big prerequisite for that is that, regardless of whether we’ve got surprises left in store, it’s that game experience that’s the important thing. Because what we’ve released has just been points throughout the game, you don’t get the feeling, and you don’t get the same idea of what it actually feels like to play the game, the story experience, context, and the emotional resonance of that. That’s something that people can’t get unless they play the game. Having said that, we are very much working to keep back stuff so that we don’t give people impressions like “I’ve seen it all.”
On the other hand, because it’s been three years, there are so many people who have been waiting for this for a long time. They really want a lot of information about it. There are those people who are just ‘Don’t hold it back, just give me everything, let me know about the game.’ And obviously we want to please those people as well. It’s a very difficult balancing act between people with the way we send information, and obviously I’m doing a lot of experimenting and trying things out and struggling my way through. I think in the end we really have got that balance there, we’ve done the best way possible for that, give both groups what they want.
Downings: At this point it’s become clear that the Alt-F4 2013 trailer, where ETO was first revealed, that was — that was more of an idea than an actual product. But a lot of people are wondering — because it came out that the “Even” part of the game, you won’t actually see it now, people are wondering why you decided to make that change? To remove the “even” part of the game and just make it one game? It used to be “The Ocean” and “Even”. but why is “Even” gone?
Han-Tani: In 2014, when we first sat down to re-plan the project that’s Even the Ocean, we really looked at which elements we need and should use and could do to create that kind of unique gameplay experience that we wouldn’t really get anywhere else. It was a very in-depth discussion about what elements to keep and what to throw away or change. We thought that hinged on having two separate games to go back and forth between. Of course, that seemed to be hard, so we decided to see if we could scrap one part. And it turns out, we could. “Even” was nebulously defined, and “The Ocean” ended up ‘absorbing’ most of the relevant elements of ‘Even’.
So we wanted to show the essential things to get the best story across, which is where we decided on that — to get rid of the Even part of the game. In fact, the whole game now contains the relevant parts of Even. We meant for The Ocean to be abstract, Even to be story driven, but now we have a game with the best elements of both. Even the Ocean sort of ended up having story elements in it, and now is very much story-led.
Downings: I know a lot of fans have been requesting things like the airship and rideable chocobos, and that you guys were able to put in a lot of that stuff. Was there anything that fans requested that you guys weren’t able to put in?
Han-Tani: Er, uh, airships and rideable chocobos. We’d get sued.
Downings: I think people are OK as long as there’s some sort of airship. That’s what’s important.
Han-Tani: Well, there’s no airship. Sorry.
Downings: So there’s a lot of focus on little details in Even the Ocean. Like I noticed in a picture, there’s wind particles everywhere. Do you ever worry that you’re spending too much time on little details and sacrificing framerate, optimization, and bigger-picture stuff?
Han-Tani: We are very much aware of that danger of going too much into detail, so we very much do concentrate on controlling that and working so we don’t fall into that trap. It really is decisions at different points in the game — does this section require that level of detail, does it not need that level of detail? It has to be done on a case by case basis. We really made sure not to make the wrong decisions in each of those individual cases.
Still, there’s no danger of framerate stuff. There is a danger of spending too long over-polishing and perfecting things, though.
Platformers, fundamentally, tend to be very expensive to make, art-wise. I mean, there are easy ways around it, like abstract art, but for the purpose of storytelling we wanted to avoid that. We found something that worked well for us. But I don’t know if we’d do a platformer again. It’s time-consuming. I want to work on something easier! (laughs)
Downings: I don’t want to ask you too many specific questions about the story or anything like that because I want to be surprised, but I do want to ask: what do you think makes Even the Ocean feel like a true Analgesic Productions LLC game?
Han-Tani: (pauses a few seconds) I don’t want to try to dodge the question or anything, but I really feel like depending on players, everyone’s idea of “this is what Even the Ocean is, this is what makes Even the Ocean” really depends on what games they like best, or if they played Anodyne and what they liked about it.
Downings: Sure, sure.
Han-Tani: I do think very much that when the players play ETO, they will quite naturally compare ETO to their favorite games of the past, and say “oh yeah, this is the kind of game I really want, this is what I like.” In a very broad sense, the biggest sense really of what makes Even the Ocean for people — and obviously I really do think it prerequisites on that idea of what everyone different likes — is the idea that this is a cutting-edge game, it’s a beautiful, great-quality, thoughtful and worthwhile game, created by two people who really care about the world, and good storytelling and gameplay, and that’s what makes it Even the Ocean.
I really think people’s impressions and interpretations of what that means can vary. So there’ll be people saying it has an epic story and that’s what makes Even the Ocean, or that cutting-edge top-level level design, that it’s the latest evolution in platformers, the different things they take.
Downings: Well I hope we have a chance to talk after the game comes out so we can see how well you did!
Han-Tani: What I really want to see the most of all is the people who have been waiting three years for this game to buy this game, on the release date even, play it, tell their friends, and then come back and say ‘yeah it was a good thing, I got a lot out of it, it gave me some things to think about, I’m glad I bought that game I’m glad I played Even the Ocean.’ I’ve got my own images of what I think Even the Ocean should be, but that’s the goal I really want to achieve. To be worthwhile for people in their own personal way, or to expand their notions of what platformers are and can accomplish.
Downings: So I have to ask — I know you’ve talked about this a little before, but my readers would kill me if I didn’t ask: is it gonna come to VR? Everyone wants to know.
Han-Tani: (laughing)
No!
Jesus Christ.
Downings: For readers, tell me something that you’ve never told anyone else about Even the Ocean.
Han-Tani: (thinking) You’ve got loads of readers reading it, what can I say? We got an energy bar!
Downings: (laughing) We know that already! I already wrote an article about it.
Han-Tani: Okay, so have you seen the library yet? You can read about the places you visit throughout the game. It’s kind of like a travel guide. (laughing) I’ll be angry at you if you don’t get user comments on that.
Wishlist Even the Ocean now on Steam. Even the Ocean releases this September for Windows and Mac.
Follow @eventheocean on Twitter.
(This article based on an interview by Jason Schreier of Kotaku, on Director Tabata from FFXV. Modified with respect and because somehow I thought it would be interesting.)