![]() ![]() The Legend of Zelda series has also been a huge inspiration. We listened a lot to Matti Bye and Mattias Olsson's album "Elephant & Castle" at the start of the project so that has been a great influence. I've gone through a lot of 19th century photographs of the south of Sweden too, and we even took a road trip on the countryside to really capture the feel of the setting. Nature has been a big inspiration this time. ![]() To me, it's much more about capturing a feel than finding a specific art style. I think it's difficult to separate art from other parts of the game. What influences inspired the art style specifically? I think a big part of what we do is to surprise, and if we continue to make the same type of games we would soon be irrelevant, so it's very important for us to constantly broaden what we are about, what we can do to constantly keep surprising people. I don't think doing something dark was the challenge in itself for us, but rather to make something with a different tone and still make it feel Simogo. I think creators, like all human beings, have different sides, and it's natural that those sides show in their creations. Did you intentionally want to challenge yourself to do something darker? Tonally the game seems like a departure from the cute look and style people have come to anticipate from Simogo. By midnight, one would walk to the cemetery - of course, this would mean meeting a lot of the creatures from the rural myths on the way. It involved a lot different preparations, and there are loads of variations when you start to read up on it, but most of them include not eating and locking yourself in a dark room for a longer period of time on certain nights, such as New Year's Eve. ![]() Year walking was an ancient Swedish tradition, with the purpose being to foresee the year to come. I think our collaborators Daniel Olsen (music), Theodor Almsten (research) and Jonas Tarestad (story) have been a contributing factor to that. Over the time, it's evolved to something that isn't horror - instead, we've found what I believe is a very unique atmosphere. The script and the tradition itself had a very game-like structure. Nothing came out of it, but in 2012 after having finished Beat Sneak Bandit, I read a short film script by my friend Jonas Tarestad, which was about this strange tradition called year walking. At the same time in mid-2011, we also started to discuss how to make a first person game in 2D on touchscreens, and came up with a rough concept. How did you come up with the game's concept? It seems closely tied to Swedish heritage: What is a Year Walk, exactly?Īfter finishing Bumpy Road, we had talked quite a bit about how powerful horror can be, and how that could be something we should explore. This project has been a bit more analogue, though, as we've been doing a lot of research and loads of communicating with the people that have been helping us out on the project, so among the more unusual tools: rental cars, camera, GPS and maps.īut the most important tools have, as always, been pen and paper. The digital tools include Unity, Maya, Photoshop, Madtracker and Audacity. Prior to that, we worked for a couple of years with downloadable console games at another company here in Malmo. We have been making games as Simogo since August 2010. What background do you have making games? Simogo's waged a secretive campaign of teasers and hints for passionate fan communities to decode, explaining on its blog that it intends to recapture the sense of mystery from days when players didn't know every last detail about a game before it launched.īut as part of our ongoing Road to the IGF series of interviews with nominees, we tried our hand at getting Simogo to tell us a little bit about Year Walk and its inspirations, and spoke to co-founder Simon Flesser (the "Simo" part of the studio name his fellow founder is Magnus 'Gordon' Gardeback). Very little's yet publicly known about the game itself, aside from the fact that the studio's described it as a first-person adventure that focuses on unique events and fluid movement. Year Walk has a haunted look, a palette heavy on the play of light and shadow. Year Walk, nominated in this year's Visual Art category, is something of a departure from the adorable action puzzles we've come to expect from the Swedish developer. The studio's portfolio - Kosmo Spin, Bumpy Road and Beat Sneak Bandit - is unified by a handmade-texture look and a touchable charm. Simogo, winner of last year's Best Mobile Game at the Independent Games Festival with Beat Sneak Bandit, is at it again with its latest game, Year Walk. ![]()
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