VGA Fireside Ep. 11 feat. Gregorios Kythreotis: Interview Highlights
VGA Gallery invited Gregorios Kythreotis to speak at the first VGA FIRESIDE of 2022! Gregorios is half of the two-person game development studio Shedworks, where he’s worked as Creative Director on many cross-disciplinary projects, from websites and apps to exhibitions and music videos. Their most recent endeavor is the desert exploration game Sable, available now on Steam.
Below are some of the highlights from Chaz Evans’ conversation with Gregorios, edited for clarity and brevity. The full interview can be found on VGA Gallery’s YouTube and Twitch channels, where you can see gameplay from Sable and learn more about Shedworks.
On how Gregorios began his video game making journey & the origin of Shedworks
Gregorios Kythreotis: I studied architecture at University. When I was studying, a family friend of ours was visiting, and he was an architect, Mark, and I showed him my work. And he said to me, you know, "Oh, that's really interesting, but it's not super architectural. What do you want to do after you graduate?" And I was like, well, actually, I would love to make video games. But I didn't really have a clear path as to how that would happen. And he said, "Well, Daniel, you know, a family friend of mine, he's really interested in making games too, you guys should meet up and have a chat.”
Daniel and I, we hadn't spoken for about 10 years at that point. So we went to the pub, this was maybe six months before graduation and we were chatting. He was teaching himself how to program; he was studying comparative literature. And we knew we weren't going to get internships even or jobs or anything in the industry. So we said, why don't we just start our own internship, start our own company? We watched Indie Game: The Movie—it's easy!
We thought it'd be a good chance to just try some stuff out and see what we can learn and see if we can release something great. And at the time, I was working in my parents' shed, so we kind of converted it into more of a studio. And that's how we started really, and we kind of continued from there.
For the first three years, we did a couple of games. But we also did some, like web design stuff. We did contract projects for apps and stuff. So a lot of the time that might be one of us—mostly Daniel actually—doing the programming. Occasionally I would come in and so I do the UI design or whatever, or art working.
And then we had our own games that we were kind of working on in tandem. Those tended to be smaller mobile projects. And we were just kind of learning the trade. Trying to release games, releasing them and then screaming into the void where nobody was listening for a while. After three or four years, it kind of built up a little bit. We were getting semi regular contract work, and we decided to do a game that played to our strengths, which we hadn't done up to this point. We decided to do a game with a building in it! That's where we started to think about Sable and work on Sable from there, really. And that's been it since – Sable, Sable, Sable.
On how his architectural background has shaped his work at Shedworks
Chaz Evans: Do you think that background in those other disciplines informed the way you did the non-explicitly game projects? Like, like apps and websites?
GK: I'd say, in terms of my process, my architectural process, architectural design process, is totally built into a lot of what I do. I don't know how different that is to what other level designers are, but I do what I learned at architecture school. In terms of working on other projects, it gave me a technical foundation and design generally on a software basis: Photoshop, AutoCAD, 3D software, what have you.
I also studied art, on what you call a foundation level in the UK, so it's just one year of art. And then I switched over to architecture. And the approach was such a big kind of mentality shift, from this art approach to architecture. In the beginning, I was trying to treat architecture like art, and it wasn't working at all, since it's so much more functional problem solving—plane-based, plane-oriented, sight-oriented. That's definitely influenced my personal approach in games. And I think it's influenced how I think about design problems, and how we're going to approach them for sure.
On ritual architecture in Sable
GK: The architecture here, I looked a lot at just like ritual architecture in general. And there's a really fantastic book called “Ritual Architecture,” [Architecture and Ritual: How Buildings Shape Society by Peter Blundell Jones]. It has some really amazing diagrammatic-like sequencing, and thinking a lot about ritual in video games in general. Video games are such a ritualistic process—playing video games in general. But also [the book is] trying to express the kind of historical culture of the people here, and imply different moments in time. So this temple, for example, has inside it these inlets, and the idea with this canyon is that it was once filled with water and it's an old dam in the corner. Actually, boats would come up and go into the temple itself. But now because it's drained, you're unable to access it in the same way. So it changes the context of what the temple itself is and how people use it.
On the research done for world building influences for Sable
GK: I went to GDC 2019. Myself and the sound designer, we went on a kind of road trip through the desert out to Vegas, and then south down not quite to Phoenix. We went to this place called Arcosanti, which is a kind of experimental desert-living arcology. We did research on how you might live in the desert architecturally.
Also, I went to Marrakech in Morocco and looked at architecture there. Even growing up—I’m half Cypriot and it’s a very hot country. It's not quite desert, but it's in the Middle East—the island, just off the coast of the Middle East, Mediterranean, and the Levant. Some of the villages—the refugee villages where I go to see my great-grandma—was just indelibly in the back of my head, having been to visit those places. Those things are all tied in [to Sable}.
We tried to think of it in three layers. We have the ships, which were like the progenitor architecture; the Sci-Fi future-ships. But now, that's inverted in the past—the kind of middle term, which is this more stone-based local material architecture that looks more like traditional ruins that you might get. And the stuff that was built after the ships had arrived. Then you have the more modern nomadic tents and stuff.
We try to think of them in these three things, period…. But also work out how they overlap and overlay and interact with one another. That was really important. In terms of my own niche within architecture study, I was thinking a lot about video games. I guess a lot of what that allowed us to do was just explore what we wanted.
The cool thing was that the project that I was looking at was a steel manufacturing thing. I created a pseudo-religion around the manufacturing of steel, and my building had lava that would flow down through it when they were manufacturing something. It was a bit ridiculous and over the top. I wouldn't say I had a really particular specialism but I guess in that sense, it's quite a like, sci fi-y worldbuilding project.
I think worldbuilding felt like my specialism. Telling stories through architecture is something I've always wanted to do.
On the inspirations for the style for Sable, and the pros and cons of designing a 2D style open world
CE: The way the environment and the figures look drawn to me and others—the game bears a striking resemblance to the legendary comic and concept artist Moebius. But also as far as tone and environment. There's a lot of connection to the fields of Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. I want to give you the opportunity to talk about your relationship with those sort of non-video game figures—some figures that are further back in history, and how you arrived at the idea to incorporate them into a video game.
GK: The work of Moebius was definitely a big inspiration of ours, and Ghibli as well. I think Moebius and his work is super inspirational. The thing that I really admire more than the technical aspect, like actual drawing drawings, is the world building. [There’s] the sense that there's more to the image than what's on the page. I think that sort of stuff is just so strong in his work, but then I think tonally in terms of the warmth, the animation, the storytelling, Ghibli really informed where we wanted to go.
We look a lot at graphic novels, and we grew up with animation, anime, cartoons, stuff like that. On a purely technical level, that made it have lower poly, lower detail, because we were such a small team. Doing something hyper-realistic, especially with characters…we can't compete on that level with what's going on elsewhere. So the easiest solution to that is: don't compete. That's a slightly convenient way to look at it, but I would just say, I really enjoy working on this sort of style.
The other thing about it is a lot’s down to the execution, particularly the shader work and the line work and stuff. Daniel did a lot of that work. In terms of the actual technical side, I think our lines are very stable in a way that I think is hard to achieve. We were really committed to this style, to the to the extent where we do things like we limit the frame animation on the characters run cycle, in order to make it look two dimensional. We kept all the lighting really flat. You know, these are things that cause a lot of problems when you're making open-world 3D game. But we chose to try and solve the problems, rather than just shy away from them. Things like reading depth, judging platforming—we have to do a lot to try and solve for it.
It's just also the tone of those works… a lot of the texture work for example, is hand drawn by me on an iPad Pro, and then taken into the game. We tried to not overwork those and not make things too perfect. We try to make it look like it was made by hand, and we really wanted to give the impression of there being a creative thumbprint on all of this.
How much do you think one's region or physical location and culture informs the video game work that they do?
GK: It's everything. In a way it permeates everything. Even if you're not doing it based on a real place, and you're trying to disconnect from what is local to you, it’s connecting from what is local to you. It's always relative to what is local. You get inspired by things that are around you, like some of the architectural detailing, like in the opening temple are just things that I saw on a walk by new office or whatever. There are these really old arches, and they have a particular shape or geometry, and I'm like, Oh, I'm gonna take that and bring it into the game. Or like I was mentioning, going to the refugee villages in Cyprus when I was growing up, and how the feeling that higgledy-piggledy kind of elements and overlapping…the treatment of architecture in my great grandma’s house; the courtyard would open up and it had this vine structure over it. Grapes just hanging down from the ceiling—that was this feeling of inside and outside blending together. That was the best sort of thing. You don't get that in London, I'm sorry, you just don't. That's the sort of thing that I will always think about and bring to these things.
