VGA FIRESIDE Ep. 6 feat. Melos Han-Tani & Marina Kittaka: Interview Highlights
Episode 6 of VGA Fireside interviewed two video game artists, Melos Han-Tani & Marina Kittaka of Analgesic Productions. The duo have worked together on several projects including Anodyne, Anodyne 2: Return to Dust, Even The Ocean, as well as their upcoming game, Sephonie. Melos’ personal work includes All Our Asias and Marina has several games on her itch.io page along with Zonelets.
Below are some highlights from the interview between the two artists and VGA Director of Exhibitions, Chaz Evans. The full video can be watched on YouTube along with a live demo from their most recent project, Sephonie.
How Melos got started
Chaz Evans:There are a lot of people out there watching this program who are interested to get involved with the field of video game making and many different tiers or context. So it's good to hear everyone's story about how they got started. So I'd like to ask each of you, how did you get involved with video game making?
Melos Han-Tani:Let's see, I can go. So me, I played games growing up. And then I did I found like a Cave Story modding program, like before high school started doing some programming.
CE: Do you remember what that game story program was?
MH: I don't remember what- it was like some kind of edited level editor someone did to reverse engineer the game and you could like make really kind of janky levels. And then throughout high school, just some programming classes, Visual Basic in Java. And then in college one summer I was just very bored and joined the open source like game engine forum and that was the beginning
How Marina got started
CE: Terrific. So that brings us to Marina, would you mind also sharing your story? We could ratchet back to the beginning. Where do you feel? It is, like as you start to be working as a video game artist?
Marina Kittaka: Sure. Um, so I usually frame it as when I was young, I played video games and my older brother and I, like, you know, we get a new video game every once in a while. But we're like, oh, we really want to play more games. So when we got the internet, we were like searching the internet for free games to play. And a lot of the time where that led us was like game developer communities making games and those were the ones that were just like free things that you could find and download. And so the two major ones for me growing up were the early Game Maker scene. Game Maker, games.com, I would always be checking. And like Mark Overmars' site who was the original creator of Game Maker. And then the other one was the OHRRPGCE, which is a RPG Maker that was like originally like DOS based and had a pretty, I think it's a small, but fairly vibrant community of people. Making- a lot of them were really like, sort of weird or joke games. But definitely like a lot of energy. And a lot of people who really wanted to make grand projects.
On their partnership and roles for games currently
CE: Okay, so here, you've met Anodyne is already off and running at that point, were some pretty clear roles formed there from the beginning?
MH: Yeah.
MK: Oh, by the way, yeah, the way I kind of started was, was that Melos was just looking for a artist for the pixel art. And so I feel like it kind of morphed as we started having conversations about the game generally. And just me trying to ask like, about what was going on with the decisions in order to like, do the art well, but because I had been interested in game design my whole life, I kind of inevitably had opinions and kind of started asking more questions and giving more suggestions. And Melos always seemed to be really receptive to that and really open to making it more of like, a collaboration. And so it kind of like shifted as we started talking to be more of like a even split, because I ended up suggesting, like, oh, why don't we add more like dialogue and characters that you talk to? And then I did a lot of the writing for that. So yeah, it kind of morphed as we've worked on it to be the kind of roles that we roughly continue to have, although we mix things up somewhat.
CE: Do you have a way of describing what those roles are in the present day, or is it a fluid, melange of creative exchange?
MH: I would say they're pretty well. Coding and music are always the stuff I do, Marina always does the art, and usually the writing but for our recent game Sephonie I lead the writing. There is- So usually with writing, there's like a lead person, and then the other person will like write some other things, but they're not usually as core to the narrative experience. So like Anodyne 2, Anodyne and Even the Ocean were led by Marina. But then Sephonie was led by me. And then for the game and level design, that's always a really, like, very conversational thing. So it's kind of like equally us although, yeah, no, it's, it's like, I think it tends to be that I will like kind of rough out the levels, with, like, debug art or something based on my and Marina's like paper ideas. Um, and then Marina usually goes and polishes that and like, you know, makes it a little bit more interesting. Or gives feedback, although, Even the Ocean Yeah, it depends. It changes a lot from game to game, but it's a pretty, like collaborative process.
Marina explains the challenges of movement design in 3D platformers while showing gameplay from Sephonie
MK: Yeah. And then we also have this dash that kind of teleports you forward in the air a little. And if you do that into a wall, then you get like this sort of bouncing vaults where you're able to go higher. And we thought, I think this is like a really cool move, because the thing with 3D platformers is that depth perception is really tricky in 3D games. And so a lot of 3D platformers have to kind of contend with that in some sense. And one of the most straightforward ways of doing that is with like a double jump move. Because you're like, Oh, you have to like under correct or overcorrect because you're trying to figure out what the depth keys are. And that definitely like works. It functions as like a game design. But it does kind of like flatten the space where you almost have too much control. And so the way that your approach most challenges ends up being like kind of the same. And then another way of dealing with it is having like a ledge grab where Oh, I didn't jump far enough, but I'm grabbing onto the ledge so I'll be okay. I'll climb up from the ledge. And so this is kind of like a ledge grab but It's, it allows kind of a wider range of things to happen, where it's not like, you're totally safe, you know, you still have to, like, make decisions about when to do the wall vault, and you're still in control of your movement after that. And so I think it's a really interesting set of moves for a 3D platformer.
Melos on his process of creating Sephonie
MH: When I was talking about prototyping this system, you know, it had like, kind of like moves and HP and damage and stuff planned. And, you know, a lot of planning and not a lot of coding with that. And I feel like, I learned that, you know, there's a certain point you can feel where you should just try to design a few levels, and then use that as, like data without, and, you know, don't worry too much about setting up systems, because you're probably not even gonna need those systems that much, you know, like, there's only like, what 30 of these links in the game. And, you know, a whole system of like damage or resistances, or something won't really, because you're in a small team, you won't really have- well the level design might not be able to explore that in an interesting way, so it's usually okay to go more minimal.
CE: Yeah. And at the same time, if that’s a sort of extra minutiae on this feature, is the point made more somehow or was the point already made without that extra system on top? You know what I mean?
MH: I think it's kind of like paring down into figuring out what the point of it is. Because early on, Marina had an idea of placing shapes, and there are a lot of like, kind of strict rules about how to place them. And that led until, like a design space, we were trying to apply, like damage and moves. But eventually, that- the narrative side of the game, thinking about like, Oh, this linking is more about, like a mutual connection between the characters and the island, that led to kind of “Okay, well, we can strip away these like strict rules and these like weird RPG numbers and just focus on like, can the level design of these linking levels create an interesting kind of like tension between the player and the level itself?” So like, on the level I just played, you have to place pieces on certain regions of the grid to open up another region of the grid, which you can use to kind of link faster. In that way, like every linking level kind of has a certain personality to it. In the sense that like, maybe a section of a Mario level might have kind of a certain design idea to it. Yeah, so I started kind of complex and then pared down into something that's very interesting and quick to understand. And then what's happening now is kind of the narrative aspect is explaining what's happening with the linking. So one of the early twists, I guess, close your ears, if you don't want to hear, early on is that there's kind of a supernatural presence to the entire cave system.
Do you usually have the whole game thought out before development or does the development evolve over time?
MH: Yeah, I would say we don't really- yeah.
MK:Well, yeah, we do. We do have a lot of conversations about like kind of what could happen. And then, as we start with the things that we're more sure about, the sort of things we're less sure about. One will become more clearly the way to go than another or certain things. Sometimes we'll just get tired of working and be like, what should we cut? And then we kind of like, figure out what the most vital things are and cut the things that are less vital or, but certainly things change. or making them
MH: Yeah, like, I guess for this game, the plot, so I had an initial like plot after we discussed a bit, and then we kind of figured out the Onyx linking like a base, like a working prototype of it. And then we worked on the movement system of it. And then from when those two things were in place, the Onyx linking and the movement system, that's enough to build a game without words on its own, right? So from there, the plot went, or I can't remember now, but I know at some point, um, Marina helped revise the entire plot. And then I wrote a draft and then Marina helped revise that draft. But I think that final revision was after linking and stuff was in so I feel like there's just some decisions that are hard to make before you have kind of a sense of what the game is like to play.
