Feltopia | Interview | PAX West 2024

Intro what's up everybody L from hypocritic here on the show floor at paxwest 2024 we are here with Andrea and Andy from woly games to talk about fotopia thank you so much for taking some time out this afternoon yeah thanks for checking out the game so for those who don't know tell us about photopia photopia is a cozy take on the arcade Sid scroller it is completely made out of felt and it's animated in stop motion which I can't wait to dig into a little more because it is an incredibly unique and very striking art style and maybe let's start there so stop motion tell us a little Stop-motion art style bit about the process of first of all how you decided upon that art style in the first place that production style to bring it to life in the game and what it kind of looks like behind the scenes putting the graphics together sure yeah well I am a felt animator I work in stop motion I mostly create online social media so it was a very natural decision for me to want to make a game using this medium and you know it's the process of making puppets with wool and animating them frame by frame and then removing the background and then Andy the lead developer will put it into the game yeah um we uh took about I don't know a few months to concept the game out kind of we started thinking maybe we should make a 3D game um and turned out that was pretty difficult to get the wool to look right and one of our uh guiding uh guiding principles for the game is to make it look really fluffy um so we decided on the 2D sidescroller uh um concept because you can make a 2d game look pretty good with the uh with the wool so we're started there and it it does look stunning in motion it truly does a little bit of a Story and narrative story and a little bit of a narrative in the world that you built could you tell uh viewers a little bit more about what the game is about and and what they can expect in terms of a narrative sure yeah we wanted it to be very story driven so we came up with a character named Sky Rider who is a magician who lives up in the clouds um in a civilization that lives in the sky and they ride on a pegasus named cumulus and the land has been infected by a smog spirit it's sort of an environmental story and so you fly around the world as sky and you use Rainbow Magic to heal the creatures and the land and it's it's wonderful again in motion now when you start to put some Creating the game experience of the gameplay mechanics on top of that again a sid scrolling shooter but with this very Lush art style on top of it how do you sort of start to merge some of those elements together taking some of the narrative elements making them blend with some of the gameplay mechanics with your sheep and sort of going into a defensive mode which you see in the demo how do some of those elements blend together for you yeah so uh me being a you know video game developer uh you know I've played a lot of shooter games and things like that Andrea comes from a very cozy uh beautiful friendly art style and so so it was kind of like the perfect storm when we got together uh because it was we can't just make a shooter game where things blow up we actually started there and it just felt too violent um Andrea had some like there was some tension there and uh so we started playing around like how do we make the most friendly cute shoot them up ever and uh Andrea has thought of like a transformation instead of Destruction and so everything in the game is uh transforming uh from you know corrupted by the evil smug Spirit back back into its original form so that was a really fun thing to play with sort of that tension of a a shoot them up game and somebody really uh intelligently said uh acute them up so I think that's the style of our game that is that is fantastic and that's got all on all the ads this is the best very adorable uh now in terms of of starting to to have Trial-and-error iteration that iterative process unfold as well where you have you're like you're saying sort of refining some of these mechanics with well we don't want to make it too violent we want to you know go through some of these stages to refine that what does that sort of process look like for you is it very sort of trial and error based are you kind of feeling some of that out as you go how do you find from your perspectives you are refining the concept as you go along yeah it's been a lot of trial and error and just yeah seeing what feels right and you know we really didn't have a road map in front of us when we were making this so uh you know for instance we we determined that Sky Rider is actually a sheep herder so adding the Sheep element and having these cute little sheep following you that you have to protect that was something that we added you know months into our game development that was not part of the original concept but it adds so much cuz then we were like well what what happens when there are all these obstacles coming up from the top and it's like oh you need to gather your sheep together so that sort like a very natural progression for the main mechanics right and I think that that makes a lot of sense now when you see Player reaction players get their hands on this you know again it's a very unique art style it's a very uh striking presentation what has the response been as you sort of brought it to trade shows like Pax West from people getting their hands on and experiencing the concept for the first time uh most people are saying oh that was so cute like stuff like that um which I did yeah I think uh we get some people say it was unexpectedly hard but uh we're working to you know in our next version we're going to make uh difficulty scaling so we're going to have like cozy mode uh so it's you know for the a lower bar a lower barrier to entry and let's let's touch on that briefly so difficulty in in something like this especially where it may seem kind of more approachable or more fuzzy or more cozy on the surface could you talk a little bit about finding that balance maybe and how you're going to you know kind of establish that as you as you kind of go along it's it's a fine line to threat sometimes right we've done a lot of uh tuning to this game uh thanks Andrea she's very uh very uh specific about what she wants to see um I'm an engineer so I just like to get the systems in place and I call it good kind of so it's been nice to have somebody who's like uh you know done film things horror things that are pushed out into the world big time um so that's been really helpful to kind of have that you know like that polish element and the difficulty scaling was a big piece of that uh because you know it's like we're trying to tune it to be perfectly difficult um and I like to see most people it's it's been a good mix of people that can beat it on the first try our our 5-minute demo um and that's been that's been cool to see but they still say it was hard but I beat it which is like maybe that's good yeah and I can I can certainly Echo that it was uh challenging but not too challenging yeah and in Port Townsen when we showed it off to our friends you know there not a lot of gamers in that crowd and so you know people were dying on the tutorial and it's like oh no um and then you know we play the game all the time so it's kind of hard for us to determine how hard it should be cuz we're just like going through it so we are so it seems like you get a lot of good external feedback from people sort of getting their hands on it and incorporating that into it as you go that's great and we want this to be a kidfriendly game so we know it has to be a bar Lower in the difficulty level but for an event like PX where everyone here is this like passionate Gamers I think it has been a pretty good level fantastic let's let's Tools and technologies go under the hood for a little bit if we can talk about maybe some of the tools and technologies that you're using to bring the game in and its unique art style to life yeah so the game engine we're using is Unity um I've been using that for quite a while uh and um so the early on we were trying to figure out how to get the assets into the engine the right way um so we worked on getting like an asset pipeline together of uh image processing um and to get you know the the edges of the the wool to look you know perfect looking very woolly very fibrous very fibrous that was a big deal because like what's the point if it doesn't look like it's wool so we uh we found the right Technologies to uh you know kind of Stack together to uh process the images and then put them into the uh engine um and they come to me now just uh you know a sequence of frames that I can uh animate uh in engine very cool now a little bit on Professional backgrounds informing game creation your backgrounds as well you mentioned uh some animation uh experience and your uh engineering experience bringing your own separate experiences in in professional engagements to life here always has to be sort of interesting and how you can apply the things you know to the things you're trying to do right so can you elaborate a little bit more on on some of the background and and previous work that you've done that brought you to fotopia as a project specifically and what if anything you found interesting or informative about the process of taking what you've done to now what you're working on sure uh so in my previous career and my current career I uh do a lot of felt stop motion on social media under the name Andrea animates I do a lot of like little tiny cooking videos with felt and a lot of fun time lapses and um brand work and so uh yeah I mean I'm always making big sets and animating my puppets in the set and it's always you know very practical and in front of me but this is very different because I'm I'm animating these individual assets just isolated frames and then it all comes together in one beautiful game and it's sort of I find of I think of it as sort of like a collage of my work cuz um it's just I've never quite seen it like that and it's just fun because this is like an interactive version of my work and that I've never experienced that either so it's really gratifying um so I come from a background of software engineering um I started like about 10 years ago working on Game Dev adjacent work uh doing like audio production augmented reality things like that but in a game engine um I I'm a software engineer at a big company now and I do this on the on the side um for that I had a startup uh doing uh augmented reality for live production um so working with Brands like Red Bull and Microsoft and live productions and putting in like explosive effects that are 3D yeah so if players want to learn more How to learn more! about photopia where can they go and what can they do uh we are on Instagram Tik Tok and YouTube and it's at copia uncore game okay and it's um available on Steam to wish list uh yes yes please wish list us on Steam we're hoping to release the game sometime in 2026 okay fantastic Andrew and Andy thank you so much for the time that was fatopia thanks keep it tuned here to hypocritic for more from Pax West all weekend long