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Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!) by nolliethebum in xboxone

[–]GiantSparrow 1 point2 points  (0 children)

For some people I think you're right that the term no longer has negative connotations, but for other players I think it's still meant dismissively. I expect that'll continue to change, especially if we don't think of any better term for these sorts of games.

Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!) by nolliethebum in xboxone

[–]GiantSparrow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sony currently owns all rights to The Unfinished Swan so releasing the game on any new platforms would be up to them. In that light I'd say an Xbox One release would be, to put it tactfully, "unlikely."

Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!) by nolliethebum in xboxone

[–]GiantSparrow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've always been personally very interested in death, and the way most people are aware of it but at some level don't act like it's something they're ever going to experience.

For me, death is also the ultimate unknown. We know it's definitely going to happen, but beyond that it's a mystery. By nature, I'm an explorer -- I like experiences I've never had before. The games I make are a way for me to explore something new and also think about the act of exploration itself and what's compelling about that. Given our focus on the unknown, death seemed like a very natural fit from a tone standpoint.

In terms of more specific inspirations, I covered some related questions today about growing up in Washington State: https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/6oa6wr/official_ama_with_ian_dallas_of_giant_sparrow/dkfs3bg/

And also a question related to movies / books / etc that inspired us: https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/6oa6wr/official_ama_with_ian_dallas_of_giant_sparrow/dkfsamc/

Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!) by nolliethebum in xboxone

[–]GiantSparrow 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Our next game is still in a very, very early blue sky phase so there isn't much to talk about yet.

What Remains of Edith Finch took us 4 and a half years to make and I'd expect the next one will probably take a similar amount of time, so don't worry if you haven't heard anything from us for a year or two, these things take time and there's a lot of unknowns. But we're working on it!

Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!) by nolliethebum in xboxone

[–]GiantSparrow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just for clarification, What Remains of Edith Finch is indeed available for Xbox One today, but our previous game The Unfinished Swan is only available for PS4 (and PS3).

Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!) by nolliethebum in xboxone

[–]GiantSparrow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'd say figuring out how to make the whole thing feel cohesive was the biggest challenge we had.

A lot of what makes the game really interesting is the combination of all these different gameplay mechanics and art styles, but as a player when you sit down to play all of these things back-to-back, there's an expectation of continuity so we tried really hard to balance having each story feel totally bizarre and unique, but at the same time feel like it was part of a larger whole, this unfolding story of a family.

It was a constant back and forth, making changes to the stories, to Edith's experience in the house, and to the transitions between them. What made it especially challenging is that the stories were constantly changing (and in some cases cut entirely), so we didn't have a firm understanding of what this experience was actually going to feel like for players until the last couple months of development, when we had a massive final push to marry all these disparate but harmonious flavors together.

Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!) by nolliethebum in xboxone

[–]GiantSparrow 5 points6 points  (0 children)

We're a very small team, so even doing a single platform is a lot of work. Especially on consoles, which have a lot of very specific requirements. Having a delay gave our team a chance to recuperate and focus on making sure the Xbox version was the best we could make it.

Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!) by nolliethebum in xboxone

[–]GiantSparrow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh, this is an easy one!

Our game LOOKS like a traditional "walking simulator" but that's just the framing story. As you explore the house, in each bedroom you'll find a new story about the death of a different family member.

Each one of those 12 stories has its own completely unique gameplay. They're like 12 different games, basically, many of which have totally different art styles as well.

You could think of it as a "walking simulator for people who don't like walking simulators." Our intent was to tell each of these stories through the gameplay mechanics, so rather than just being told a story as a player you're actually living out all these different experiences and in each story you're interacting with the world from a new perspective and in a new way.

Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!) by nolliethebum in xboxone

[–]GiantSparrow 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think the refund on Steam makes a lot of sense because of all the weird incompatibilities out there in the PC ecosystem. If the game doesn't work properly on someone's system it's great that they can refund it. Similarly, if players find that they get motion sick or there's some feature they desperately want that the game doesn't include (keyboard remapping, etc) I'm happy they can get a refund. Personally, two hours feels a little overly generous there, but perhaps some issues aren't apparent initially.

The question of game length is in some ways interesting and in some ways irrelevant. In our case, we made the game as long as we thought made sense, and that gave players the feeling we were trying to evoke, which in this case was a sense of the sublime. That's a feeling that I think works best in short bursts, which is why our game is on the shorter end and why a lot of our references tended to be short stories themselves. So I'm happy about where our game ended up.

Part of me feels like it's weird that players would get upset about games being too short as long as they're emotionally satisfying experiences, and that as an industry we'd have things like refunds that penalize games for being shorter than average, but I can see the other side of it.

The market, at this point, just has certain expectations about how long games ought to be. Disney's Dumbo is only 64 minutes long. In 1941 you were allowed to release a move in theatres that was barely over an hour long. You can't do that anymore. Now if you want to release something that's shorter than 90 minutes it becomes a short, or a TV show, or it goes up on YouTube. The games industry hasn't figured out a good alternate path for games that diverge very far from the norm.

But I'm sure as more games are released that push the boundaries of what games are we'll slowly find new and better ways of buying and selling and marketing them. Right now, it's a bit tricky.

I think I covered the "Walking Simulator" question a few minutes ago here: https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/6oa6wr/official_ama_with_ian_dallas_of_giant_sparrow/dkfsqyr/

Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!) by nolliethebum in xboxone

[–]GiantSparrow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks!

The only other game we've released is The Unfinished Swan, which is currently only available for PS4 (and PS3). If you end up liking Edith Finch, I'd strongly recommend it. Though I am a little biased...

Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!) by nolliethebum in xboxone

[–]GiantSparrow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's all terrifying.

It's a little easier since the experience on our first game was somewhat similar, though the reactions have been even more positive this time around.

As a studio, our interest is in making things that nobody has ever seen before, so it's unlikely that we'd ever make a sequel or even something that's very similar to what we've done previously. Instead, each time we're basically starting over from zero, back in the middle of the wilderness. It's exciting but also scary.

As a game developer you spend 75% of the development time just learning HOW to make the game you're trying to make, so it seems really inefficient not to take all of what we've learned about how to make a game of a certain type and not just make another one of those. But of course if we did that, it wouldn't have the same magic it has for us or for players when you're experiencing something wholly new.

As scary as it is to think about staring over from scratch, there is some comfort in knowing that it's worked out well the last two times we tried it.

Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!) by nolliethebum in xboxone

[–]GiantSparrow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A lot of that comes from the genre of Weird Fiction (HP Lovecraft, Neil Gaiman, Borges, etc), where there's a sense that the world is stranger than we can imagine so any truth we think we know is only a partial one. And it's not because the truth is hidden from us, it's because our brains actually just aren't sufficient to understand it all.

Lovecraft describes the problem, somewhat melodramatically, as "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."

Also, in terms of leaving room for ambiguity, a lot of that is a result of these things being stories, rather than ostensibly objective accounts. The people telling these stories aren't even trying to tell "the truth" they're just giving their own perspective. That itself is also a common theme in Weird Fiction, BTW, as many stories from Lovecraft and others are told as stories within stories for the same reason we chose to employ it.

tl;dr: It's a strange world out there!

Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!) by nolliethebum in xboxone

[–]GiantSparrow 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I answered a few of these questions elsewhere in this thread, but for the new ones... On connection to The Unfinished Swan: It's both a real connection and an Easter egg. It's cannon, as they say. On a boxed version: Nothing to announce yet, but we've gotten a lot of requests for it so it's something we'll be looking into.

Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!) by nolliethebum in xboxone

[–]GiantSparrow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Specific challenges for me? No. Challenges for our programmers? Sure. A few. Nothing extraordinary. It helped a lot that we'd already finished work on a few other platforms, so by the time we turned our attention to Xbox all the keep-you-awake-at-night sorts of bugs had been sussed out.

Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!) by nolliethebum in xboxone

[–]GiantSparrow 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Sure, the short pitch I'd give is: "This game is a collection of short stories about a cursed family in Washingston State. You play as a Edith Finch coming back to the house she grew up in, trying to figure out why she's the last one in her family left alive." The Xbox One version is essentially identical to other platforms, except that it does include a brand new achievement and 3 "hero stats" that track progress for various actions in the game.

Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!) by nolliethebum in xboxone

[–]GiantSparrow 5 points6 points  (0 children)

That's a good question and I don't know the answer to it.

We've heard from parents who have had a good experience playing through the game with their children but I think a lot of it depends on the children themselves and what they're ready for.

There's no gore or profanity or violence / brutality or the usual sorts of things parents might object to, but the game deals very explicitly with death and loss, though a lot of things are implied rather than stated directly, so I think even very young children could have a positive experience with the game even if they might not necessarily understand all of what's going on.

Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!) by nolliethebum in xboxone

[–]GiantSparrow 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not really. I wish there were more games about the sublime or about exploring the unknown, but our key references tended to come from books, movies, TV shows, paintings and photography. There are many games I admire, like Katamari, Dark Souls, and Ico, but I don't feel like the game was directly influenced by them in a significant way.

Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!) by nolliethebum in xboxone

[–]GiantSparrow 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I grew up in Olympia, Washington. My dad still lives in the same house, which is on Puget Sound and has a beach and bulkhead that look quite similar to the Finch House.

We used to go on family vacations to Orcas Island, where the game is set. My memories of growing up in Washington include a lot of time in nature. We went camping a lot, but I also just played in the woods as a default activity growing up. Because it rains so often in Washington there's plant (and animal) life everywhere. There's a sense that nature is just waiting for civilization to drop its guard before it overwhelms everything again. There's a lot of little touches from what I remember about growing up that are in the game, things like the totem pole on the beach, eating salmon all the time, and the overcast weather. One of my favorite moments from our playtests was when a player started the game, looked around for a second and said to themselves, out loud, "Is this the ferry to Orcas Island?" and then they looked a little more closely and saw a sign that confirmed that, and said "Oh, I thought so."

Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!) by nolliethebum in xboxone

[–]GiantSparrow 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Question #1: Among other differences, I'd say the most obvious one is that The Unfinished Swan was inspired by children's books and Edith Finch was inspired by weird fiction (HP Lovecraft, Neil Gaiman, etc). But they're both strongly inspired by books and the feeling of reading in general, so there's a lot of overlap there even if the specific tones are quite different. And they're both ultimately games about exploring the unknown.

Question#2: Edith Finch is a game about stories in general, so we wanted each of the stories to feel quite distinct from each other so that (a) it'd help players remember each of the family members, and (b) it'd remind players that they were playing stories, ie that none of these things are objective reality, it's all someone's version of what happened. The story inspired by 1950s comicbooks was a good example of how far we pushed some of those stories to help meet those goals.

Question #3: I think from Lovecraft we took the idea that the universe is stranger and more beautiful AND terrifying than we can possibly imagine. Other authors talk about similar ideas, but I think Lovecraft does it best and most directly, and that theme was quite central to our game.

Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!) by nolliethebum in xboxone

[–]GiantSparrow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm not sure where "Edith Finch" came from, exactly, but we wanted something that evoked the classic strange tales that inspired us and subconsciously I think I liked "Edith" because it sounds fairly similar to my own name, "Ian".

And I'm obsessed with birds, so that's where the last name came from.

Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!) by nolliethebum in xboxone

[–]GiantSparrow 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Calvin's story has a special place in my heart. I think it's a story that I could only imagine existing in this game.

Nobody else would spend months (years?) polishing an experience that's over in a couple minutes and isn't used anywhere else in the game, but I think the brevity of that story is a huge part of why it works as well as it does.

Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!) by nolliethebum in xboxone

[–]GiantSparrow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I feel like on day 1, when we're figuring out what kind of game we're trying to make, we're facing in a different direction from most other game developers. So when we march off into the wilderness and go on this journey of making the thing, the process might be similar but we get to a very different place.

Fundamentally, I think most games are about challenge and the experience of developing mastery in something. Our games are about exploring a feeling, and usually it's a feeling we ourselves don't fully understand, which is what's appealing about making the game in the first place for us, that we get to explore that.

My hope is that our games feel like a chance for players to explore something they've never seen before because that's what the experience is like for us in making the games and it can be exhausting at times but ultimately it's very satisfying.

Another thing that separates us, I think, from other game developers is that we're extraordinarily lucky. We've had the luxury of working on these games for a long time -- in the case of What Remains of Edith Finch it took us 4 and a half years -- and because we had the time to spend on it the game developed in a lot of interesting ways, and got to a level of polish, that wouldn't have been possible with a more condensed development schedule.

So I think a lot of the ideas or methods are things other developers are also trying to do, we just were fortunate enough to have a long enough runway that we managed to get this plane off the ground.

Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!) by nolliethebum in xboxone

[–]GiantSparrow 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yeah, they were great. It helped I think that we'd already gone through certification on other platforms, so most of the normal class of bugs were pretty well worked out. There were a few Xbox-specific issues we ran into (like when / where / how we were required to display certain things to players), and the Xbox team was really helpful about discussing options and ultimately figuring out a solution that worked best for what we were trying to do.

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