From the first moment I played Sword of the sea On the game days of Summer Game Fest Play, he knew it was like the Game Journey, who led from that wonderful game created years ago until the moment he was playing the last game of the game of games of Matt Nava, Giant Squid.
I played the start of the game. It begins as an unnamed character in the sand. Start sailing around the sand, like a snowboarder in SSX. Except that you do not ride a snowboard. You go with a sword, sliding over the sand as if you were in a hoverboard.
Interestingly, the experience of snowboarding was the inspiration for Matt Nava, creative director of the game and founder of Giant Squid. He told me that he was inspired to be a snowboard and a surfist and the feeling of moving quickly. When you are at the moment, he said that these extreme sports became meditative. It is about returning to nature and connecting it.
We have seen these types of games in Flower, where you turn a city from gray to greenery, travel while sliding through the sand and also in other peaceful games. There are pictures of the Pathless and Abzu, the company’s previous games, in Sword of the Sea. While using a sword as a mysterious character in Sword of the Sea, do not use it in violence. As a character, look for something, but I did not learn what was in my short demonstration.
The game has beautiful music, but play the game in silence. There is no dialogue. No spoken storytelling. It’s like the video game version of a silent poem or movie. In the game, they move, solve puzzles and, when you do, turn the sand into seawater. It is a very satisfying experience.
I said it was strange how Giant Squid struck this game, while the rest of the industry was fighting for lack of funding, high costs and taste changes. But Nava revealed to our conversation that Giant Squid was on the edge for a while until PlayStation supported the company. It was an interesting chat in the middle of a very chaotic demonstration day at the Summer Game Fest.
Here is a transcript edited from our interview.
Gamesbeat: What are some of the inspirations for this? I feel like I see a lot of travel here and your first game.
Matt Nava: And even the Pathless, which was our game after that. It was about moving very fast and the impulse. All these ideas are. But really, inspiration is just being a snowboard and going sailing myself. When you really do these things, move quickly and it’s extreme, but it’s really this kind of meditation. I am very interested in the meditative and spiritual side of these extreme sports. Normally, when video games portray extreme sports, this is a lot of surface level. This is not the real reason that people will sail again. You want to be in the wild. You want to connect with nature. You want to explore.
There is this type of magic sensation. This is what we try to achieve with this game. Take the movement and speed, but let go of this flow of flow and start connecting -you with the scene.
Gamesbeat: Is everything silent? No one speaks or narrative?
Nava: Yes, there is no dialogue in the game. There are definitely characters. You will meet another mysterious character along the way. There will be a story that reproduces as you head around this world. There are many different biomes to explore beyond the sand. You will see in the trailer that we have just left the showcase. There are snowy areas and other things. We are telling the story with a kind of atmospheric storytelling.
Gamesbeat: Do you still need a narrative designer for that?
Nava: Oh, yes. We have had a writer in this game. He is hilarious. We are like: “OK, don’t write words, but please help us.” It’s great. In the posterior version, there are few fragments that you can find and read for more information about the world’s background. You can read some small poems about history. It is very subtle, as we do.
Gamesbeat: Are you directly connected to your past games?
Nava: All of our games are somehow connected. What we like to do is let the players go out with these connections. We will certainly give them some clues and things to continue. But we never explain exactly how they are connected. We have pictures from Pathless and Abzu, so if you play these games, you will recognize some things. You will see this space of connection, surely.
Gamesbeat: Animation and environment, it seems that they are both areas where you already know what you do. The sand and the sea. Was there anything that was very familiar to do it or did you have to learn more?
Nava: It’s funny. I thought, “I made a game of sand. I made a game of water. This will be easy.” But then we added this new thing, which is that the terrain was encouraged. It is constantly moving in all frames. This meant that we had to invent this new technology. This is a very personalized technology that we did so that you can move with this wave at high speed. It was familiar, but also a totally new challenge. It was a lot of fun.
Gamesbeat: What time do you have in mind? Is already scheduled for launch?
Nava: Yes, it will leave on August 19, soon. We have to finish this thing. We are almost finished.
Gamesbeat: What platforms is going to?
Nava: It will be at the PS5 and PC, Steam and Epic Games store. The first day at PS5 will be at the PlayStation Plus service.
Gamesbeat: Do you learn a lot about the main character, or are still mysterious?
Nava: It is very mysterious. Learn more about it through the lore you read in the game, these small fragments. At first, it is a kind of this empty armor dress. You see, the drop hit him and lived. It is a kind of this empty creature. Is looking for something.
Gamesbeat: How would you compare development with past projects? Has moved faster?
Nava: Each game I make takes about three or four years. This is so far about four years of work. We started it during the pandemic, just after shipping without a route. It was the first game we started remotely as a team. We had to discover this. The team joined. It is quite incredible what they have taken away.
Gamesbeat: How many people are on the team now?
Nava: We have 16 or 17 people. A medium -sized equipment.
Gamesbeat: And is this intentional?
Nava: This is our identity. We like to keep it small. We are a close group of friends, basically, doing strange games and outside.
Gamesbeat: There is a sword, but usually your games have been nonviolent. Do you have to use the sword?
Nava: It’s funny. The first game I made with a sword, we do not fight or anything. There are things you cut. You saw the little one, what I call seeds, where the water interacts and the water comes out. Later there will be a kind of antagonist you know. There are moments of script. But yes, there is no time to fight the game in the game. It’s really about the movement. The sword is part of the lore.
Gamesbeat: Do you consider that someone should be able to discover? It’s a failure if someone doesn’t know what to do after?
Nava: One of our great challenges when we design the game was to do it so that you can play and discover how to play without looking at anything. Only self -guided. We teach things into things secret as you go. At first, we show a small text that tells you how you jump and so on. But we do secret things like, if a player already jumps before we show them this text, we do not show the text. We understand that you already know how to jump. We don’t have to tell you. We try to get out of your way and leave -you are in the game, do not remember that you are playing a game.
Gamesbeat: Is your own engine?
Nava: It is UNREAL ENGINE 5, but our team is unique because, although we are quite small, we make a lot of personalized representation. It does not look like all other unreal engine games. It has a very unique visual style, and this is really because of the personalized technology we put on the unreal top.
Gamesbeat: What is difficult to do?
Nava: The biggest challenge is to get the character’s movement to feel good. We have been working on how to get out of jumps and interact with the wave movement. We do some things like: Go faster in the sand. Go even faster in the water. You go slower to the tile. Without having any speed control for the player, only automatically go at the speed you feel everywhere. Just ensure that everything is perfectly good when moving is what we have continued to work for four years.
Later in the game, you will discover environments with snow and lava. Some very surreal environments. We are taking these landscapes you have seen before. You have seen a desert landscape. You have seen the water. But not. You have never seen a mountain of water. You have never seen the ground move like this. There will be places you don’t expect to see in a game like this.
This was one of the biggest challenges when he was throwing this game. Would come with a conceptual work of art. “Imagine -animated. Imagine -you are moving these waves.” “Just show me a photo of the desert.” You have to see it in motion to understand it. But once you do, once you feel it, everyone says, “OK, I get it.”
Gamesbeat: How did you fund this game?
Nava: We associate with Sony. Sony has been our financial sponsor. They have been great members. They understood the game soon and believed in us, believed in the team. We have had a close collaboration with them in the past. We have worked with them to send Abzu as an exclusive console on the day to the PS4. They have always been intimate friends of the study. They have a great team in PlayStation Indies.
Gamesbeat: Have you said how long your past games have done so far?
Nava: I do not have these numbers in my hand, but the good is that it is enough to move on. They have been successful. We still need to get funding from large companies, but each of our games has found their fanbase. We put our trailer and have our discord. Everyone was crazy. It’s a lot of fun to see. They are already making a new art of fan, which is a great impetus for morality for the team.
Gamesbeat: You look like you are making a step here, even while the rest of the industry has struggled.
Nava: It has been a difficult time with so many studies. We had been on the edge for a while. Last year was really hard. We persevere and fight hard. Sony really came in and helped us. They did it so we could continue and finish the game. We are grateful for helping us to do it very difficult.
