Recently I had the chance to speak with the Creative Director of the upcoming game FRACTER, Sanatan Suryavanshi. Take a look below.
JB: What led you to game development after such a lengthy career in TV and Film?
SS: I’d been interested in exploring the game space for some time but wanted to do it a particular way and that way requires a lot of risk taking and a lot of trust among everyone involved. When Frank Falcone, the owner of 4L Games was starting a new studio and asked me to lead their flagship game, he was willing to give me the trust and room to drive despite my background being primarily in film. The timing was right and Fracter was one of those fortunate instances required for any creative project to materialize, where all the pieces came together.
JB: What have been some of the challenges in adjusting how you work when it comes to games, versus working in TV/Film production.
SS: There were so many: switching gears from designing visuals scoped for a 60 foot cinema screen to something with the simplicity needed to read on a mobile phone; live frame rates and the limitations that this puts on mobile graphics; being used to linear animation, where you can control the flutter of every single blade of grass in time and then trying to design for an interactive medium where the audience is as much the author of how a moment plays out as the director is. The list goes on..
That said, those same limitations, once embraced, were probably responsible for some of the most striking features of the game.
JB: What was the genesis of this game? What led to this team making such an interesting concept?
SS: All projects go through many evolutions as they develop and Fracter was no different. Frank Falcone originally came up with an idea for a mysterious strategy game that would evoke the feeling of exploring a scary basement. When I was brought on board, I decided to age the project up and take it into a darker space, emotionally and visually. A world filled with amorphous darkness full of good and bad entities that are all reflections of yourself. I think we all have fractured parts of ourselves that we fear or seek on some subconscious plane – combined with the right mood, music, and poetry, I felt trying to create this plane as an interactive journey would make for a compelling experience.
JB: What expertise have you been bringing from your own background when it comes to this project? Has it enabled you to give an outside perspective?
SS: The look and feel of Fracter is probably what was impacted most by my background in film. Having a vernacular rooted in images and sounds and experience leading high caliber teams in animation require you to sharpen your craft to a high level, I leaned on those skills a lot throughout the development of Fracter.
I’m sure having an outsider’s perspective had some impact. There’s some degree of uncertainty which comes from working in any new medium, but I suppose the other side of that coin is freedom. I wasn’t really thinking too much about how things are usually done in mobile games. I’d just look at my list of problems that needed to be solved on a given day, come up with what my instincts told me was the best way to solve these problems, discuss with my team – a lot of whom did have experience in games, make a choice hope it was the right one. I didn’t spend much time worrying if something I was doing was considered the right way or the wrong way to do things in the mobile gaming space because I didn’t know.
JB: What are some of the biggest influences that have impacted on FRACTER?
SS: Too many to mention. But if I was to pick one from each of the big mediums, I’d say Jenova Chen for his theory of exploring different parts of the emotional spectrum in games, Jun Miyake – particularly Lost Memory Theater -Act 1, Guillermo del Toro and his immaculate taste and then of course my background growing up in India before moving to Toronto, where I was exposed to all kinds of sights, sounds, poetry and ideas that I’m sure have made their way into the world of Fracter.
JB: What is the end goal for FRACTER? Do you hope to push storytelling further, to experiment more, or something else altogether?
SS: I think Fracter is more the beginning of a goal than an end, for me personally. It’s the first attempt towards figuring out a language for a particular type of game that is rooted in my own tastes and interests. I’m thrilled at how well it has been received and look forward to hearing about more people’s experience with it.
JB: Are there any plans of continuing FRACTER as an IP going forward?
SS: I will leave that one shrouded in darkness – stay tuned 🙂
JB: Is there anything you wish you could have included in the game that was not included?
SS: More levels and a bigger scope would have been nice, but as I mentioned, this was our first game and we had limited resources. I made a choice early on to focus on quality rather than quantity, so we used what we had towards making Fracter the longest version possible of the experience we wanted to give the player- within budget.
JB: What would you like to do next in terms of game design and development?
SS: I’m developing two game ideas which tackle similar themes as Fracter and are also very atmospheric, but they are still at early stages. 4L also has another game in the works.
JB: How did you like the overall experience of working on the game?
SS: It was an incredible experience. We had an incredible team that made the game what it is. Andrew Milner, my technical director, went above and beyond as did everyone else on the core team. A project always is what it is because of everyone involved, this couldn’t have been truer for Fracter.
JB: Is there anything you would like to say to the readers of Real Otaku Gamer?
SS: I want to thank Real Otaku Gamer and their readers for the interest in our game! We are a small team that made a small game and are honored by all the support it has gotten. Thank you very much!
We thank Sanatan Suryavanshi for taking the time to speak with us. You can get the game on Steam here.
You can follow 4L Games on Twitter here