The pleasure of transforming sand to water in Sword of the Sea | Matt Nava interview

From the first moment I played Sea sword During summer game days, I knew it was like the game of the game, which led this wonderful game created years ago when I played the last game on Matt Nava’s game studio, Giant Squid.

I played the start of the game. You start as an unnamed character in the sand. You start to surf through the sand, a bit like a snowboarder in SSX. Except that you do not drive on a snowboard. You ride on a sword, sliding above the sand as if you were on a hoverboard.

Curiously, the snowboarding experience was inspiration for Matt Nava, creative director on the game and founder of Giant Squid. He told me that he was inspired by being both a snowboarder and a surfer and the feeling of moving quickly. When you are at that time, he said that these extreme sports are becoming meditative. It’s about being back in nature and connecting with it.

We have seen this kind of flower games, where you convert a city from Gray to greenery, traveling by sliding in the sand, and other peaceful games as well. There are images of The Pathless and Abzu, the previous games of the company, in Sword of the Sea. While you manage a sword as a mysterious character in Sword of the Sea, you don’t use it in violence. As a character, you are looking for something, but I haven’t learned what it was in my short demo.

The game has beautiful music, but you play the game in silence. There is no dialogue. No story spoken. It’s like the video game version of a poem or a silent film. In the game, you move, resolve puzzles and when you do it, you convert the sand into seawater. It is a very satisfactory experience.

I noted that it was strange to see how Giant Squid struck his stride with this game, while the rest of the industry was struggling due to the lack of funding, high costs and changing tastes of players. But Nava revealed in our conversation that Giant Squid was by the edge for a while until PlayStation supports the company. It was an interesting conversation in the middle of a very chaotic demonstration day at the Summer Game Fest.

Here is a transcription published by our interview.

Gamesbeat: What are the inspirations for this? I feel like I’ll see a lot of trips here, and your first game too.

Matt Nava: And even the path without path, which was our game after that. It was a question of moving very quickly and of momentum. These are all these ideas. But really, inspiration is just to be a snowboarder and surf myself. When you do this kind of thing, you move quickly, and it’s extreme, but it’s really this kind of meditation. I am really interested in the meditative and spiritual side of these extreme sports. Usually, when video games represent extreme sports, it is really the surface level. This is not the real reason why people return to surf. You want to be in nature. You want to connect with nature. You want to explore.

There is this kind of magic sensation you can get. This is what we are trying to achieve with this game. Take movement and speed, but let yourself enter this flow state and start connecting with the scene.

Gamesbeat: Is everything silent? No one is talking about, not a story?

Nava: Yes, there is no dialogue in the game. There are certainly characters. You will meet another mysterious character along the way. There will be a story that will take place when you make your way through this world. There are a lot of different biomes to explore beyond sand. You will see in the trailer that we have just come out on the window. There are snow -capped areas and other things. We are telling the story with a kind of atmospheric story.

Gamesbeat: Do you always need a narrative designer for this?

Nava: Oh yeah. We had a writer on this game. It’s hilarious. We say to ourselves: “Okay, do not write words, but help us, help us.” It’s great. In the later version, there are small fragments of traditions that you can find and read to find out more about the background of the world. You can read a few little poems on history. It’s very subtle, the way we do it.

Gamesbeat: Is it directly connected to your past games?

Nava: All our games are connected in one way or another. What we like to do is let the players find these connections. We will certainly give them clues and things to do. But we never define exactly how they connect. We have images of The Pathless and Abzu, so if you have played these games, you will recognize certain things. You will see this connection space, that’s for sure.

Gamesbeat: animation and the environment, it seems that it is the two areas where you already know what you are doing. Sand and sea. Was there something that knew very well, or did you have to know more?

Nava: It’s funny. I thought: “I made a sand game. I did a game of water. It will be easy. ” But then we added this new thing is that the field is lively. It is constantly moving in each frame. This meant that we had to invent this new technology. This is a very personalized technology that we have done so that you can move with this high -speed wave. It was familiar, but also a completely new challenge. It was very fun.

Gamesbeat: What timing do you have in mind? Is it still planned for the exit?

Nava: Yes, it will be released on August 19, very soon. We have to finish this thing. We have almost finished.

Gamesbeat: What platforms will they?

Nava: It will be on PS5 and PC, Steam and Epic Games Store. The first day on PS5, it will be on the PlayStation Plus service.

Gamesbeat: Do you learn a lot about the main character, or is it mysterious?

Nava: He is very mysterious. You learn more about him through the tradition you have read in the game, these little fragments. It is sort of this empty armor costume at the start. You see that Droplet struck him and make him come to life. It is a bit of this empty creature. He is looking for something.

Gamesbeat: How would you compare development to past projects? Did he move faster?

Nava: Each game I make takes about three or four years. This is about four years of work so far. We started it during the pandemic, just after delivery without path. It was the first game that we started from a distance from a team. We had to understand all of this. The team met. It’s quite incredible what they have succeeded.

Gamesbeat: How many people are on the team now?

Nava: We have 16 or 17 people. A medium -sized team.

Gamesbeat: What is it intentional?

Nava: This is our identity. We like to keep it small. We are a group close to friends, basically, making strange games and there.

Gamesbeat: There is a sword, but generally your games have not been violent. Do you have to use the sword?

Nava: It’s funny. The first game I made with a sword, we do not make a fight or anything. There are things you cut. You have seen the little one – what I call the seeds of the ocean, where it interacts and the cut and the water comes out. Later, there will be a kind of antagonist you meet. There are scripted moments. But yes, there is no moment in the game. It is really the movement. The sword is part of tradition.

Gamesbeat: Do you consider this something that someone should be able to understand? Is it a failure if someone does not know what to do then?

Nava: One of our big challenges when we designed the game was to make you really play and find out how to play without needing to look for anything. Just self-guided. We secretly teach you things as you go. At the beginning, we show a small text that tells you how you jump and so on. But we do secret stuff like – if a player already jumps before showing them this text, we simply do not show the text. We understand that you already know how to jump. We don’t need to tell you. We try to get away from you and let you be in the game, don’t remember you playing a game.

Gamesbeat: Is it your own engine?

Nava: It is Unreal Engine 5, but our team is unique in that even if we are small enough, we do a lot of personalized rendering. It does not look like all the other unreal engine games. He has a very unique visual style, and it is really because of the personalized technology that we put on Unreal.

Gamesbeat: What is difficult to do that?

Nava: The biggest challenge is to ensure that this character movement feels good. We worked on what it does to leave the jumps and interact with the movement of the waves. We do things like – you go faster on the sand. You go even faster on the water. You go more slowly on tiles. Without having speed control for the player, you go automatically at speed that feels good everywhere. Make sure that all of this feels perfect when you move is the thing we have continued for four years.

Later in the game, you will discover environments that have snow and lava. Some very surreal environments. We take these landscapes that you have already seen. You have seen a desert landscape. You have seen the water. But not like that. You have never seen a mountain of water. You have never seen the ground move like that. There will be places that you do not expect at all in a game like this.

It was one of the greatest challenges when I launched this game. I would offer a conceptual play. “Imagine this animated. Imagine these waves move.” “You just show me a photo of the desert.” You have to see him in motion to understand it. But once you have done it, once you felt it, so everyone says: “Okay, I understand.”

Gamesbeat: How did you finance this game?

Nava: We are in partnership with Sony. Sony was our donor. They were excellent partners. They understood the game early and believed in us, believed in the team. We have had a close partnership with them in the past. We worked with them to ship Abzu as an exclusive console during the day on the PS4. They have always been friends close to the studio. They have a large team at PlayStation Indes.

Gamesbeat: Did you say how well your past games have done so far?

Nava: I don’t have these figures at hand, but the right thing is that we just have to continue. They succeeded. We still have to obtain funding from large companies, but each of our games has found its fans base. We released our trailer and we have our discord. Everyone became crazy. It’s really fun to see. They are already making new fan art, which is a big morale for the team.

Gamesbeat: It seems that you hit a stride here, even if the rest of the industry has had trouble.

Nava: It was a difficult period with so many studios. We were by the edge for a while. Last year was really difficult. We persevered and fought hard. Sony has really entered and helped us. They made sure that we can continue and finish the game. We are grateful to them to have helped us go through a very difficult period.