Many video games with famously protracted development times have one thing in common: they turned out to be huge disappointments.
Spore was Will Wright’s attempt to simulate the evolution of a life form from the microbiological stage to space-age civilisation. It took eight years to build and never quite lived up to the epic premise. The much anticipated Too Human was juggled for nine years from the original PlayStation to a Nintendo GameCube exclusive, finally surfacing as a mediocre Xbox 360 title. Then there’s the notorious Duke Nukem Forever with its lawsuits and financial troubles, taking 15 years from first public announcement to final release – and it was awful.
Announced back in 2007, Owlboy flirts with those titles in terms of development longevity – released this month, the 2D platformer only narrowly avoided a decade from conception to release. It was also hotly anticipated. In 2010, it was named Game of the Year at the Norwegian Game Awards, and a year later its first public demo was widely praised. More recently, it was named “Best in Play” at the 2015 Game developer Conference, and was selected to be showcased at PAX West this past September.
But this is where the comparison with those other much hyped titles ends. Because Owlboy turned out to be magnificent, garnering hugely positive reviews. The question is: how did D-Pad Studios, a five-person team based in Norway, buck the trend from bloat to broke?
One factor is that Owlboy found itself in development suspension for very different reasons than those bigger titles. Sure, there was some drama, with the game’s original programmer leaving the project back in 2009, but this is not a story about huge budgets and legal papers. Instead, Owlboy’s level designer Adrian Bauer explains that the studio wasn’t officially formed until 2010 and that the custom XNA engine the team uses wasn’t particularly stable or optimised until around 2012. Unexpected family deaths and burnout have also caused small delays over the years as well. And then there was a side project, working with Norwegian musician Savant to create a game in his name, Savant - Ascent, released in 2013.
None of these things are the main reason for Owlboy’s extended prelude, though. That is something more simple and admirable. “We aimed high and ambitious and decided no shortcuts and cut corners,” said Bauer.
When D-Pad co-founder and art director Simon Andersen came up with the concept for Owlboy 10 years ago, he wanted to prove a point: the advantages of 2D art over 3D art. “The Wii was promising it would change how games were played back when the project started, and pixel art was still very much seen as outdated, rather than an art medium,” Andersen said. “So before the whole 2D resurgence took place, I wanted a title that could showcase the medium’s strengths.”
Andersen looked to the Kid Icarus series at the time as talk of a 3D version was rumoured. Considering such a game, Andersen couldn’t see how any of the concepts of indoor flight in the series would translate well to 3D. His thoughts were that the 2D art allowed for much easier navigation – it would only be complicated by the extra dimension.
These thoughts congealed with an idea that Andersen had while he was replaying Super Mario Bros 3: “The raccoon suit you got allowed you to press a button to descend slowly after a jump, but what if you could just press it to continuously fly instead?” Andersen imagined that such a mechanic would let you fly really high, perhaps up to floating islands so removed from society that you might not be able to understand their language. It was here in this celestial realm that the foundations of Owlboy manifested. The rest of it came when Andersen considered how the character would be able to fly.
“A lot of options were considered. Jetpacks. The character being an insect. I considered a girl that spun her pigtails to propeller around,” Andersen said. “Then, my girlfriend suggested an owl and everything sort of fell into place right there. Owls would have their own cloaks that act as wings. Owls are also generally symbols of knowledge.”
A couple years after this was locked down, more and more independent developers started to pick up pixel art again. But it was often being used as a way to create art for a game as quickly and simply as possible, or to reference retro titles, rather than to push the potential of the artistic technique. “Having taught myself a very specific field, it started to dawn on me that artists that respected the medium were getting increasingly rare for a number of reasons,” Andersen said. “I decided I was going to use Owlboy as a way to showcase pixel art done properly, using as few ‘cheats’ as possible.”
It’s this dedication that, more than anything else, added years to the production of Owlboy. “The entire game is made pixel by pixel. No gradient or blur effects, no tracing or 3D captures. Not with millions upon millions of colours, but as limited of a palette as I could allow,” Andersen said. “The only thing that we’ve had to do is allow rotations, but I’m just going to have to accept that.”
He admits that this level of detail “isn’t a competing business strategy,” and if D-Pad were more inclined towards that, they could probably have got away with scaling Owlboy down to an 8-bit retro game look, or using 3D models and reusing assets. “What I’ve wanted to show with Owlboy is that these kinds of games can still be made and resonate with people,” Andersen said. “People want these kinds of games, but you have to be pretty dedicated to make them. The same kind of dedication they used back in the 80s and 90s.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this dedicationforced D-Pad to save as much money as it possibly could while working on Owlboy. It’s why the team doesn’t have a central HQ, but work from their own homes or makeshift office spaces, bouncing ideas off each other in Skype chats. There are at least some resources for them to work with - it’s what has made being based in Norway a boon for the team. “The Norwegian government has been very supportive, and have given us grants that have made it possible to focus on the game without having to rush it out the door,” Bauer said.
He adds that the Norwegian Film Fund has, in more recent years, also shown an interest in branching into games to help build the native industry. “As a result, we have a quickly growing and very friendly community in Norway, where we share ideas and help each other out,” Bauer added, “which is a big change, since when we started out, we were the only indies here, and there were only a few larger games companies.”
This spirit of collaboration, not just between friends, but across an entire country, is at the heart of Owlboy. “The theme of friends and co-operation is something we put into everything we could,” Bauer said. “It’s a huge part of our team work.” But it didn’t come immediately.
When first conceptualising the game, Andersen started out with Otus, the titular character, as being somewhat disabled. The cloaks that the people in this owl society use to fly around are inherited and have to be earned, but Otus struggles to master the art of flight with his. “As such, maybe the main character is not very able himself, so the concept of carrying other people and using them to fight for you followed naturally from that,” Andersen said.
In Owlboy, you can pick up the village engineer, called Geddy, who fires a pistol at enemies for Otus. Later in the game, other support characters will appear with different abilities, and you’ll need to pick the right one to pair Otus with in order to overcome challenges and solve puzzles.
“We played with the idea of letting Otus do damage but our design reflects our story themes,” Bauer said. “If Otus could do everything there wouldn’t be a reason for players to think about the gunners and to almost always have them with you.” It’s a game about co-operation by a team that has had to rely on it to survive the past 10 years. In this way, it has become a very personal for each member of D-Pad – not just in how it’s taken up a significant chunk of their lives, but also how its themes reflect the resolve they’ve shown to get through it together. It’s no surprise that the only words the team can muster to describe the experience of finally releasing the game are “incredibly emotional”.
Each member of D-Pad has their own massive archive of old Owlboy material. “There are Google chat logs, emails, mock ups, discarded versions of game maps and old builds,” Bauer said. “You name it, we might just have it socked away on backup drives. The most continuous change long we have is for our game repo. This one goes back as far as 2011. We also have some newspaper cutouts from 2010.”
All of it is a reminder of what they’ve been through. What it takes to dedicate yourself to a craft, the design meetings and critical reactions, the award nights and darker days. But these mementoes will be dwarfed by one: the finished game being released to the public and finding a receptive audience. Some things, it turns out, really are worth waiting for.
Owlboy is available on PC, via Steam. Other formats are being considered.
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