I would even measure like, how wide is a standard sidewalk?!” “I’d just spend hours looking at corners of buildings and studying the architecture, like where they actually place street signs, where they put streetlights, you know. In absence of a major city to study, Lackey tells me that he spent his time in Google Street View looking at Chicago’s infrastructure. "I got up really close looking at piping and gutters - I probably looked like a real weirdo.” “Unfortunately, we live in Ohio, kind of out in the country, so there’s not much to research for cities! There’s a few towns I went to and took a lot of photos," Lackey says.
“It’s about encouraging you to experiment without holding your hand,” Lackey tells me.ĭespite none of the team having any proficiency in 3D, Lackey picked up Blender and started embarking on research trips to the inner city in order to shape the game’s urban world.
THE PEDESTRIAN XBOX HOW TO
The trio were further inspired by games like Myst and The Witness and how they passively teach the player how to proceed. “That design language, that art style fit perfectly with our priorities.” “In the public sign system, everything is specifically designed to be understood from every language and seen from far away as you’re moving quickly,” Lackey tells me. The Pedestrian’s urban signage aesthetic then became complimentary to the mechanic and an earnest devotion to what they call ‘clean gameplay’ - they didn’t want to use text or tutorials to impede on the HUD-less experience. A lot of times, you don’t have a good vision for something, you just stumble your way into good ideas.” Real world research for an in-game aesthetic “It’s an intuitive thing that people are used to - if you’ve ever used computers at all you’ll be familiar with node-based systems, it’s just connecting dots,” Lackey explains. “We have all these different pieces that we’re connecting together to make the doors link up - why not make that part of the game loop?” The team introduced the mechanic, and even before they decided on a 3D play space they had found their fun factor. “As we were making levels, I found that I was having more fun in the level editor than I was playing the game,” Lackey tells me. Yet it was only when the team grafted in a level editor that the premise quite literally fell into place. The team thought that the survival game would be their big score, but as Lackey started asking the rest of the team to add features to his incontinence project, the game shifted into many different forms, from a Super Meat Boy-esque platformer to a stealth game. “It was going to be a 2D endless runner where you had to make it to the bathroom before you wet your pants,” says Lackey. Skookum Arts split up and worked on a few prototypes including a multiplayer shooter and a wilderness survival game, before Daniel created a curious mobile game. After pulling together a vertical slice, the trio took to Kickstarter in January 2017, raising ~$30,000 with a polished 20-minute demo.īut the genesis of the project started years before that defining moment.
THE PEDESTRIAN XBOX MOVIE
Lackey tells me how 2012’s Indie Game: The Movie inspired him to embark on the project alongside his brother Jed Lackey, the lead programmer and Joe Hornsby, who worked part-time on the game’s design.
“We’ve always been motivated to not only consume things - we wanted to be creators.” “I think homeschoolers have an affinity for entertaining themselves, and creating their own stuff,” artist and designer Daniel Lackey tells me. It’s also been in development for the better part of a decade. It’s a game without dialogue, tutorials or even a formal menu screen, a brain-teasing cinematic short with a rousing jazz score. If you’re yet to play Skookum Arts’ The Pedestrian, it’s a node-based puzzler where you play as a symbolic depiction of a person, the kind we see every day when we stop at traffic lights or spot civic signage.īy making connections between the public sign system, you follow the protagonist on a grand adventure through an urban environment as the hum of society persists around you.
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