We’re on the final video/article from PAX East 2018. How exciting!
I’m kidding, it’s time to crack my knuckles, slink back into my chair, and put on a GearVR headset to play some more of Lila’s Tale. Rafael Ferrari(holy shit, really? That’s his last name.) is a member of Skullfish Studios, and there have a very familiar story: A few game developers scattered across the globe with only a company name in common that bands them together. That makes their company sound looser than it is, but I’ve always been more of a poet than someone who writes in prose. Anyway it’s the same for us at Scarecrow Arts.
By this point(we released the videos sequentially in the order we filmed them) I’ve become an expert at hearing thick accents and understanding a solid forty-percent of what they’re actually saying. As for Rafael’s booth situation, he’;s comfortably seated between two other studios that pitched in to attend together at a third the cost(again this kind of setup needs to be disclosed in the application).
Lila’s Tale is actually very interesting, you control the entirely game by wear you look, and subsequently, where you don’t look. Rafael was a lead developer for GearVR in Brazil(where he’s from) and is now working from country to country with his team on interesting VR titles for a console most people unintentionally already own. The game runs very well, I didn’t play long but there was no hint of motion sickness, and the lighting is very pretty. That’s not my favorite word to describe the visuals of a game, but I was a little surprised how colorful and cartoony, yet detailed, the models were. Phones are cool, I’m not much of a mobile gamer, but maybe Joe Russ has the right idea; we did try to make an android build of The Story Goes On back in 2016, might be time to revisit that.
Something unique about Skullfish Studio’s goals is accessibility. Lila’s Tale uses very little language, it’s not strictly English or Spanish. Having English as a second language is damn near a requirement to play good video games, something we strive for with TSGO, Anton’s initiative, is to translate the game into as many languages as possible for players who are either too old or too young to be able to read English speedily. Another, much simpler, way would be to throw language out entirely like Skullfish and uses shapes and culture-agnostic symbols to tell your story. It’s very fitting with Lila’s Tale, looking around is just about the first thing you ever do as a human being and it’s the main game mechanic.
