How Barcelona’s Piccolo Studio is crafting After Us

The Game Awards showed us the future of gaming. One of the upcoming titles is After Us. Piccolo Studio is creating an exploration adventure game, published by Take-Two Interactive’s Private Division label.

The title will release on PC on Steam and PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in Spring 2023. A beautiful game with an interesting story and creative approach.

We spoke with game developers Alexis Corominas and Jordi Ministral, two of Piccolo Studio’s founders, about their approach. They chose to set the game in a post-human world, which isn’t usually a comfortable premise for video games.

But as devastating as it is to think about what caused the apocalypse, the creators see their title as being about “legacy and hope.” Did. Although there is a similar spirituality about nature, this game looks very different.

You play as Gaia, the Spirit of Life, who brings hope to a broken planet on her surreal post-human journey. Traverse environments, save the souls of extinct animals, and harness the power of Gaia to fight the dangers plaguing the Scorched Earth.

After Us features Piccolo Studio’s style of delivering impactful storytelling, combining it with compelling exploration and adventure. Gaia must jump, glide, dash, wallride, and swim to avoid deadly obstacles and enemies. As an embodiment of life, she has the power to help regenerate and rebuild the Earth. By emitting bursts of light, Gaia stimulates the growth of new plants and reveals new paths for traversal.

After Us depicts a fantasy world driven by the destructive behavior of unbridled societies that players experience in ten different biomes. Players learn the ultimate fate of various majestic creatures, including the last harpooned whale, the last caged eagle, and the last cornered deer, and resurrect their souls to bring life to the world. to get back. Each new environment presents new challenges to Gaia, telling the story of these animals’ final moments before the climactic moment of rebirth.

studio with passion

There’s a lot of passion put into this title, and Corominas reminded us in an interview that we’ve talked about how it came about before.

Korominas and Ministrals are ports of the gaming industry. They worked together in the advertising industry during his 20 years. Over time, we started creating more interactive experiences for big brands like Nike and Coca-Cola. They were making money and winning awards. They started their own company to escape the cramped work, but felt that something was missing.

So they decided to close their advertising company and pursue their childhood passion of making video games.

“We were over 40 and had a midlife crisis,” Corominas tells me in 2019. Advertising was having its own midlife crisis. Especially after the economic slowdown in 2008, he was data-driven. Creativity was at an impasse. We were still making money from advertising, but it was no longer satisfying. “

In 2019, the team was finishing work on Arise: A Simple Story. The title was published by Techland on consoles and the Epic Games Store on PC. It’s about an old man who wakes up in limbo after he dies. He gains the ability to look back on his life and relive it.

The founders were proud of the risks they took. They built a successful game with a team of about 15 people.

“It was crazy. , we are ready to start working on our first game.The main goal of our company is to touch people.Make people feel.Human emotions.We say we don’t make games. We make them, even our logo is a needle and thread about the craft.”

Looking at these origins, it’s easy to see the commonalities between the studio’s beginnings, the Arise games, and the latest After Us titles. Arise received a score of 81 out of 100 on Metacritic, which aggregates game review scores.

“Arise was a reflection of our personal situation. We had a midlife crisis. We started looking back and decided to quit advertising and start a video game company,” Corominas said. says. “For our next game, After Us, we decided to look ahead instead. We’re older and we’re parents. So we started thinking about the idea of ​​legacy. What are we leaving behind?” Not just your children and grandchildren, but as a generation, or as a human race.”

They crafted a story about legacy in a game that begins in a desolate and gloomy world where all life on Earth has been exterminated at the hands of mankind.

“We cover some hot topics about the environment. But we see a lot of negativity around it. , I wanted it to be something positive,” Korominas said.

This game has a lot of exploration, platforming, puzzles, and combat. But it was an uplifting and hopeful journey, said Corominas.

“That’s what I want them to feel at the end of the game,” he said.

They made the protagonist powerful, as evidenced by the name Gaia. However, she is small and vulnerable in a large, hostile world.

“We’re about emotional rewards. There are over 100 animal spirits that can be collected in this world,” Corominas says. “They start populating the world and roaming around.”

greater effort

The studio has now grown to about 30 people, more than double what it was when we were working on Arise. And I’ve been making new games for about 2.5 years. Priced at $30, this low price reflects the fact that the game can be completed in a few days. You can either sprint through it or spend a lot of time staying in the environment.

“Ultimately, the game talks about the many facets and faces of humanity. and an agent of love,” said Corominas. “And there is a statement that we love so much from a physicist in Barcelona. We love it. It is said that man is the only animal that kills for pleasure. is only her.”

The game also contains a message about climate change, but the studio doesn’t want it to come across as too preachy.

“It’s not our job. Our job is just to tell the story,” Corominas said. “So we tell the story of what happened in that world, which is the allegory of the Earth, and the story with the protagonist. It’s so fantastic and surreal. We’re not an NGO. We make games. , this is a game.”