The Indie Game Magazine April 2015 | Issue 48 | Page 16

kowski), Maya and Michaell Bakalars, are
all industrial designers with professional
backgrounds that include Exhibit, Point-ofPurchase, and Experiential Design. We’ve
each had to work at breakneck paces for the
last decade… 30 years of design experience
total. These fields don’t allow for a designer
to take a week to model and texture a table,
or chair, or whatever other game prop may
exist… they allow for only a couple of hours.
We’re comfortable with the typical design
project that lasts between 4 days and 3
weeks- so what I’m saying is we are very fast,
very efficient, and very good at what we do.
Unlike traditional game designers, industrial
designers are tasked with almost projectmanagement positions; we innovate, ideate,
design, present, and manage the production
elements throughout a project’s life cycle.
Our day jobs are intense and extensive, and
it’s taught us quite a bit.

Framerates became miserably low and we
were unsure of how to remedy the situation
in May of 2013. Optimization is one thing,
but we wanted our characters and world to
be amazing… we wanted the terrain to be
awe-inspiring. We wanted water to look and
feel like, well, water! Unfortunately these effects are just outside of what we felt Unity 4
could provide on a console or common-range
gaming PC. So we held off.

Fast forward to March of 2014 and Unreal
Engine 4 makes a debut. We had dabbled with
UDK in the past and knew that the technology was insane (in a good way), but for one
reason or another never perused that engine
for The Lost Pisces. But Unreal Engine 4 was
something special, and we began the long
journey of porting our art into that engine.
The fact that Unreal can handle such a gigantic
breadth of things well, from massive terrains
to realistic foliage, to their incredibly robust
IGM: You’ve been working on The Lost Pisces blue-print visual-scripting system, has given
three years now, and originally intended to us the confidence that we can deliver the
launch a Kickstarter in May of 2013. How game we’ve always envisioned.
has the game evolved over all that time, and
IGM: Pisces partially described as a “shooter.”
what makes now the right time to lay all the
What else can you tell me about the game’s
cards out on the table?
combat mechanics, and how they’ll evolve
Rutkowski: the time we were using Unity over time?
to build the game, and while we love Unity
Rutkowski: ’s just the easiest way to describe
for specific reasons, we weren’t confident
it until we release game footage, I suppose.
that we could provide a stellar experience
The game is set in first-person perspective,
using it. We were able to prototype all of the
as this makes the most sense when it comes
original ideas for Pisces, with Kinect-enabled
to interacting with your female companion,
learning AI and such, but when it came to a
Pisces. I don’t know if I would define it as a
visually-stunning world, it was insanely dif“shooter” in the sense that shooters are usuficult to maintain a consistent experience at
ally focused only on that… shooting things.
a decent framerate. Unity can do an amazing
There’s not a whole lot of that in The Lost
amount of things, and can look outstanding
Pisces,actually. The game is an adventure
when you purchase enough of the communitythat pits you, the gamer, against massive
created plugins that provide better and better
machine-like gods that are next-to-impossible
lighting and AI effects. But it comes at price.

16

The Indie Game Magazine

to destroy. There’s usually only one way to
“kill” the god, and it involves plotting and
discovery elements to find the appropriate
weapons and methods required to fulfill
that goal.
IGM: As Pisces becomes more “human,” she
loses some of her more powerful abilities.
Growing weaker as gameplay progresses is
typically the exact opposite of what most
players expect when experiencing traditional
games, which serve as power fantasies. How
does the team plan to empower players, or at
least offer them a sense of positive progression, as Pisces grows weaker?
Rutkowski : Another good question! From
the perspective of an RPG, it could certainly
be perceived that we’re doing the exact
opposite of what is a proven formula for
engaging the gamer. The whole project is
unorthodox, I suppose. But we’re not really
building an RPG at all. The fact that Pisces
becomes more and more human over time
is just a different twist on a gameplay mechanic that everyone is familiar with: As a
game progresses, we expect it to become
more challenging! Stage 5 is usually more
difficult than stage 2.
Likewise, the enemies you en