E3 and the PS4!

Posted on 10 June, 2013 by Sam

Hi everyone!

Gosh, E3 sure is exciting. All these big names announcing interesting/amazing things; it’s a little surreal to be right alongside them all.

We’re excited to be showing Contrast at the Focus (our excellent publishers) booth to media and anyone else who stops by. It’s an even more polished version of what we showed at PAX, and is effectively finished content for the bits that we’re showing. If you’re at E3, we’d love you to come by and say hello.

However, we also have some big news – Contrast is coming to the PS4! We’re super excited about this, as being part of a console launch is always something special. But Sony is apparently pretty excited too, as they’re also showing playable demos of Contrast at their E3 booth!

So, in short, we’re at E3 in force, which is great news. Thanks to Focus for their support, and also to Sony for supporting not only us, but all the other indies out there. We’ll post up pictures once Focus and Sony have shown off their booths to the rest of the world

- Sam

A Publishing Deal

Posted on 24 May, 2013 by Sam

Hi everyone

We are super excited to announce that we have signed a publishing deal with Focus Home Interactive, to release Contrast on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 at the end of this year!

I’m going to update this post later on to describe what this means in detail (and hopefully answer a bunch of questions people have been asking us recently), so feel free to check back later on. I’ll even post an awesome new piece of art from Whitney to celebrate with, too.

(Oh, and if you want an example of Focus’ efforts in the marketing department, and why we like the cut of their jib, check this out. Neato.)

- Sam

Edit: I promised an update, so here it is. Art first, words follow.

Concept of shadow shifting in action!

As you will know from our previous updates, Contrast is almost done. It’s completely playable, all the art is in, etc, and we’re just refining some of the puzzles, smoothing over its rough edges, and optimizing it for both PC and consoles. One important part of the deal is that we will retain complete creative control over the game and the IP. We also have more time to refine the game, meaning that we’re in the fortunate position of being able to fix a few things we didn’t think we’d be able to (not a lot of developers get this opportunity).

We’re excited about this deal because the guys and girls at Focus are incredibly enthusiastic about Contrast. This is very much a partnership, where they can bring their enthusiasm and experience to help us market and distribute the game. They have a great media presence, meaning that we will be able to reach out to a wider audience. They also have significant production experience, so can point out areas of improvement that we might have missed.

So, there is a downside, in that we’ll have to wait a bit longer for release. This is bad for us, because we remain stuck in the dodgy factory until people can buy Contrast. But, we think that a wider release will allow us to do the best possible job on this project and, hopefully, put us in a position to make another great game after this one.

Thanks again for all your support We’re going to have a new website set up soon, which will hopefully make it easier to get in touch with us – stay tuned!

Art talk: The World

Posted on 25 April, 2013 by Whitney

We get asked a lot about our visual style, and how we came up with the world/environment of Contrast. It is a blend of a huge number of influences, and this post summarizes the reasons behind our choice of time period, the architectural/artistic influences and how we chose to stylize the world.

In choosing a time period, we needed an era that could host film noir style storytelling, while at the same time being more magical than 1940s and 50s America. We settled on a rough idea of the 1920s, due to being strongly influenced by the whimsical, dark and bizarre nature of German expressionism (which was also one of the major influences on the film noir aesthetic).

We loved the beautiful, artistic decadence that seemed to be a huge part of the 20s. In Europe during that time period, I imagined you would have turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau mixed with the more angular deco. I loved the idea of combining that with the dilapidated architecture and winding alleyways you find in Mediterranean cities like Venice, Lisbon and Barcelona (Spain and Portugal were stuck in my brain thanks to some travelling I did before working on Contrast). Guillaume lived in Lyon when he came up with the idea for Contrast, so he shared my enthusiasm for that ambiance. We agreed that a cocktail of these influences could create a pretty unique setting for our game.

We didn’t want to make the world too realistic as it could feel dry and boring, while also being extremely labor intensive to build (photo realism doesn’t come cheap). We knew we didn’t want the world to be too abstract, as it could give off the wrong impression by seeming child-like and silly. We had to establish elements of the world that were OK to simplify, abstract and warp (examples being the architecture, walls and streets) while keeping other elements realistic, grounded and serious (ex.windows storefronts).

We also have two star environment artists, Chris and Alex (aka PixelNauts), who really got this direction and were able to realize it beautifully. They understood the mood very quickly, and even did a ton of their own concept designs for specific locations. We hope you’ll agree that they have done some amazing work!

- Whitney