Meet Our Creative Director: Jamie Antonisse
There are many more adventures in store for the Guildlings, so today we’re sitting down with Sirvo Studios’ co-founder and our game’s Creative Director, Jamie Antonisse!
Prior to Guildlings, Jamie was best known for indie games including The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom. As a graduate of the University of Southern California’s Interactive Media MFA program, he’s our resident expert on all things related to characters, story, and setting!
So how did Guildlings start?
Guildlings began as Sirvo co-founder Asher Vollmer’s brainchild, way back in 2012. He had this idea for a game about being a “Guildmaster,” and sending adventuring heroes across the world on quests. He asked me to help him with a paper prototype. We developed it over the course of a couple days, tested it, enjoyed it, and promptly put it in a drawer for three years.
Then in 2015, Asher pitched me on an adjusted version of the game: what if, instead of a scribe sending barbarians and wizards across a stock fantasy realm, the game was about teenagers setting out on a magical road trip? That felt really exciting to me. It took me back to my own journeys across the continental US, including the one that took me from DC to California. I cooked up an atlas of destinations pinned on a mystic-modern continent.
That’s when we both realized we had to make this game, and we’d need a team to do it justice. We joined forces with Ryan Sullivan, Asher reached out to some talented artists he’d admired from Twitter (including Ellen, Kyle Youngblom, and Mac Schubert).
With a unique modern fantasy setting like this, did you look at other games or stories for inspiration?
The original draft was very much an attempt to find little nuggets of magical realism hidden in a map of the USA. I definitely had snippets of Italo Calvino and Borges in my head while I was working.
But Worldaria really came into focus when I looked back on the result and started thinking about it less as an Invisible City and more as a 21st century Oz. Oz is such a great creation; it takes the enormous upheaval and complexity of 1900’s America and runs it through this evocative fantasy filter. It makes its fantasy elements approachable, vulnerable, human.
I wanted Worldaria to do that for our modern world. I wanted to take social networks, coffee chains, skate videos, and office parks and make them magical. Conversely, I really wanted to bring elves and goblins down to earth. I wanted to see an elf driving a Honda Civic on a learner’s permit.
There were other references that became important to the game, of course: Steven Universe, The Adventure Zone, even parts of Homestuck. But those came later, once our team had established the characters.
When character designer Ellen Alsop came aboard, did you already have a fairly solid idea of the characters?
Nope! When Ellen first came aboard, the game was quite different. In fact, your entire team of friends could be randomly generated from different classes and personality traits. It was only after a month or two of experimentation that we ditched the procedural and decided to focus on a specific story, a specific set of friends. I wrote up some names and outlines for Ellen to work from, and she came back with some specific requests, including Myers-Briggs personality types, to round the kids out. Only two of these characters came out looking anything like I’d imagined. The rest were totally different, and far more interesting, than the sketches I had bouncing around in my head.
The team dynamic developed a lot over time as well. I really credit the writers rooms we did for that. These were two-day focused brainstorms where we really broke down the characters’ wants, needs, strengths and weaknesses, and made sure that everyone had a solid arc. In addition to our eventual staff writers Adam Hann-Byrd and Danyel Copeland, we brought in some talented folks for those rooms. Child psychologists, YA writers, social media strategists, all sorts of perspectives contributed to the makeup of our guild.
The game features a lot of group chats and texting, so bringing in social media people was to learn how to do that most effectively. What sort of insights did they share?
I think my biggest takeaway from those sessions was to be authentic, to create from a place of excitement and irreverence instead of filling the script with Tolkien-y versions of the latest memes. This was a delicate balance with one character in particular, I’m guessing you can imagine who.
Another thing people often notice about the game is that it uses lots of emoji.
If you’re looking at emoji as a gimmick, you will invariably use it wrong. If you look at it as a replacement for a single word ("let’s have 🦃 for dinner”) you’re just playing charades. Emoji work really well as shorthand, especially for emotional ideas. Some of those meanings are specific to certain people. I guess if there is a secret, it’s that I’m genuinely interested in emoji. If you’re not genuinely interested in them, you probably shouldn’t use them in your game!
Who was hardest to pin down, as a character?
Probably Palance, because I found him so personally relatable. He was sort of my stand-in for a while, but no one wants the lead writer lurking in their chat. Eventually, through some conversation with other writers, I realized that Palance needed to provide a stronger, more specific lense on this world. Gwynn viewed things through rules and structures, Syb through sarcasm and logic, Chazazz through stream-of-conscious key clack. I went back over Palance and started to understand him as a visual and emotional thinker. So I figured he could rely on more of a language of emoji to express himself.
What advice would you give to someone just starting out in games?
If you want to learn the craft of development, study the game genres you love. If you want to contribute to the future of the medium, look around and between genres, seek out the games that don’t exist yet. The range of expression in this medium is already huge, but we’ve still just seen a fraction of what’s possible. Examine those empty spaces. You might find the perfect spot for your career.
That’s somewhat selfish advice, because it’s really what I want to see out of the next generation of games: more surprising successes and more interesting failures.
What’s one thing players can look forward to in the next installment of Guildlings?
The next story update will be a kind of bridge to Chapter 2. The game will open up quite a bit. I’ll tease a few more details in our upcoming newsletter, but for now I’ll just leave you with this headline: Fakey will return in 2020.
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