We chatted with the creative director and game director on Chants of Sennaar about their beautiful puzzle hit from last year.
"Hi friends, I'm in Bilbao for The Big 2024 and I'm here joined by the guys from RunDisc who made one of the most beautiful games in 2023, which is Sands of Senna. Thank you so much for for joining us. You know, I haven't played the game but it's really tempting to me because I love the art style. So first and foremost, you as the art guy, what can you tell me, you know, may you use this approach, this style and what did you want to convey with the art style of Sands of Senna? The art style of the game is mainly aimed to produce, excuse me, we are very small team so we had to be very radical in terms of artistic design."
"So we very early in the project developed the art direction with bright colors, with minimalistic style and we decided to take inspiration from French comics like Druillet, Moebius, people like that. And so in fact this art style is driven by the fact that we are a very small team. Of course Yann Giraud had to be there, right? I'm a huge fan of Moebius myself as well. So how did you work technically for that art style to be applied, you know, in the engine and to work with the game? So first Julien create a first mock-up of the game with Photoshop. He take first environment, he change the color, he apply filters and show me that's what I want. So then you try to develop shader, to think about technical limitation, to think about how we can produce the game with this look and with our budget, very few budget. And at the beginning of the project we fix all the technical points and we can produce this game. And of course this is not just about the art. The art is one way to convey what you guys want to tell but this is actually a story of, you know, Tower of Babel. So you know, where did the concept of the game come from and what did you want it to, what did you want to tell with this game? In fact the myth of the Tower of Babel came later in the project. It was not with first inspiration at all. We already had the concept of language oriented gameplay. We had idea of having five people living in a big tower who could not talk to each other and it's at this moment we started thinking, oh it looks like the Tower of Babel. So let's use this myth to convey your ideas to, you know, as I said earlier on the conference, it's easier for us to present the game to journalists and players. If we say, imagine like a big Tower of Babel with people inside."
"People already have ideas of how it should look like. So it's more easy for us to present the game like this than starting from scratch. So we decided to use this myth for its evocative power but the story isn't absolutely the same.
It's quite the opposite in fact. In the myth it's God who strikes the people with some kind of malediction. The game is quite the opposite. You are here to reunite people, people that are talking different languages but your role as the voyager is to make them communicate. So you have the inverted role in fact and the message is really different. The message is, it's quite a naive message but a powerful one that in fact somehow everybody is searching for the same thing. Everybody wants the same thing but in different ways. And if you can communicate, if you can take time to listen a little bit to people, even strangers, you can find a lot of ways to get close to them."
"What is everybody looking for? Happiness? Tranquility? Love?
Everybody is, yeah, I think that lots of people just want to live in peace.
Peace of mind?
Peace of mind. They have different ways to search for it. But I think people are really more alike than they think. Lots of troubles in the world come from misunderstanding. Not every time, of course. But lots of problems could be partly resolved if people talk more to each other."
"That's a beautiful message. Is that something that you achieve towards the end of the game? Like the characters get to a point where they agree or they are in peace or they are good to each other?
I won't spoil the game."
"Of course.
I won't spoil the game, but you managed to do this in a special kind of way.
That's tempting. I have to play this one. And speaking more about mechanics, you guys use puzzles here. What type of puzzles? I love puzzles. I love puzzle games. And this year we have pretty nice puzzle games with Lorelei and others."
"But I still have some from last year to play, such as your game. So what type of puzzles can I expect to find in Shines of Senna?
The first kind of puzzles is the understanding of language. So in Shines of Senna, for understanding a language, you have to understand a set of glyphs. A glyph is a symbol. And at each symbol, you have to associate a picture that represents a word. A word, an action, something. And you have a journal that you have to complete. On a journal, you have between three and five pictures. For each picture, you set a glyph. And when you found all the good glyphs of your page, it is validated and they can use to speak with other people. And in Shines of Senna, you have other type of puzzles, very different type of puzzles. But each puzzle has a goal to help you to understand the language. So there is a link between the puzzle and the language. For example, at the beginning of the adventure, you have five switches that you have to switch on or off to activate a mechanic. And to find a good combination, you have to read a note where you have to write with a non-language. Open, close, open, close, close, open. And the puzzle, what is the good combination of switches, is linked to the understanding of what is the word for open and what is the word to close."
"And on all the game, you use this kind of mechanics. Or we can understand the language with puzzle and or we can solve puzzle with language.
Okay, so it's mostly about symbolism and glyphs. And what's the inspiration behind this? Were you guys into this before? Like, were you trying to make puzzles out of symbols? Try to guess what this can mean? Or where did the inspiration come from to this specific symbolism?
The language part of the game was firstly inspired by another game, which is called Evans Vault, in which you play some kind of archaeologist who discovers an ancient civilization in ruins and tries to decode, decipher the glyphs. It was a nice idea."
"And we decided to take inspiration from this, but to expand it, not only in one language, but on five languages. And not with a dead language, but with vivid languages. So the first inspiration was this. But after that, the main idea was to plunge you into the experience of a voyager. So someone who, imagine you're taking off a train in a foreign country, you don't speak a word of it, and you start listening, you start looking, you watch signs on the shops, you listen to people talking, you try to say hello, thank you, please."
"Like a Chinese room.
Yes.
Sort of theory.
You travel, I imagine. So if you spend like two or three weeks in a foreign country, you don't even try, but you start to understand your first world. And you can say hello, you can say thank you, you can say help me. And this is the experience we wanted to create."
"You start to decipher what they're doing.
OK, so you guys are five people in the studio, if I'm correct, at RunDisc. So it's the same as five languages in the previous game. Let me ask you, this is your second game. You did something very different before. What can we expect from you guys next?
We can't say very much about our next project. We can say we are working on something new."
"We are still working with Focus Entertainment, which was our publisher on Chance of Senna and co-producer. And we are working with them for a new project.
We can't already tell what game it will be, but we can say it will be the same kind of game, the same type of game. We won't make a fast FPS, for example. We think we touched something with Chance of Senna. So we are going to expand our audience and we are going to expand our narrative ambitions and our visual style, too, and try to make something cool."
"Sounds very tempting already. So looking forward to both playing Chance of Senna very soon and to learning about your next project soon, hopefully. So thank you so much for your time. Enjoy the show.
Thank you."