I spoke to Coatsink’s Hannah Watts about their new game Shu.
IC: Who is Shu? What is Shu?
HW: Shu is a 2.5D Action Platformer and it’s very reminiscent of nostalgic platformers so Rayman and Mario were big influences. As for Shu himself, he is a bird in a world populated by bird-like creatures and he’s trying to outrun the end of the world.
IC: A bird? He’s not angry, is he?
HW: No, he’s not angry. He’s really sweet actually. I think all the characters are quite nice.
IC: Having one person or a small team writing a game really died down but it’s been having a real resurgence over the last several years.
HW: I think it has, but I think it’s quite fragmented now. You’ve got anti-games, you’ve got art games, you’ve got experimental games, you’ve got visual novels, visual narratives, and that all sits under the umbrella of indie games. I think it’s surpassed itself in a way and become quite self-aware.
IC: How many people worked on Shu?
HW: Shu was quite interesting in terms of development because it was Secret Lunch that started it originally so they had four or five [in the team]. That was on and off for a while and it got brought over to Coatsink, and again it was on and off for a while until January this year when a real core team was put together and that was myself and two other 3D artists, a concept artist that worked on and off, anywhere between one and three programmers, a QA tester, three designers and a sound technician.
IC: What’s your role in the team?
HW: I’m a 3D artist.
IC: I liked the art style. It’s a good looking game but it has a really simple cartoon look about it.
Thank you. The art style came on leaps and bounds from what it was. There’s an IGN video from 2013 where the environments were completely different. They were much more realistic with standard textures and we stripped all that out and went back to the drawing board for the environment.
IC: What are people at Comic Con making of the game?
HW: I think it’s been quite well received. We’ve got some really nice reviews. We’ve got some critiques now and then but it’s not been anything we weren’t aware of ourselves, that we wouldn’t have changed if we’d have had the time. I think the biggest criticism is it’s not long enough and they want more which is the best criticism we could get. At Comic Con people are really enjoying it. We had someone this morning that came back for two hours to play it so that’s really nice to see.
IC: You’re right next to a huge loud Bandai Namco stand. Is that helping?
HW: I think it probably gets eyes on the game we wouldn’t have got normally. At EGX we were in the middle of a lot of indies and people go there purposefully, more so than here where people might be going to the Tekken tournament which is right next door, and then seeing Shu and thinking “what’s that?” And weirdly, even having the cash machine next to us helps because it’s getting a lot of eyes on the game and it piques people’s curiosity.
IC: What’s next from Coatsink?
HW: Part of the company is still working on Shu to bring it to the Vita version, hopefully for Q1 next year. Obviously we’ve had to strip a lot out but we don’t want to compromise the quality and the art style so we’ve had to do a lot of tricks with atlasing textures and condensing with the background. As for the rest of the team, there’s a couple of projects but I can’t really talk about them yet. We’re very busy. We’ve been growing all year and it’s very positive.
IC: So is the company doing well then?
HW: We’ve brought on two new artists recently and we’re now running out of desks. It’s a good sign and it’s nice to see new faces and new influences.
IC: Where are you based?
Sunderland, but we’ve got people commuting from Middlesbrough, Newcastle and Darlington. It helps that we’ve got Northumbria Uni and Teeside Uni, so we get a lot of talent.
IC: Are they coming from games development courses?
HW: Yes, Teeside is one of the skillset accredited ones.
IC: That wasn’t an option some years ago.
HW: I think a lot of people would have gone through fine arts to get to the art side or just Computer Programming or Computer Science to go into the programming side. It’s nice that those options exist now.
IC: Are you getting a lot of young people coming though?
I think everyone in the company is 31 or 32 or under. Between the ages of 20 and 30 really, so it’s a young company.
IC: What’s it like working at Coatsink?
HW: We’re all friends outside of work and we all hang out at weekends and go around each other’s houses. It’s got a really nice culture. I’ve worked elsewhere and it’s very different here as it’s not got much of a hierarchy. Obviously there are project managers and I have a lead artist that I ultimately I answer to him, but it’s not a dictatorship at all. I can have a conversation with my lead artist, who still makes art as well, where I can say “I don’t think what we’ve done works, maybe try this” and there’s no elitism or egos in the company at all.
IC: Was there a big push to meet a release deadline for Shu?
HW: With Shu we chose to extend it quite a bit because we’d rather something of quality came out because it’s a genre that isn’t as popular as it was in the 80’s or 90’s. We wanted something quality rather than something that was rushed and missed the mark.
IC: Platformers went 3D for several years and I never thought they really worked. It was too easy to misjudge the depth of a jump. Shu’s 2.5D style seems like the right balance between looking modern, but feeling right when you play it.
HW: Within the engine we were very specific about collision because the characters are 2D, so all the collision had to be on that exact plane which was only a pixel wide, so everything had to adhere to that or it would break the illusion.
IC: Was it a very conscious decision to have the 2.5D look over 3D because of 3D being hard to play?
HW: We did turn it back. Going back to what I’d said how the game looked in 2012, that was disjointed because there were different camera angles. It could be a little bit jarring so that’s why we have a fixed camera now. It moves occasionally for certain areas, like elevation areas, but we were conscious of keeping that one camera angle and working with props in the foreground and parallax backgrounds to create that illusion of depth.
IC: When is Shu out?
It came out on the 4th October on PS4 and Steam. The Vita version we’re not 100% sure but possibly Q1 next year. We wanted it out this year but with optimisation we’d rather have something that played smoothly at 60FPS than rush something out and have framerate issues. The Vita community is quite tight and passionate so we wouldn’t want to bomb it essentially.
You can see what we thought of Shu here.