After Us: Crafting an organic platformer, out May 23

blog.playstation.com:

Here at Piccolo Studio, we like to say that we “craft” games rather than “make” them. Our logo features a needle and a thread, symbolizing this very approach.

With After Us, our next project releasing on May 23, we tell the story of Gaia, a small nymph brought to explore the outside world for the first time. The universe is a surrealistic version of Earth in the far future, after humans have expunged all life on it. It is a strange, oneiric, but ultimately captivating world where everyday objects float around, some small, others massive, and where a coat of hazardous oil taints the land.

This third person adventure mixes platforming, puzzles, and combat in a nonconventional way. The world is rich, divided into 10 different biomes. “Some parts of the game rely more on puzzles, some on exploration, others on combat, and often we switch up the traversal sections so it stays fresh”, says game co-director Jordi Ministral.

We invest a lot of time into creating singular experiences. How do we do it? We start with a vision, a holistic idea of how we want the player to feel. Then we take the rules of a specific genre, and we twist them. At its core, After Us is a 3D platformer. Yet, we intended to have many features often avoided when developing a platformer: a camera that is far from the main character, a lush world filled with assets artistically scattered around, and an absence of strict metrics. A designer’s nightmare, right? But we found solutions that worked wonderfully to create the organic experience we envisioned.

In complement, Gaia’s movements are simple to execute. They can be effortlessly chained in a pleasant flow. She dashes at very high speeds – about 70 km/h – so the scale of the world ended up being huge!