How Grand Theft Auto, Zelda, and a Southwest Pacific nation inspired Tchia
You might look at Tchia and recall Link’s glider in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. You might also be reminded of the open water sailing from The Wind Waker. But developer Awaceb co-founder Phil Crifo thinks there’s a better comparison: Grand Theft Auto.
“Even though it’s very different in terms of tone and theme, I think the way [GTA developer Rockstar] is able to build fictional worlds based on real places, and take those real places and make them get the essence of a place built into a video game world, has been a real inspiration for the way we treated our rendition of New Caledonia,” Crifo told Polygon.
Tchia, the new open-world game about a child exploring the wilderness, is set in a fictional version of New Caledonia, a small island nation in the Southwest Pacific. It’s where Crifo and several other members of the development team grew up; all the voice actors are local to the island, too. Rockstar has long created fictional stand-ins for actual places, like Liberty City (New York), San Andreas (California), Vice City (Miami), or Los Santos (Los Angeles). For the developers at Awaceb, making an open-world playground meant drawing inspiration from Rockstar’s ability to transmute real geography into fun.
“When you grew up playing GTA with your friends, everyone had that moment when you’re like, ‘Can you imagine if GTA was taking place in our hometown?’” Crifo said. “We did a little bit of that with Tchia.”
Instead of drug dealers and guns, however, Tchia is about the titular child and her ability to transform into anything in her environment — rocks, a camera, a bird, or a piece of flaming coal. Sort of like if Grand Theft Auto 5’s Trevor Philips could turn into a baseball bat or a stained T-shirt.
Crifo
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