Sifu Aims for Authentic, Culturally Accurate Martial Arts Experience, Dev Sloclap Says
When Sloclap, the studio behind technical martial arts brawler Sifu, set out to build its game, the Paris-based developers were aware of the unsavory history behind a Western company portraying East Asian cultures. “Throughout the 20th century, the Western entertainment industry has sometimes shown little care in the way they used elements from other cultures in their own productions,” Sloclap said.
Bearing that in mind, the studio brought in both cultural advisors and a kung fu master to ensure that Sifu achieved its goal of being an accurate and respectful homage to classic martial arts and action films. Game Rant spoke with Sloclap to talk about how the dev team accomplished that aim.
Sifu: Where To Find The Shortcut In The Club Level
Sifu takes place in an environment clearly inspired by both Eastern martial arts films and Hollywood action movies: gritty industrial areas, neon-lit nightclubs, and glittering cityscapes. To accurately capture the game world, Sloclap said it ran content reviews with consultants from Chinese game studios. Those reviews yielded feedback “on things like displayed text and details of the environment’s design.”
The environment wasn’t the only part of Sifu’s design that the cultural consultants helped out. The player character’s design is also based on feedback from Sloclap’s Chinese partners.
“Character artists from China gave us interesting feedback, and we learnt a lot about how facial characteristics are perceived in China.”
The studio then changed the look of its main character based on that feedback, while at the same time staying true to the original creative intentions. Sloclap still wanted Sifu to have “sharp and stylized art direction,” and a main character whose features reflected “his
Read more on gamerant.com
