Rexcrowle

Creating the fantasy of seeing your fingers tearing up through the game world when you pressed the back touch was tricky. It took a lot of iteration to get it feeling right, but thanks to Dave (Mm tech director) and his belief in the concept, he was able to prove it could work and spent a lot of time getting to feel just right.

But it needed to be integrated into a platform game! How do you make it feel powerful but not so powerful that you just destroy the world with the first press? Our design team really came through - John, Christophe, Swann, Dan were able to treat it as a really interesting special-power to remix and toy with the environments they were designing, to give it lots of tactile physicality, and art and audio teams were able to play up the comedy value of suddenly seeing giant fleshy fingers erupting into a world made of paper, and how the inhabitants of that world would react.

We then faced new challenges with how to communicate that this was an interaction that the player was actually able to do. Normally you can throw a button prompt in to guide people, but how do you tell someone to do something outside of the game? One of the things that really helped at this stage was when engine programmer Mark and tech artist Stefan produced a new shader for the game, which looked just like transulcent paper. It made sense, you could see through it, and that started to help players "get" what they needed to do. Poke it!

So yes, giant fingers ripping up through a paper world, hard to do, but a fun weird result!

It's natural for us, as a studio, to show a little more of how we make our games. I think that's more interesting and inspirational than seeing something so shiny and polished that you're not sure how to interact with it.

The crafting element of Tearaway formed organically, mainly from us enjoying making a world out of paper (most of our concept art is made out of paper, instead of drawn on paper!), and various ways of allowing the player to add to that world slowly appeared. Nathan Ruck, a programmer on the team really wanted to allow players to customise characters with paper and worked on implementing that system. I was keen we didn't dilute it, and kept it purely to cut-and-paste so that it was pure and had its own distinctive look, so we've ended up with a character customisation system where players are making stuff that blows our minds, all purely out of paper, scissors and glue.

But it was really important to us that this was all quick and easy to do, and integrated with the storyline, so without really thinking about it, you were making squirrels into royalty by making them crowns, or turn Elks into the colour of your carpet at home!

Lots of sleep. Avoiding paper. Playing PS4 :)

We don't really know at this stage, its really interesting and inspiring to see what players are sharing on Tearaway.me and helps us think about what the future could bring, but at the moment we're having a little break to recharge first.

pens are at the ready!