Why design games? For Apple Design Award winner Felix Bohatsch, it's
about more than creating delightful diversions or telling a great
story.
"[They're] a kind of asynchronous communication," says the
Vienna-based designer. "I can share topics and thoughts with people
all over the world. I find that very rewarding — if it turns out
well!" he adds with a laugh.
Gibbon: Beyond the Trees turned out pretty well. Developed by Broken
Rules, of which Bohatsch is a co-founder, Gibbon casts you as an ape
who flings, swings, and slides their way through a beautifully
realized landscape. The flinging-around-trees mechanic is unique, but
easy to learn — even for earthbound humans.
Welcome to the jungle: *Gibbon* begins in a gorgeously drawn forest.
"The goal was to create a flow state with the gameplay, where players
get into the swinging and jumping without thinking too much about it,"
says Bohatsch, who conceived the game with Clemens Scott, Broken
Rules's creative director and lead artist. "What we hope is that the
device sort of vanishes, and all you have is the players, world and
characters."
Still, there's more to Gibbon than free-flying fun. "We quickly
realized we couldn't just build this purely escapist infinite runner,
where everything's lush and beautiful and happy," Bohatsch says.
"Gibbons are endangered. They're losing their habitats and their
forests are being destroyed. And that led to my second motivation: To
show the world the difficulties gibbons face. Not to be preachy — but
to show how it might feel to lose your family, or to live in a world
where there's maybe not much place for you."
The game's bustling cityscapes are a commentary on how gibbons are
losing their habitats, says Bohatsch.
The digital draw For a short while, Bohatsch felt that there might not
be a place for him in design. He applied to university with the hopes
of studying graphic design but wasn't accepted to the program he was
aiming for. "I thought, well, I'll learn more about computers, since
that's what designers use," he says.
He spent the next few years learning the tools of the trade and the
science behind it. Though he certainly played his share of games, he
never considered himself a hardcore gamer. What he did feel was the
draw of games — the way they could unify graphic design, interactive
design, and computer science.
When an opportunity to study game design materialized, he jumped at
the chance. "I'd never seen myself as a game designer, but that moment
was where I realized I could combine my passions and put them to good
use."
I wanted to evoke feelings that might be linked to the natural world
[without] re-creating it.
Appropriately enough, the idea for Gibbon came from a family trip to
the zoo, where Bohatsch found himself noticing the animals' remarkable
agility and almost otherworldly movements.
The Broken Rules team explored variations on that idea over several
years as they worked on other projects, trying to find the right
translation of that motion to a screen. "We didn't want a simulation
game; we wanted a sense of abstraction," Bohatsch says. "I wanted to
evoke feelings that might be linked to the natural world [without]
re-creating it."
To breathe life into the game's rich hand-drawn look — the lush
forests full of spreading branches, inviting vines, and mighty tree
trunks — the team turned to London-based artist and designer Catherine
Unger, a game veteran who'd worked on such titles as Tangle Tower .
"The goal was for the visuals to look like an illustration," says
Unger. That meant adding hand-painted 3D textures, rough edges, and
even a little wobble in the game's linework to capture that storybook
feeling.
The team initially used 2D assets to create a parallaxing environment
with the game, then experimented with turning the canopies themselves
into 3D splines. "It looked amazing!" says Unger. "That snowballed
into a discussion that led to [more] 3D foreground elements that gave
the game a whole new level of depth."
There was a lot of debate...
When it came time to replicate the animals' movements in the game, the
Broken Rules team, well, broke the rules.
"Gibbon has a kind of inverted control scheme." Bohatsch says. "You
hold when the gibbon has to hold, and release when the gibbon has to
jump. Basically, whenever the gibbon collides or interacts with a tree
or a vine, that's when you touch the device."
Early sketches show how the Broken Rules team reached for a "poetic
connection" between player and character.
To refine the mechanic, Broken Rules brought on Canadian developer
Eddy Boxerman to sharpen the game's main physics and movement. "We
never wanted it to be about pixel-perfect timing, but we did want some
kind of challenge that gave you agency over your actions." The team
tried out alternate outcomes for not lifting your finger at the right
time, including one that levied a penalty and another that... did
pretty much nothing. "The gibbon would just jump away on his own. It
was easier for some players," laughs Bohatsch, "but it was getting
pretty boring."
Gibbon 's jump-to-release mechanic subverts the traditional
press-to-jump action of most games, but the Broken Rules team stands
by it. "There was a lot of debate about whether this was a good idea,"
he says, "but I think it creates a kind of poetic connection between
you and the character."
The mechanic created a challenge for Unger too. "It was particularly
difficult to create the art style for the trees; the gameplay meant
that the trees looked a bit alien and unusual," she says. It was game
co-creator Scott who solved that challenge, suggesting that Unger and
team limit tree canopies to the background branches and keep the main
gameplay branches free for gibbon swinging.
The games we want to build aren't necessarily about being realistic,
but about developing emotions.
The poetic connection Bohatsch mentions is the keystone of the game —
and it's been Broken Rules's specialty since the studio's 2009
inception. The Broken Rules catalog includes such well-regarded titles
as And Yet It Moves and Secrets of Raetikon , as well as two more
Apple Design Award winners: Eloh , a rhythmic puzzle game, and Old
Man's Journey , whose main character follows his own arc of loss,
regret, and reconciliation.
"It's really about emotion, right?" he says. "The games we want to
build aren't necessarily about being realistic, but about developing
emotions. When I was younger I played a game called Echo , and there
was a moment when you held a button to grab hands with a secondary
character. It felt so great. All you did was press a button. But the
characters and their reactions were so natural and evocative. That
showed me how games can create a whole range of different emotions."
In the end, *Gibbon* is about a search for family.
Emotion isn't the only thing at play in Gibbon — the team has a
careful eye on embodiment, too. "Players tend to have a bias toward
the characters we play," says Bohatsch. "In Old Man's Journey , we
heard from players about how, as they played, the developed more
empathy for the old man." It's the same with Gibbon — putting yourself
in the hands of another creature creates that connection from the
first jump.
This immersion carries through in the game's environments. When play
begins, you're in a lush forest: swinging amongst spreading branches,
inviting vines, and mighty tree trunks. As the game continues,
however, those forests begin to thin out. The primal green backdrop so
familiar to those early moments is replaced by harsh, chugging
construction vehicles and the dissonant rumble of man-made machinery.
"I wanted the deforestation scenes to feel starkly different from the
jungle scenes, not just for visual variety but also for emotional
impact," says Unger. "The more realistic desaturated tones in the
deforested areas mirror the empty feelings of the gibbons in the game.
But they're also a true-to-life representation of a jungle devastated
by human impact."
The game's deforestation scenes have a dark, unsettling feel —
especially when contrasted with the natural beauty of previous levels.
In the end, Gibbon takes its place among Broken Rules's titles as a
game that's something more. "I want people to think about gibbons and
about how much space we can still give them," he says. "We want to
linger in people's minds after they've played."
And he wants to continue creating games that speak to something
bigger, something more universal, something that can't be created in a
vacuum — or, sometimes, even a studio.
"If I had any advice for aspiring designer, it would be to go out in
the world and live a life outside of games," he says. "Travel, talk to
lots of people, read books, go to concerts. Play games, sure, but
don't spend all your time with them. There's so much inspiration in
the world, whether it's coming from nature or other human beings or
other species. That's what we're trying to design: new ways to look at
the world through the gaming lens."
Learn more about Gibbon: Beyond the Trees
Download Gibbon: Beyond the Trees from the App Store
