För tio dagar sedan, när vi var i den brittiska huvudstaden för att besöka London Games Fests New Game Plus, fanns utvecklaren Hyper Luminal Games och Passion Pictures på plats för att visa upp sitt mysiga äventyr The Day I Became a Bird. Den sagoboksinspirerade titeln lanserades dessutom samma vecka, den 16 april, vilket gjorde tillfället extra passande, något vi tog vara på genom att prata med Passion Pictures om projektet.
I en intervju med producenten Karen Troop fick vi veta mer om det charmiga spelet och hur det kom till. Det visar sig att resan dit var både lyckosam och inspirerande, och involverade bland annat bokmässan i Bologna:
"So, Andrew Ruerman, who is the founder of Passion Pictures, he originally... he basically found the book at the Bologna Book Festival, and he previously had done this with another film that had been very successful, he actually won an Oscar for, called The Lost Thing, where he'd found the book at the festival, turned it into an animated short and won an Oscar. So, he thought, I will go back to the Bologna Book Festival and do the same thing.
He came across this book, was immediately drawn to it, and then ended up working with Epic Games because they were looking to find ways to bring more stylised animation into Unreal Engine.
So, that was turned into this short film. It's a really lovely 15-minute animation, which, incidentally, you get as DLC with the game, if you buy the game, which we thought was... Yeah, we just thought that was a lovely little thing to do. And then I came along as EP in the games team, and immediately went, there's a cosy game here. It really confused everybody at the animation studio, because, you know, it wasn't their first pick for the kind of things that might make a game, and there's not a lot of huge gamers there and things like that. So, I pulled this one out, everybody got very confused, and then I went away and made a game."
Är då The Day I Became a Birds resultatet av en lycklig slump, eller snarare ett exempel på när förberedelse möter rätt tillfälle? Det går såklart att diskutera. Oavsett vilket går spelet nu att avnjuta till PC, och du kan även se den Oscars-belönade kortfilmen som ingår i den fullständiga utgåvan. Och på tal om att titta - hela vår intervju med Troop finns nedan.
