FEIST

We're Florian and Adrian, the co-creators of FEIST.

We studied game design at an art school in the department design and liked that our studies weren't limited to game design but also included art an design with people from other fields of study. We are not so much interested in game design because we like games but rather like it because it encompasses many different fields that can (and should) potentiate each other in the form of a game.

We believe that Indies are always an important innovative force in all creative industries. They are able to work on smaller projects, take greater risks and therefore innovate more than big studios are able to.

At a time when the big studios struggle and innovate less, they give indies a competitive edge they can use to advance new ideas. It's also the indies and small teams that can push gaming to new grounds - like the many flash game developers that engage people with gaming that don't think of themselves as gamers at all.

FEIST started out as our final thesis for our Bachelor degree at the Zurich University of the Arts. We decided to form a team in January 2008 with only a very vague idea of what kind of game we wanted to make. We then fleshed out a concept of how we wanted to make the game rather than of what the game should end up to be. We wanted to be flexible in the process and to be led by experimentation. We ended up creating a lot of groundwork that wasn't exposed when we turned the game in for the thesis but we were then able to work on in the time since.

Our biggest issues where with conceptualization of the game mechanics and figuring out which parts worked and which didn't. The experimenting nature of our development process allowed us to make discoveries we didn't anticipate but also meant that we only had an idea of the game that was difficult to express. We needed a lot of time to concretize that idea and to focus the game after all the content we created.

We believe that the sum of all parts that make up a game should be more combined than just the sum of each other. The visual style of FEIST wasn't created isolated from the gameplay but created together at the same time. We wanted to create an attractive world which invites the player to explore and experiment. Suggestion can be more powerful than actually showing something and so we took the idea of a hazy shadow/puppet theater as inspiration for the visual design.

In the beginning we also used a lot of independent animation clips and illustration magazines as inspiration.

Feist is actually a German word meaning fat, brazen or cheeky. We liked that meaning and also found that the word looked more crude when written in all-caps, looking a bit like it could have been put together with planks.

Looking back, the development process could have been a lot shorter, of course, if we'd knew exactly where we were going. But it wasn't the aim of our project to most quickly reach a predetermined goal but rather to experiment and to react to our findings. In that regard the experience was really valuable and there's nothing that we feel should be avoided if we did the project a second time.

We started conceptualization in January 2008 and worked on FEIST until graduation at the end of March 2008. We've been working on it off an on since then, investing about the same amount of time again. We hope to finish the game sometime this year.

We are using Unity3D as our game engine and Cinema4D / Photoshop for the Artwork. Unity, with its modular structure and encouragement to write reusable code was a great fit for our project and we found that it was much easier to create good looking visuals with Unity than with other engines we had used.

You can always try to brute-force a result but if it doesn't work out, the result will be suboptimal. There's often a better way to achieve something similar with a lot less effort. And sometimes your findings can even lend themselves to something great that you didn't anticipate at the beginning.

We want to make a game that has an appeal beyond regular gamers. We studied at an art university and found that there are not many games that were attractive for the people we worked with. We wanted to create a game that would be appealing to those people and other non-gamers we know. FEIST doesn't feature a clear-cut goal or a stats-loaded interface but rather wants to leave room for the player to explore the game himself. We want to create a game that leaves room for the unexpected and therefore invites an explorative and experimenting gameplay. People who look for a challenge and a high-score based game will not find that in FEIST. Others who want to explore a new world and are open look for their own way through FEIST will hopefully have a great time.

We didn't do any conceptual sketches for FEIST but instead sketched the game directly in the engine. That took more time than the traditional approach but allowed us to to find out what works best based on it's final outcome. When doing paper sketches first, they often end up looking good on paper but then translate badly to the game, especially if they're adapted with too much respect for the draft. Huge parts of FEIST's look are due to the fact that we were able to discover what the engine is good at and to turn that into striking visuals.

We want to finish and release FEIST next. We don't know yet what we'll be doing after that and are open to any opportunity that might open up.