Thatgamecompany’s story writer, Jennie Kong, delivered a talk at GDC on Monday entitled “Evolving Emotional Storytelling in ThatGameCompany’s Sky”. Considering Thatgamecompany were the creators of Journey, the game that made me want to enter the weird and wonderful world of video game journalism, the talk was a must-see for me. Gladly, it didn’t disappoint and made even me, someone who never advocates the brilliance of mobile games, excited for a game that will only be available on iOS at launch.

Kong, a 15-year veteran of the games industry, has been working on narratives in video games for years. Over the course of her illustrious career, she’s helped to launch over 300 games and worked on franchises like Uncharted and The Legend of Zelda.

Thatgamecompany has always made games with extremely unique narrative styles and their new game Sky will be no different. In her talk, Kong talked about how the studio has three distinct narrative tools that it uses to make its games resonate with players.

The first is emotion through language. For those who have played Thatgamecompany’s games, this tool may come as a surprise as they typically are completely void of any spoken or written words. What Kong meant by this, of course, is the use of universal language, and in particular, music. This can be seen when looking at Journey, Thatgamecompany's most well-known title. Austin Wintory managed to compose a soundtrack for the game which utterly blended the experience of playing and emotionally connecting to the world. This blend of emotional resonance with interactive experience is still hardly ever seen to this day, and Thatgamecompany is incredible at using sound design and music to guide the players’ experience through the narratives of a game.

Kong revealed that in Sky, the studio’s newest and “most ambitious game yet”, their patented musical-narrative design will, of course, play a huge role. For a mobile multiplayer game, it’s intriguing to see how in particular they’ll use this narrative tool, as mobile games aren’t typically as fleshed out in the audio department.

The second narrative tool Kong disclosed is emotion through space. Once again, this is easily seen when assessing Thatgamecompany’s previous games. In Flower, the studio’s first major success, there are vast open spaces that evoke loneliness, empathy, and peacefulness. The player feels a strong connection to the world they’re exploring even when that world is mostly open, empty space. In a day and age where developers constantly claim that “worlds are characters”, Thatgamecompany is one of the only studios that follow through on this, although they don’t make such cliché promises in the first place.

Kong told the GDC crowd that there are various areas the player will come across in Sky. As they fly around the fantastical world of the game, they will explore a multitude of different areas which, unlike in Journey and Flower, aren’t based around one environmental theme like desserts or fields. Instead, the world’s explorative areas will each feel and look distinct. Once again, mobile games don’t tend to use space to tell emotional stories. Sky, however, looks as though it will harness the power of Thatgamecompany’s design standards in this way.

Thirdly, Thatgamecompany evokes emotion through action. This is, once again, beautifully executed in Journey. When exploring the desert plains, players can only move, jump and make small musical chirping noises. All of these actions are minimalistic means of communication, which can be extremely important due to the game’s cooperative aspect. Sky is no different and leans even more heavily on multiplayer. Kong emphasized how important altruism is to Sky, and one of the primary taglines of the title so far has been “a game about giving”. In Sky, you can unlock actions like holding hands so you can lead your friends through the world, and hugging, which Kong suggested was the action the studio had received the most positive feedback for during their “aggressive beta testing”.

When you consider the many battle royale games that have received mobile ports recently, it’s easy to see that the mobile gaming market is heavily set on games that involve violence and killing. It will definitely serve Sky well to be a game about helping your friends to explore instead.

Although it’s been in development for a long time (longer than Kong would have liked as she jokingly admitted to her audience), and although many may have it pegged as just a mobile port of Journey, I for one am hugely excited by the prospect and potential of Sky. Not many mobile games are as well thought out or as well designed as Sky appears to be, and fewer still are made by development studios as skillful as Thatgamecompany. Moreover, the combination of narrative devices that Jennie Kong discussed in her GDC talk are ones that create such stunning ambiguity for the player and arguably make Thatgamecompany’s narratives even more powerful than they ever intended.

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Sky is set for full global release sometime this year and will be coming first to iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. Details on additional platforms are still to come. For more coverage of GDC 2019, stay tuned to Game Coping on all of our various platforms…

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