PT: The dancing translates so well as a video game too. It makes me excited to see something like this happen. So music is another big part of the game. You’ve previously mentioned that you’re working with Oleg “Heinali” Shpudeiko. How did that collaboration come to be?

MS: I was watching when we were making these handmade animations of dancing and I was watching a ton of movies, ballet shows, contemporary dance shows and I found this one movie with Oleg’s music. I decided I would contact him, but he’d never worked with games before. He’d made music for one tiny mobile game for his friend and he’s normally working on dance shows and his hobby: electronic music.

So this is actually the musician that I wanted to work with but to be completely sure about it I held a small contest with a lot of friends from previous productions. The whole team chose the best tracks and they were Oleg’s. We are super happy about working with him because he’s super fast and he can make a lot of drastic changes in no time which change the game completely. He’s got this old piano and you can hear the notes that get distorted. We’ll release the trailer soon with just his piano music.

PT: There seems to be this invisible guard that prevents you from falling off of platforms. Why’s that?

MS: So it’s something that I’m really happy about and we’re calling it ‘Edge Guard’. Before introducing that you could fall from anywhere which is really common like in Mario for example. The problem was that it was really easy to fall of from different places and players were looking at the camera. More noticeably they were looking at her feet so they would not fall and after introducing Edge Guard, they completely changed. They started to look at the background and see the world.

Our game is mostly an audio/visual story-driven experience so it was something that we wanted to do. We didn’t want to combine our games with game design philosophies. When you remove all of the puzzles and the challenges, your brain will change to a different state. You don’t think about challenge or surviving in that world, you think about breathing it in completely. That’s why when you fall you start from where you fell so the penalty for falling is really low.

PT: In your original announcement of the game you’d mentioned you took some time to work on optimize the visuals of the game. Can you touch on that?

MS: I bought a Nintendo Wii U [laughs] about two and a half years ago and I was really really happy with that decision. It’s the only console I have at the home right now. I have a PS4 at the office, but I just play Nintendo at home, and I’m really really amazed that they are concentrating on releasing games in 60 frames per second in full HD with multi-sampling. They look gorgeous and completely smooth and I play them with my kid. I think that’s something we lost in this current console war between Xbox One and PS4, they were concentrated on making the graphics full of effects and not sharp. For example, have you played Uncharted 4?

PT: Yup.

MS: So Uncharted has amazing graphics, jaws on the floor and so on. But if you spin the camera around you’ll see this blur in the camera, this is something that I really hate. [laughs] And this is mostly because if they wouldn’t do that then it would be jaggy movement and this would be much worse. But when you play Mario on Nintendo, it’s super fluid and no single frame dropped. So I said ok, we can sacrifice half of the visual effects because we are literally sacrificing half of the processing power that we have. There’s this quality that was lost and we should say that we don’t like it.

Bound is super crystal clear. It has proper multi-sampling, not fake sampling with jagginess, so that means we have to sacrifice a lot of stuff but it’s not like we have a lot of extra processing power. We’re right on the edge, so we’re working with QA all the time, so if we find a piece of level that’s jaggy then we optimize that part. It’s currently running at 60 at every part of the game. I would like to see if people actually react to it. I wonder if people will respect that and think that it’s the proper way that games should look on TV’s. For example like in the Amiga times or the Commodore 64. There was a time when those games were super fluid like Super Nintendo. They were so fluid that when you saw a game that was running in a lower frame rate, you’d think the console was broken or something.

PT: I dig that, but since you mentioned Nintendo, which ones are your favorites?

MS: I can easily say that one of my favorite games is Super Mario 3D World,the latest one. I’ve played a lot of Mario’s on 3DS and this is the best version and complete evolution in every way. They’ve taken and curated the stuff that was always working and added new stuff. For me and my kid, it’s like the best game to play over and over again and we’ve beat it like ten times already. If I could count the hours spent playing that game, it would be crazy. Probably something like 500 hours or something like that and normally I don’t play too much of games that take too much of your time like MMOs or Free-to-Play games. But normally I play Super Mario with my kid. It’s a family experience. We help each other and so on. This is the exception for me. I usually don’t like to play long games like they say Witcher 3 has a 100-hour campaign and think to myself “Oh no. I will not play that game.” I will drop it early on and I did, I played roughly 10 hours and I have it installed on my hard drive but I just don’t have time for that.

PT: So do you guys know when you’ll be releasing the game?

MS: It will be coming in the fall and we’ll have more information soon.

PT: Well thank you so much for taking the time out to sit down and talk with me. I really appreciate it. I know you’re probably really busy and I also didn’t mean to get in the way of Eurovision.

MS: [laughs] Yeah I forgot about that! And I was like ‘Oh no! I’ll let him know.’ And I didn’t know it would take that long. It was because of the voting process! It took twice as long. But thank you for your interest in the game too!