One of the more anticipated upcoming indie platformers is finally closing in on release. Fez from Polytron is the perspective shifting platformer all about playing a 2D character interacting with a 3D world, and it’s due out on XBLA early next year. The game’s designer Phil Fish was at GameCity festival to let the groups of the public have an exclusive early hands on with Fez, and I grabbed him for a quick chat too. Here’s how the conversation went down:

DIYgamer: How have the people on Nottingham been responding to seeing Fez?

Fish: Fantastically well. This morning I had a class of about 15 kids, aged 12-15 I was told, they played for about 90 minutes straight, and they were just entranced by it. They said things like “This game is amazing” and “I’m going to have to get an Xbox”, it was really gratifying. When I saw a class of young teenagers walk in, I was afraid that they were going to think my game was stupid and boring because there are no explosions in it, but they really liked it. Everyone so far seems to like it, it seems to work. We wanted to make a game that would suck people in, a world that would really absorb you. I’m here to hang out and talk with people, but a lot of the time, it’s just silence in the room, with like 12 people here, all just looking at the game, fixated with it.

DIYgamer: It seems like there’s been a bit of a renaissance of 2D platformers over the last few years, and Fez seems like part of that. How do you feel about that.

Fish: That seems to be the perception, but I don’t feel like 2D games went anywhere. I feel like I’ve been playing 2D platformers pretty much my entire life, or maybe 2.5D, or things that are not actual pixel art 2D platformers, but the basic gameplay: I don’t think it really went anywhere. It stayed alive on DS and stuff like that. The retro aesthetic I think is making a comeback. For a while there, it just looked outdated, when 3D games came along, pixels were the old guard, that was over, we were moving on. Then it took maybe ten years for it to become retro cool. Now it’s definitely a big thing, it’s kind of hip, the 8bit aesthetic is very popular, but I think what is happening is that in the indie circles, pixel art is easy and manageable, compared to 3D art, vectors and polygons. If you’re going to make a 2D game: You’re probably going to use pixel art. It goes hand in hand, it’s approachable, all you need is Photoshop or whatever software you use, it’s easy to learn. It lowers the bar of entry greatly to just to produce assets for your game, if you’re just one guy or two guys, and you’re trying to make a content based game, it’s a good solution to use pixel art.

DIYgamer: Once you’d got the initial mechanic nailed, the rotation, it’s pretty obvious how that’s cool. But it seems like it would be challenging to come up with lots of puzzles to use it in an interesting way. Has that been especially hard?

Fish: It was very hard. The whole thing started with the rotation mechanic, that was the first thing we had. Then the big question was: What’s the rest of the game like? What’s it’s structure like? At the very beginning of the project, it was going to be a series of linear levels, presented in a very Mario like fashion, just a string of levels you play in a linear order. Early in the project we decided that no, it was going to be an open world type game, that was going to be completely non-linear. It was adding these kind of notions to that core mechanic, that really made the game what it is today. We realised at some point that there is only so many puzzles that you can make using that mechanic, so early on it became as much about the mechanic as it was creating this pleasant world that people would want to spend time in, and not just focussing on gameplay and mechanics, but more about this mood and feeling. That’s when the game became about exploration, and not puzzle solving. When we combine this idea of navigating interesting 3D structures from 2D points of view, with the notion of an open world, that it really became what Fez is today. Yes, there are puzzles in Fez, there are many different types of puzzles: Crate puzzles, puzzles like what you would see in Myst, A lot of the puzzles are navigational, but I think the real string of the game is exploring these 3D worlds for 2D perspective: That’s what it is.

DIYgamer: You’re on the Xbox, it’s going to be exclusive at release at least. What is your stance on other platforms, going forward?

Fish: Ideally I would like to see it on everything eventually, but there’s only basically two of us making this game. Focussing on just the Xbox release has been a lot of work already. A simultaneous release would not have been reasonable, or even possible at all. It kind of works for us, because I wanted it to be a console game, before it was a PC game. I mean, we’re making it on PCs, but to me it kind of mattered that it would end up on a console, and people would play it only with a controller, on their couch, and not even have the option to play with a keyboard. We spent so much time and effort making this game that I want as many people as possible to play it, but at the same time I’m happy with it being on Xbox, it’s a good platform to release your game on, and it’s a console. We kind of built the game from scratch for that platform.

DIYgamer: A few indies that have said that they’ve had a not particularly good experience working with Microsoft recently, what’s your take on that?

Fish: Our relationship with Microsoft has been great, almost surprisingly so based on some of the stories we hear from friends and colleagues. We’ve been working with them close to four years, and I feel like straight from the get go, they got us. They understood who they were dealing with, and that it was a really small scale operation, and that it was just two guys, and they set their expectations accordingly. They’ve been super hands-off, they’ve been letting us make our own game however we want, they’ve not interfered at all, they’ve been helping us out with testing and technical issues. Honestly, they’ve been great.

DIYgamer: Any suggestions you might have for other indies hoping to establish a good working relationship with them?

Fish: Not at all. I have no idea. It really seems to be a case by case thing that depends on the strength of your game, and whether or not the type of game that you’re making aligns well with the way they are trying to manage their portfolio these days. Everything is always changing at Microsoft. We signed our contract with them years and years ago, if we were to try to get the same contract with them today, I don’t think it would even be possible because the standards are different already. If I had to start from scratch today, I would have no idea how to go about getting on Xbox.

DIYgamer: You said earlier that whilst developing the game, you got quite into quantum physics, how did that change the development process.

Fish: I was looking for themes and ideas to put into the game, and trying to figure out what the game was about to begin with. I started to realise at some point that it was kind of about reality and perception. Our core gameplay mechanic kind of played on those themes on a lot of levels. That pushed me to read up about these subjects. I got into quantum mechanics, string field theory, higher spacial dimensions. Obviously. it’s a 2D creatures living in a 3D world. It got me thinking about the 4th dimension, the nature of the universe, how things work, what they’re made of. That’s when you start looking at quantum particles, the smallest building block at we’re aware of in the universe, and how they behave and how they work. The place where quantum physics overlaps with perception and the way we see the universe, the way our brain works, and how everything we experience as reality is just us taking in the signal and interpreting it in a way that makes sense to us. Basically this whole train of thought that led to the catchphrase that we use with Fez: Reality is perception, perception is subjective. That became almost a mantra maybe about halfway through development, after I started getting into these kind of things, that it really shaped the universe, the story and the lore in the game. When I kind of touched on these themes, I realised that on a philosophical level, that’s what the game is about. Really it’s about collecting cubes, jumping around and solving puzzles, but the underlying theme became about reality and perception because of this research that I did.

DIYgamer: It seems like it’s pretty much wrapped up around now, you’re looking at an early release next year?

Fish: Yep, it should be coming out around February, if everything goes according to plan, which it never does. Somewhere around that period. The game is complete, it’s playable from start to finished, everything is in there. We’ve just been debugging, polishing, optimising and things like that. The creation part has been over for a couple of weeks now. It’s more or less done.

DIYgamer: Any exciting post-release plans, for when it is finished?

Fish: Travel. I want to travel a lot. Obviously I’m going to take a break, and I have bad bad wanderlust. I just wanna see the world.

DIYgamer: Cool. Thanks.

Fish: Thank you.

[Polytron]