The creators of 1000xRESIST discuss how creative constraints inform their approach to storytelling in 3D spaces. Hear from sunset visitor 斜陽過客’s Remy Siu (founder and creative director), Pinki Li (narrative designer), and Nicole MacDougall (programmer) on how they combined their theater and game development skills to create one of the decade’s defining narrative games with Unity.
Remy Siu, co-founder and creative director, sunset visitor 斜陽過客: sunset visitor 斜陽過客 is a narrative independent video game company that is focused on telling diverse stories through the lens of speculative fiction.
Pinki Li, narrative designer, sunset visitor 斜陽過客: Remy and I have been working together for a long time, and we've been working in the performing arts context within which has constraints all of the time. We never have enough time, we never have enough resources. And so something that we've really learned to do is lean into constraints.
Nicole MacDougall, programmer, sunset visitor 斜陽過客: Coming into a studio that was founded by people who did not come from a games background, one of the things that drew me to sunset visitor 斜陽過客 was, you know, people talk about, you know, your art is better if you have outside influences. Your art is better if you're not just remaking your favorite game.
Creating within constraints
Remy Siu: As a studio making our first game and not having prior experience, but experience outside, we really were trying to bring our artistic practice from the performing arts and from devised theater to making games. We wrote this way, we worked in-Engine this way, and we had iteration cycles that reflected devised theater cycles.
We're a small team, but you know, trying to tell a narrative at that scale is a huge challenge. And I think the kind of creative solutions that we took to try and circumvent that were the creation of new techniques for ourselves, both as writers or while working in an engine. I think that's really important to have those kinds of restrictions or constraints.
Remy Siu: So the realistic production choices that we had to make in "1000xRESIST" included a lot of things like the fact that there's a lot of NPCs who are clones of each other, which conveniently means they use pretty much the same model and we swap out glasses or we swap out hair, essentially. Character design was done very, very quickly, and we were able to populate this world with a bunch of individual characters, and they have, you know, individual personalities and a lot of writing work was done to bring that out.
I think a very good example of that is in the first chapter of the game, there's a section where you're chasing a friend, and she's kind of breaking down. In, say, a more resourced environment, we might have depicted the friend kind of running away from the player character, but because that was very difficult to do with a small team, what we did was use our existing mechanic, which allowed you to change time periods and create a kind of flipbook effect, which I think a lot of players have responded to. But that was the kind of technique that we used a little bit out of desperation and a little bit out of because we had those restraints and allowed us to kind of discover a piece of vocabulary that we used throughout the rest of the game.
In-Editor demo: Custom narrative tooling
Remy Siu: So this is what a Unity Scene in 1000xRESIST can look like. You can see in our hierarchy that there are all these time periods existing on top of each other – it's visual pandemonium. To help us work in an organized way, our programmer created a time period editing tool. With this custom tool we can isolate, preview, or mute time periods. We really need it in situations like this. You can see here there are 63 timelines in this scene. This allows us to jump between key moments in the story in the Editor and see any changes very quickly. We also use this tool to help compose the transitions of timelines in the order they appear without getting completely lost.
Environment design in 1000xRESIST
Pinki Li: One of the special properties of making a narrative game is that you get the player to spend a lot of time in spaces, and I think that was really integral for the type of storytelling that we were looking to pursue. I think there's a lot of places where we start the player off in a small world and then we start to open things up for them. Because of the 3D world space, the world gets to expand and contract in a way that I think strengthens the story. It's just a very spacious and kind of a lonely game. It's a lonely game that benefits from space feeling kind of like… forever? It also benefits from space feeling very, very tight and claustrophobic. And so for that reason, I think space is a big vector for how we're telling the story and how we're trying to create impact for the player. And I think that that would be very difficult to do in two-dimensional space.
Nicole MacDougall: The decision to go 3D actually was an economical decision for us, not just 'cause of course the prior experience with theater and the 3D modeling that was being brought into the studio. But when you have a 3D model, you can change the materials, change the pose, shine a different light on it… All of those things, of course, are relatively inaccessible if you're doing just like an illustrated visual novel.
1000xRESIST is available now on desktop and consoles. Find more Made with Unity titles on our official Steam Curator Page, and visit unity.com/resources for more content featuring Unity developers.
This transcript has been lightly editorialized for readability.
