Name: How Culture & History Inspired the Design of Falcon Age
Uploaded: 2019-05-24T21:01:30.000Z
Duration: 5 min 53 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Me growing up, and my sister and my brother growing up where it's like we have these two cultures, right.

So we have traditional Asian parents and expectations.

So like I could be an engineer, doctor, uh...

My brother wanted to make films and my sister got into fashion so it's like, yeah.

My name is Chandana Ekanayake, I go by Eka.

I work at Outerloop Games, we're making a game called Falcon Age.

I tend to kind of always kinda have a Google doc of ideas.

And when I saw a YouTube clip of a giant golden eagle attacking a mountain goat on YouTube, it's an old clip.

I had no idea how deadly and vicious birds were.

I was like, okay, there might be something there.

So we kind of, we work in Unity, as a lot of the indie game developers do.

I just downloaded some stuff from the asset store, just random bird models and then we just prototyped something out really rough.

And then depth scale changed when it lands on you was like–– Oh shit, that's magical, that's interesting.

So I grew up in Sri Lanka, which was a British colony for 150 years and it was a Dutch colony before that, and a Portuguese colony you know, going back hundreds of years so.

I looked at a lot of the games and at the games I play and we see a lot of perspective from the colonizers.

So when you have like a stranger in a strange land and you come into new land you end up essentially being a colonizer in the place.

So for me when I started out early on I wanted to see if we can change it up a little bit and try a different perspective.

And myself, Meg, our writer, one of the writers, she grew up in India so we have a lot of conversations about these kind of things and tropes and things.

So I thought it would be fun to, and interesting, to try that out.

So the perspective in Falcon Age you are on a plant that's been colonized for generations but you are one of the colonized.

So setting it in kind of a desert planet, it allowed me to have the idea of what if British colonization never stopped and what it would be like.

Oh, it'd be automated and it'd be privatized.

There has been a lot of falconry in India and Southeast Asia as well and Mongolia and Kazakhstan.

You know, the falcons are a big part of the culture there.

They're nomadic tribes and it's sort of right of passage to capture a falcon, hunt with it for awhile, and then let it go.

And by the way, when I was working on this idea for a couple years and then Assassin's Creed was announced and I was like, oh no, they're gonna kill us.

There's a thousand people working on their eagle, we can't compete with that!

Cool thing is, we're a seven person team and if we're gonna design a game around a pet we can design the game around the pet, right.

One of our goals was to have a balance between you as the player and the bird.

So when you get into combat situations make sure the bird can't do everything by herself and make sure you can't do everything by yourself.

So in combat you have a melee weapon, that's good for short range and medium range and the bird is your long range way to touch the world.

So she can go out and there's drones in the air so she can go hit one down.

You can go over and finish it off or there's certain robots that have weak points that you can't do anything so you whip it and distract it.

And then she can go in and like flip it up in the air and then you can bash it, so we're trying to mechanically have it where it works with both of you together.

You pick her up and then if you pet her it'll bring some health back, but you can also make snacks for her.

So you go hunt rabbits, you get some peppers, that'll be like a health buff like in Zelda or a defense buff or stealth.

So there's temporary buffs in the game that will kind of level up your falcon.

So we looked at a bunch of birds and chicken behavior, you know, there's a whole YouTube series of Steadicam, like attaching a Steadicam to a chicken and then moving around and they keep their head.

It's like the best Steadicam, nature's best Steadicam.

I mean, you know, part of making a game is doing the research too and it's fun.

We're like, okay, we're gonna do a falconry game, it's gonna be stylized but we have to sell it, right.

Like, the bird has to be believable and I feel like that's sort of why people are like the gifs because the bird behavior is, close enough to something that they've seen.

One thing in our culture, like having a mean auntie is like a good thing.

So we wanted our, the main character you meet in the game and in the trailer is Ara's auntie and we wanted to represent her properly.

Make you feel really guilty about all your life choices.

So that's been fun to kinda explore that in a game, which I haven't really seen.

I was showing my game, Falcon Age, to my 11 year old recently and I was running around.

And all the characters are kinda Southasian in descent.

He's like, what, you can put all brown people in a game, you can do that?

- Like, you're allowed? - Yeah, you're allowed to.

So like, it was cool, it was like, okay yeah.

It is important when you see people that kinda look like you or you can identify with, that you can aspire to, and that's a big deal.