If you’ve ever heard the phrase ‘Put your money where your mouth is,’ that’s good… but don’t do it. Money is riddled with disease. The phrase means that somebody ought to stop complaining about the way their bosses do things and go off to do things their own way. Even if it bankrupts them, kills them, or causes their mouths to fall out from some horrible infection.The founding members of Spacetime Studios, including me, are experiencing this fresh mixture of elation and terror that comes from doing things our own way. This means that when things go wrong we have only ourselves to blame. And of course we get pissed off and yell, spray-paint our monitor screens, collapse and cry ourselves to sleep.
The upside is when things go RIGHT. When that happens we erupt with jubilation, and (of course) yell and spray-paint our monitors, collapse and cry. We are fortunate enough to see this happen pretty regularly. I realize everyone thinks they have a great team - because you wouldn’t hire them otherwise - but to see evidence of the group gelling is tremendously positive. Of course once they read this, they’ll develop a complex and everything will squeak to a halt. (So if you work at Spacetime, stop now, forget what you just read, and get back to work!)
Okay. Anyhow. So my job as Creative Director is to manage the development of both the gameplay and the fictional property. Since we are working on an ORIGINAL intellectual property for our first game, we’ve had to come up with a method for creating fictional properties. And while there’s a bunch of details to discuss about how we do that, one really cool thing we do (that really illustrates the ‘money-to-mouth’ principle) is “Going Too Far.”
“Going Too Far” is a fundamental design directive at Spacetime. Around here, you really must at least try to go too far with each creative design. The ideas first need to be really fun and compelling at their core. But the dramatic aspect needs to feel totally crazy. Too crazy for anyone to ever pitch under any circumstances. And if it’s your idea, you would envision yourself being dragged off in handcuffs and thrown in a hole the cops dug for criminally goofy designers.
We have come to this principle the hard way. In the beginning we had some grounded, well-proven and conservative ideas from which to base our story. And the earliest iteration of the game’s fictional universe was, to be extremely kind, ‘not great.’ After a lot of hard work the second iteration was only slightly better than ‘okay,’ which caused us to get a bit frustrated. The team decided that we needed to free ourselves from the shackles of reason and look for stuff that lives in our hearts.
Back in the early days of science-fiction, especially before we went to the moon, space adventure fiction was crammed with really insane stuff. Beautiful, fantastical stuff. I’m talking about the sort of stuff that we don’t necessarily think of these days because we (as audience members) are overly familiar with the mundane rules of “real” space adventure like: there’s no air, the food is horrible, you freeze if you’re not dressed right, and how going to the toilet takes hours and help from several friends.
Here at Spacetime we’ve used the principles of “going too far” to push our fiction deep into the realm of fantasy, to a place where our point-of-view is sharp and clear. You’ll see things in our game that aren’t hard-science, things that are deliberately fantastic, that deliberately break some long-established (and I’d say ‘useless’) rules. We’ve learned to excite and enhance our ideas until we hit the most vivid, interesting, funny, horrifying, or bad-ass thing that we can imagine.
Sometimes we even scoot it back a notch before we start making it.
- Cinco Barnes, Creative Director