I’ve maintained for fairly some time that the oldsters at Aether Interactive are doing among the most attention-grabbing work in interactive fiction ever. Their video games repeatedly play with each the construction and interface of the style in ways in which ought to impress even probably the most cynical IF-hater. Recently the phrase wizards at Aether surprise-launched their latest sport Sol Hemochroma and introduced a full launch for his or her beforehand unique Subserial Network. The entire Aether crew got here collectively to speak about launching two video games in a month, and the way their work is rising with expertise. 

Alright, let’s cowl the fundamentals: Who are you, and what’s Aether Interactive?

Matilde: I’m Matilde Park, and I prefer to make experimental, narrative-driven video games. I’ve solely ever labored in Twine, however we’ll see how far that retains taking us…

Penelope: I’m Penelope Evans and I prefer to make sticky disagreeable video games in regards to the boundaries and constraints of being alive.

Matilde: Aether Interactive is the corporate we based in 2017 – Aether Interactive is the title of the corporate that made the faux JRPG sport Arc Symphony, in our Arc Symphony. So we made it the actual firm, we made it so Aether Interactive additionally made the actual Arc Symphony. The two of us personal the corporate, and from there we work with collaborators. Artists, musicians, technologists, producers. We each put on numerous hats on our tasks, however by and huge our greatest expertise is our narrative chemistry and our mixture of sensibilities and backgrounds. We’ve began to work fairly persistently with Sarah Mancuso as a composer, too, and it’s been actually nice.

You simply launched a sport referred to as Sol Hemochroma, what precisely is it?

Matilde: Sol Hemochroma is an adaptation of an deserted screenplay that Penny present in our scholar newspaper basement. It lets you information this film about 4 teenagers in Canadian suburbia encountering the horrible alchemy of municipal politics. Wait, sorry. “and”. Terrible alchemy and municipal politics.

Sol Hemochroma isn’t the one sport you’re releasing this month, you’re additionally launching Subserial Network on September 17. How are these two video games popping out so shut collectively? Are these tasks associated?

Matilde: We made Subserial Network predominantly over the primary 5 months of 2018, and it was our first time working with a writer. Part of our settlement with the writer was 90 days of exclusivity with them. So we made Sol Hemochroma inside that 90 day interval to essentially change issues up. We had a script we discovered that we needed to essentially adapt into one thing good, so we took the little interval as a problem for ourselves.

I really feel like Aether has grow to be considered being inherently technological or robotic, however it’s as a result of we had a fixation happening for just a few video games of that intersection between, like, trans expertise and artificial personhood.

Penelope: Many of our conferences contain me suggesting one thing is unattainable or inadvisable below timeline or tech restraints after which Mat and I egg one another on like two youngsters designing an unsafe skateboard trick after which I get up and we made a online game.

Subserial Network was initially launched as a part of a bundle, what has modified from that model to the complete launch?

Matilde: Well, we’re simply going again after this break and doing a little extra polish, night out among the pacing based mostly on the suggestions from the general public. Subserial Network is de facto experimental – it’s like, telling a narrative by Outlook and Netscape, principally, and establishing what the participant is aware of, what the participant’s company is, and their private feeling of development between these interfaces (and the adjustments to the interface and rethinking the interface as the sport goes on) wants tinkering.

I additionally needed to do some additions to the final two acts of the sport to utilize the stuff we arrange. I really feel like we did job instructing the participant, however I additionally needed to essentially problem them, too. The sport can be, nevertheless, fairly lengthy as it’s!

Penelope: More fanfiction.

Each of your video games takes place in a special time interval. Why do y’all maintain altering the setting like this?

Matilde: You ought to hear in regards to the subsequent one! Penny and I type of get enthusiastic about story concepts after we get collectively, and we simply chase them down so far as attainable. Like, I learn TV Tropes frequently, even now … Penelope’s been writing 750 phrases or no matter each single day for like a decade or one thing. She’s written like 25 novels. We simply love to do our takes on completely different genres and traditions after which typically type of subvert the expectations of 1, too. We come at tales from a special perspective, I feel; we’re typically not that fascinated with illustration for illustration’s sake a lot as having queer, trans perspective completely remodel the narrative and the construction. To rethink the origins of experiences that first fashioned these genres. We have lives which are at odds with these traditions. So turning them on their head can be, coincidentally, attention-grabbing and satisfying!

Penelope: We go very fast about writing one thing so we held on the robotic ideas for lots of content material. There was rather a lot to discover there. And yeah we’re each TV Tropes folks, we grew up on numerous related internet content material. I feel we every have an invisible listing of tales we need to play with, and we’re nonetheless figuring out how a lot these lists overlap.

Sol Hemochroma has a very distinct visible and audio character. How did you go about crafting this sense of aesthetic?

Penelope: it was type of a pipe dream of mine to work with Joan Chung (the character artist for Sol Hemochroma) — I’d seen her work at a con as soon as and was simply completely enamoured. I needed a very putting aesthetic, a mode you don’t see a lot of in video games, and he or she actually delivered. We labored a barely untenable timeline so we introduced in Allison for background work and he or she did an absolute feat of manufacturing.

Joan: From the very starting, Matilde and Penny’s intention was to make a sport that felt like a misplaced letter. We needed the sport to appear to be a crumpled piece of paper that was laid out and reassembled, and was able to learn.

This is my interpretation, however as we approached the story, I felt as if we have been a reminiscence that was ingrained within the mesh of human consciousness, and it was a little bit previous. Maybe a few a long time. The sentiment behind the story felt…actual, aged, possibly classic, however extra like a cinema of horror class with a room of seventeen 12 months olds who knew greater than they let on. And have been a little bit ironic, or punk-y about it. We talked about this at first – the youngsters put on outfits from a punk motion within the Nineteen Seventies, and the spirit of that period accounts for many of how the characters turned out.

From there, the visible aesthetic was straightforward to craft. I used numerous paper textures and made certain that the characters felt aligned to the intent of Penny and Matilde’s writing. My fashion is a mixture of manga and western sci-fi comics and it felt like – when Penny discovered me, that Aether Interactive knew what sort of artist they have been searching for, and we jived very nicely, creatively. It was nearly absurdly straightforward to attach with their sense of aesthetics. The visible character fashioned naturally.

The bulk of the backgrounds have been carried out by our structure artist, Allison Lownie, who did an incredible job. I solely drew two of the backgrounds, however what was necessary was to consider them like storyboards, or like flash playing cards. They have been meant to really feel like quiet, fast impressions that one of many characters might need drawn in the event that they needed to recollect what occurred on the day of the sport.

Sarah Mancuso (Sol Hemochroma’s composer): Sol Hemochroma is a challenge that got here collectively extraordinarily shortly (two months manufacturing time!), so pondering again on its manufacturing and growth is one thing of a blur.

A variety of various concepts have been thought-about for the soundtrack throughout pre-production: at one level it was going to be centered on solo piano, and at one other it was going to be all analog synth sounds. At one level I had proposed utilizing OPL FM synthesis a la early PC video games, after we have been contemplating a wholly completely different visible aesthetic. Eventually, Matilde got here up with the thought of a dreamy 80s guitar soundtrack and bought actually enthusiastic about that method, in order that’s the one which ended up sticking. I actually love dreamy guitar pop, myself, so it was enjoyable to get to write down an entire bunch of it for this!

Once we had an total course set, it was nonetheless one thing of a problem to determine precisely what to do with it. I had some free descriptions and a handful of reference materials (Memory Tapes, The Cure, John Carpenter), however it felt like we have been in considerably uncharted territory right here so far as translating that into a visible novel soundtrack. To some extent I needed to simply belief my very own assumptions about what would work greatest. I recall one level early in growth after I was second-guessing myself in regards to the music, worrying about whether or not I used to be on the identical web page as everybody else, Matilde reassured me to “Trust Sarah. I do.”

The first track to be written was Philosophy, or relatively, the primary minute of it. It had fully completely different percussion and the dreamy chord strums weren’t there but, and I might inform that issues simply weren’t proper but. Antimony was the subsequent to be written, and it set the tone for a lot of the remainder of the soundtrack. Once I went again to Philosophy and made some adjustments with Antimony in thoughts, the general course began to materialize and make sense to me.

Writing a lot music in two months was a problem nonetheless, particularly coming proper off the heels of Subserial Network and a few concurrent work I had been doing for different sport studios. I feel probably the most tough level was after I tried out three or 4 fully completely different potentialities for the second half of Litharge earlier than lastly arising with one which felt proper to me.

In the midst of my Litharge battle, Matilde requested me if I might write an explosive album opener for Trituration, the intro theme, and that was evidently simply the course I wanted to propel myself out of my inventive droop. I took some inspiration from Chris Slusarenko’s work on the Carbon Whales track “The Jeep” to have it kick in with an enormous arpeggiated lead melody. Reprising it on the finish for Dissolution was additionally Matilde’s suggestion and tied issues collectively properly, I feel!

By distinction Subserial is far more reserved as a digital desktop. What about these video games made you need to make such completely different UI’s?

Matilde: Subserial’s look was meant to blur the body between your laptop and the sport. The aim was that you simply needed to begin utilizing your laptop to play the sport in its personal method. We’d get this remark throughout beta testing the place folks wouldn’t know methods to navigate by key phrase with out writing down the key phrases for reference, in order that they’d must open Notepad and write it down in there, they usually have been like, “Can you make a new window to put information in?” Well, that’s the entire level! You must open another program to resolve the issue. That’s how Subserial works. There’s all the time info to salvage with your individual instruments exterior the “game’s borders”.

And as soon as you actually be taught that in the course of the sport’s playthrough, what a sport is type of will get pushed open a little bit bit additional, as cliché as it’s to say. It’s that idea that basically first excited me and made me need to make Subserial. I believed it was a very intuitive thought, but additionally a very difficult one on the identical time.

Sol Hemochroma is supposed to be actually materials, natural. It’s meant to appear to be items of paper in layers, so it has this crisp, black and white, parallax factor happening. The VN format and the look of a storyboard can have rather a lot in widespread … that was our entire guess, anyway!

Finally, if folks haven’t checked out an Aether Interactive sport earlier than, what ought to they find out about these video games?

Matilde: When I direct video games, I attempt to consider them as one thing you spend an evening with, get a personalised expertise with, carry your individual baggage with, after which have one thing to speak about after. They aren’t locations to dwell inside like Fallout or Skyrim. They’re locations to dwell in like a film, like a go to. They make a very clear picture, they’ve a very clear message to impart, or inquiries to ask, and there normally isn’t any ethical reply. There’s simply what you consider what occurred. I actually like pondering of them like motion pictures. That actually suits the size we work at, since we make video games shortly, with the scope of a feature-length movie (or a mini-series, at most).

Penelope: I feel our video games are reliably unhappy, visceral, advanced and loving. Aether tries to evoke a very robust sense of reminiscence, normally reminiscences unfamiliar to you—experiences from a life you half-lived, or by no means lived, or can’t even think about. To me our video games are returning to a spot in your thoughts and dwelling there for some time, no matter whether or not that place existed earlier than you began enjoying.

This interview has been edited for readability and size.