The Last Night: Interview with the cyberpunk sensation of E3 2017
There are games that catch the eye from the first seconds, and The Last Night is one of them. Unveiled during the Xbox conference of E3 2017, the title has been much talked about but has remained quiet since. We wanted to know more about it and had the chance to ask our questions to Tim Soret, founder and creative director of Odd Tales studio.
We thank Tim very much for the time he gave us, for this very rich interview about the game's development and background. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.
The Last Night is planned on PC and Xbox One and will be compatible with 4K and HDR. Its release date is not yet fixed.
Hello Tim. Who is the team working on The Last Night? How many are you at the studio?
Tim Soret: Our workforce is between 5 and 9 people, half of them full time, the rest are freelance. And we intend to seriously beef up the team in 2018.
How did you come up with the idea for The Last Night and what did you do before?
Tim Soret: While most of my friends were captivated by Mario and Sonic, I was -at age 4- mostly obsessed with Flashback and Another World - two French games, by the way.
They're called cinematic platformers, and as a kid, I loved the physicality of these games where the animations had a priority over controls (you had to take some momentum before jumping, for instance). Above all, they were really immersive games, with the sensation of living a real adventure, in crazy science fiction worlds, pretty close to the fantasy comics of Moebius.
Then I grew up while cultivating the same love for video games. At age 19, I started freelance graphic design and I made a career in the web, then advertising, motion design and special effects for brands like Samsung, Rayban, Nespresso, Cartier, Nike, Yves Saint Laurent, etc ...
When I was 24 years old, in 2012, a client and friend called me to work with him for a month in Hong Kong. It was to illustrate a huge event for Cartier, with video: it was a great technical and creative challenge, it was well paid, it was abroad, so I went there. It was the first time I'd travel out of Europe, and when I arrived there, this green, winding, chaotic, upright and warm town put a huge slap on my face.
I took a camera to capture my sensations over there, and you can immerse yourself in this city just by taking a look at this gallery.
When I came back, I was transformed. I then understood where Blade Runner came from, Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Flashback, Moebius, all that we see in science fiction and cyberpunk ... The chaos, the crowd, the juxtaposition of the modern and the traditional, the wealth that stands alongside poverty, the bubbling nightlife, the dizzying scale of the city around ...
Two years later, in 2014 with my little brother Adrien, we tried to found a studio and get into the video game idnsutry. We had seen the documentary Indie Game: the Movie, and we also decided to participate in the Cyberpunkjam, an online video game creation contest that lasted 10 days. We were late, so we spent only 6 days without sleep trying to release a small tribute to Flashback, with an urban, nocturne and rain-soaked look similar to Blade Runner.
We were happy with our little free Flash thing, we let time pass ... and then one morning we woke up and realized that we had won the competition, among the 250 games posted. Suddenly, tens of thousands of players rushed on the game, the press made headlines about us, the web was excited and we realized that we may have been onto something there. Cyberpunk was a dead and forgotten genre in 2014, it was long before it came back with the remake of Ghost in the Shell or Blade Runner 2049, so we started thinking that if people liked what we could make in 6 days, what would happen if we took the time to do things right?
Three years later, as the project became more mature, we discovered how to set up a studio, raise funds, assemble a team, move abroad, imagine and draw the universe, learn to use a real video game engine, explore what we were able to do, while some left and others stayed ... Three years later, with my team, I released a trailer that was shown at E3, and there it was ... completely unheard of.
The trailer shown at E3 was reminiscent of Blade Runner in its atmosphere. Is this film part of your big influences? What are they?
Tim Soret: Blade Runner is the visual standard for cyberpunk. Although it was filmed in 1982, it's still impeccable 35 years later. No one has since succeeded in surpassing it, portraying the future in such a rich, credible and sensual way. Of course, it's a major influence. That said, I'm looking to portray a more welcoming, greener, warmer future. The Last Night is not necessarily a dystopia.
What interests me is not to follow a detective, a cop or a hacker, but it's the story of this couple in the street, this girl who goes to school (if there still is one), this woman who goes to work (if there still is too). What does it look like in the future to take public transportation, go shopping, party, make love?
This is what science fiction and cyberpunk lack. Only Black Mirror does it a bit, but the writers are only interested in a detail of society per episode, so it's quite limited. What is interesting is to see how each change of society interconnects with the rest. How everything is organized, transformed, how manners evolve, what is the impact on the life of an anonymous person, that's what fascinates me. As if we could show our lives, our social networks, our jobs, our video games, our porn, to people we would have brought back from the year 1850. Imagine the huge slap in the face they would take. Well, I intend to inflict the same.
For our readers, could you pitch the game in a few words please: what is the goal of the game, what is it about?
Tim Soret: The Last Night is an action-adventure game, a science-fiction drama, draped with spleen and melancholy. You wake up every night in your apartment. Your neighbors make noise, a dog barks while a baby is crying, the subway makes the floor vibrate, the debts pile up, your friends do not call you anymore, and the small jobs are becoming more and more rare because of your dirty online reputation. In the city, you are free to reach whoever you want where you want, take the metro to go to the red light district, go for a drink with a friend or go to work ...
But while everyone spends their life in augmented reality, dodging hordes of imaginary zombies, streaming drunken evenings and playing characters like a life-size MMO, you are not. You are incompatible, because of a serious accident that damaged your brain when you were a kid. Alone, isolated, disgusted by this world that isn't waiting for you, you feel deep inside you the urge to fuck everything up, to awaken the world of this absurd nightmare. Night after night, from meeting to meeting, your life will take a turn that will disrupt you forever.
How did you come from a 'little project' to getting E3 coverage? What happens when you go in prime time at the conference of a big manufacturer for example? Is it Microsoft who contacted you in this case?
Tim Soret: The first people in the industry to have spotted and supported us are the people at ID@Xbox, the Xbox Independent Gaming Support Program. They knew we were working on something visually innovative. I designed The Last Night to evoke the pixelated games of our childhood, but as embellished by memory rather than simply retro ... Hence this mix between old-fashioned sprites and next-gen lights and effects, that I had never seen in any game until then.
Two months before E3, Microsoft went to see us to know if we could prepare something worthy of E3. We had nothing really convincing to show them, but we told them that we were confident and that we could do it. Actually, we were afraid of failure, to be honest. I called a Parisian friend to help us in London, and with the rest of the team we gave everything we could. The trailer was interesting and different enough that Microsoft decided to put it as-is in the conference, next to the trailers of giant titles made with millions of dollars. It was surreal.
Have you seen a difference before/after E3 in terms of exposure, and what has changed (or not) for you and your approach to the game?
Tim Soret: It exceeded all our expectations. Even if deep within me I was hoping for such success, it was impossible to say it to anyone during these 3 years, it would have seemed pretentious, it was incomprehensible for most people. So to see the players cheering and wanting the game, it was pure joy. What a fucking joy to see that people have connected with what we were trying to do. I was not sure it would interest that many people. It was a funny bet, many people questioned the abandonment of my career to embark on a pixel art project. In hindsight, it's mainly because no one except myself imagined where I could take this style ... Hence the importance of trusting yourself and getting started, sometimes in a little naive and shameless way.
The minute the trailer had aired The Last Night got propelled as a Twitter top trend, before everything else.
Tens of thousands of journalists, developers we admired and players told us it was the most interesting game of the conference. Our phones all died in less than 15 minutes because of the notifications. Incredible. I still could not believe it, I felt like an impostor: me, the little French developer who does something in pixel art with not even a hundredth of an AAA game's budget. We went from unknown to the eyes of the general public to highly anticipated indie game, as was the case with Cuphead in 2013, or Ori and the Blind Forest. It was incredible. So, as before, we did not know if it was going to affect the general public, we might be able to do 30% of what we had in mind. This validation of the public at E3 has allowed us to receive crazy opportunities that I can not talk about here. Not yet. In any case, know that we work to make the game as rich and complete as we can, even if it will take more time.
So where's the game at? What about its progress? Is it releasing this year?
Tim Soret: There is still some serious work to do. We have all the tools in place, all the workflows are there, the universe is set, almost all the features are programmed. But now I don't have the budget and the team I need to make the project a success yet. We have yet to release the majority of the assets -mostly animations and setpieces-. We can not announce anything for the moment. We do our best to recruit and speed up all that. You'll know more in a few months. But I absolutely do not want to release the game if we don't have a level of finish worthy of a great indie game. I don't care about 2018, the dates are all artificial, there are plenty of games to play in the meantime. What matters is that the work be complete, fascinating, its potential exploited thoroughly and that we release everything we could rather than do 3 DLCs and two bland sequels.
Small technical question: is it difficult to work on pixel art? Why did you choose this rendering? Tribute to Flashback?
Tim Soret: Pixel art, unlike what it seems, is very difficult to master at this level. We really have to find artists capable of making such sets. We have to spend a lot of time training new talent to the special 3D style of The Last Night. Obviously this is partly a tribute to Flashback, but not only. It's mostly the sets of old 2D fighting games like Garou Mark of the Wolves.
I have always found them sublime, and I have always wondered why there was no such scenery in more action/adventure-oriented games. And since nobody did, I thought I had to do it myself. That said, we quickly realized the time it would take and the limitations of lighting and parallax. I wanted shadows, reflections, physics... And the only way I found to reconcile all that is the rendering you have today.
If you want to have more details on the genesis of The Last Night in video, go see the "making of" video for the trailer that I made.
Finally, do you have new pictures to offer us during this interview? We're rather fans of the art style at Xboxygen!
Tim Soret: No, no new pictures, I don't want to spoil the game too much. I intend to drip-feed the revelations for the trailers.
Thank you Xboxygen. See you soon!
