A Coffee Break with: Frédéric Lopez, Crying Suns

“You have died, Admiral.”
Those are some of the very first words you’ll hear as Admiral Idaho, waking aboard a ship you can’t remember, one ominous robotic figure telling the tale of who you’ve been.
Because in Crying Suns, death is omnipresent, lurking in every corners of the galaxies you’ll visit: A combat you couldn’t win, a lack of resource leaving you and your loyal crew stranded, a bad decision taken too fast.

At quick glance, Crying Suns shares similarities with another spatial roguelike: FTL.
But while FTL was first and foremost a tactical, giving priority to its arduous combats, Cryings Suns has a story to tell. A cosmic scaled, epic, terrible story of humankind almost lost, and whose fate befalls your weary shoulders.

We’ve had the chance to interview Alt-Shift’s CEO Frédéric Lopez, and get a glimpse at how a team of 10 can write a game of a thousand, crying suns!

“Let’s be honest. What we really want is the player to act like Admiral Adama in Battlestar Galactica”

Hi Frédéric, and welcome to our Coffee Break!
Let’s begin with the obvious:
Crying Suns is absolutely GORGEOUS, that pixel art is to die for.
It shows just enough to set the grim, mysterious mood, and let the imagination goes beyond.
How many artists were working on the game? How did you pitch them to get that artstyle?

We were 4 people contributing to the graphics. Uriel Lacroix on pixelart design and animation, Louis-Julien Berthe on 3D modeling but also on pixelart design and animation, Mathias Baglioni on the interface design and myself on the art direction, communication and some assets production.

The pitch wasn’t easy to define with words as I wanted to create a very unique style combining pixelart graphics with more modern 3D engine possibilities (dynamic lighting, atmospheric effects, etc.) But the main idea was: “Let’s make a HD pixelart space game with a deep dark and disturbing atmosphere”. From this, I created a few pixelart characters, space and indoor backgrounds, battleships side views and started staging everything together by making targets screens for the game style I had in mind. The most important part of this work was to converge towards a strong, coherent and unique identity, a graphic style that could be easily recognizable among others.
The result is a very specific DNA: a combination of pixelart aspects and textures, angular/wired 3D models, a specific color palette, everything wrapped in dense and bright space environments.

The setting in Crying Suns is space-opera, but bigger.
An all powerful empire expanding in all the universe, far up to the outer rims… And suddenly, the technology used everywhere stops working. Chaos ensues.
There’s something of a cosmic scale here, I know you’ve cited Foundation as a primary source of inspiration and I can’t help but think of The Metabarons graphic novel as well.
How did you come with such a setting? What were your inspirations?

You’re right about this reference. Jodorowsky is a strong influence for our work. We could also cite “L’incal” from him and Moebius, Enki Bilal’s work (The Nikopol trilogy), and many other sci-fi references that fashioned our artistic vision and our writing. Franck Herbert’s Dune was also an important source of inspiration, not only for the scenario but also for many graphics ideas, characters factions, and a few anecdotes you will find by playing.
From this incredible universe, we included one of Herbert’s powerful ideas, the Spice. Kind of.

In our universe, before they mysteriously shut down, the OMNIs (Crying Suns’ extremely advanced machines/IA — Ed.) were a limited, extremely-valued resource. The rich owned them and the poor worshiped them. Basically, those with the most OMNIs ruled and were the wealthiest. So, as is the case in Dune with the Spice, there is a constant desire from the major players in our world to acquire more OMNIs, no matter the means. And there is a constant effort being made by The Emperor of our story, Oberon, to control how many OMNIs the major players can have and also, because they are extremely powerful, how they can be used. From Asimov’s Foundation novel, we really liked this idea of a galactic empire that has fallen to pieces but has a contingency plan, though one that’s difficult to implement, built in to possibly save it.

It’s an interesting setup for a video game because it puts, right from the start, the player in a situation where all the odds are seemingly against him. It provides a rich atmosphere and gives the main character purpose.

Some people will call it grim, but to me, Crying Suns evokes deep melancholia.
We feel the void, the loneliness of space: Upon meeting those people stranded on a planet once their home, now their grave, or traveling between two abandoned ships.
Or even the main pitch: the terrible ordeal of a last fleet in a desperate attempt to save, not just the world, but the universe known.
How did your team approach writing to convey those feelings?

The backdrop for the story in our game is a future civilization built by advanced artificial machines from top to bottom. The question that interested us early on is what would happen to that civilization and the people living in it — people utterly dependent on the tech created by those advanced machines in every aspect of their lives from growing food to receiving medical treatment — if those machines one day suddenly and inexplicably shut down.

So we tried to imagine what that experience would be like for the various people, rich or poor, pro or anti these advanced machines, living in that world. And, yes, in a universe where people are suffering terribly in the absence of tech and are starving or dying from disease and are powerless to do anything about it, sadness is an important sentiment. But so is anger, disappointment or resignation, even elation, depending on that particular character’s background and/or beliefs. We tried to write characters and situations that would reflect many different kinds of possible post-machine tech scenarios in a world like this and the various emotions attached to that.

On the gameplay side, we also wanted to create various emotions for the player. We tried to make the game challenging, not just in terms of skill, but ethically as well. In the game, you take on the role of Admiral Ellys Idaho who’s trying to do what’s best for his ship and crew, basically anything that helps this particular batch of clones to live longer so that they can possibly save The Empire and turn the advanced machines back on again. But, as you’ll soon discover if you play the game, what’s best for you and your ship frequently isn’t the best thing for the character you’re talking to who, let’s say, is starving and desperately needs some of your ship’s resources. As the admiral of your ship, will you try to help everyone you encounter — even when it comes as a risk to the safety of your ship and crew — or will your ship and crew always come first? You have to decide and live with the consequences of that decision.

Crying Suns was described at first as FTL meets Asimov’s Foundation.
The combat plays really different from FTL, though.
FTL was all about micro-management, while Crying Suns swaps the micro for macro — which emphasizes the epic scale.

How did you think the combat? Will it still be as tactical and gripping as FTL’s?

You’re very right about the scale change of focus: our very first idea was to add to the FTL gameplay/formula a sense of scale and a feeling of high stakes. We wanted to focus on macro rather than micro management. We wanted the player to feel that they weren’t just leading a few people on a small ship but a huge battleship with hundreds of crew members trying to save humankind no less!
Our first focus was the setup. We toyed for a time with putting the player inside a pirate galleon or a huge mecha, but the scale wasn’t big enough for us. It didn’t feel right. Our first epiphany came when we told ourselves, “Let’s be honest. What we really want is the player to act like Admiral Adama in Battlestar Galactica”. That was it for the setup. Then we iterated over this gameplay idea for about 6 months!

I think we can consider that Crying Suns’ fights are as tactical and gripping as FTL but in a different way. Crying Suns‘ focus on macro-management means you‘ll have to decide how to cleverly organize your squadrons types, combinations and positions on the grid to face enemies patterns and IA, while the tactical pause will allow you to adjust those decisions progressively. On top of that, you will also have to optimize the use of your battleship weapons that could have a huge tactical impact on the battlefield! Combined with your fleet strategies, the use of area weapons, blocking weapons, other more or less exotic and special weapons, plus auxiliary systems and officers abilities will allow you to design complex battle tactics.
Each chapter completed will also unlock new Battleships with different starting setups — some more squadron-oriented, others more weapon-oriented — the idea being for the player to adapt and take advantage of these various typologies.

Let’s talk about the mechanic of Officers –who act like “Heroes” in a playthrough.
The game has a pool of them — some unlockables — to choose from and have onboard the ship.
From what I’ve played so far, they seem to really shape the way we’ll play a run.
Can you explain a bit the impact those Officers will have?

Officers are the second choice of your run after the battleship but they are also the first stones you lay for your future setup and are important in this aspect. Whether you want to focus more on squadrons, weapons or future scrap is firstly defined by their abilities. Each officer have one ability so you better choose wisely depending on your enemies specialty and your own battleship limitations.

The second aspect you need to think about while choosing your officers are their skills: each officer has 2 or 3 out of 9 skills, the variety of those skills are the key to unlock new dialog choices during events and they also impact directly planetary expeditions’ success which are a major source of resources income.

But you will have to make some concessions since you won’t have access to everything, every skill, every ability. In fact, you choose 2 out of 5 randomly generated officers and you won’t always have your favorite combinations. Do you prefer having a bonus during fight or more chances to earn scrap in expedition and avoid danger during dialogues?
The randomness of this choice is an important feature that helps players to discover naturally different kinds of playthrough, it creates some expectations and makes every run taste different.

Of course, officers are just the kickstart of your playstyle orientation, more choice later on will give you opportunities to get your hands on your beloved weapons, squadrons or auxiliary systems.

There’s something you did and I wish more developers would do too:
When your Kickstarter campaign came out, you had a demo available.
And you kept that demo up during the whole development, updating it very regularly.
To stay in touch with the community and let everyone try the game at every stages, this is something important to you?

The demo, and the beta as well, were crucial in terms of gamedesign as we really based a lot of our process on community feedbacks. Our successful Kickstarter campaign allowed us to gather an incredible community that helped us everyday until the release through valuable insights, constructive comments and, regularly, long (and sometimes quite painful) surveys. Even now, they are behind us, supporting the team, encouraging us via Discord, Twitter, Facebook. It’s also a huge boost for our moral.

It was also crucial in terms of marketing. As obvious as it sounds, it’s always better for players to be able to test for free before buying a game, especially now that the whole digital economy is based on free-to-play.

Crying Suns is now coming out today after 4 years, and a whole team of 10 persons.
In retrospect, what was the most challenging part of this journey?

I will put my CEO hat for this one :)
The most challenging part was to be able to make it happen financially while keeping it in line with our initial artistic intent and a high final quality. It was a long and quite risky process, many short nights, but in the end, we managed to deliver a game that we are truly proud of.

I imagine you’ll be celebrating a while, and then some time spent updating the game, but I’m dying to know and I’m not a patient person :D
What’s next for Alt-Shift? Can we expect more Crying Suns content in the future? Or a new game’s in the works already?

We will soon release a DLC including additional contents (new characters factions, new battleships, new squadrons, etc.). And of course, if Crying Suns is successful enough, we might work on other, much more significant DLC, with new contents and probably also some features improvements that we had in mind but which were not possible in our initial budget.

We are also working now on the iPad version, that we aim to release at the end of the year or beginning of next year.

The studio already works on new projects although Crying Suns still takes some time of course. Some of these projects are still in the concept stage, other in early stage of pre-production. A lot of cool ideas are popping everyday in the studio, the challenge now is to explore a few and decide which ones have the potential to enter in a pre-production phase.

Thanks Frédéric!
We usually have a Coffee/Tea/Beer bonus question, but since the studio loves cooking, tell me!
What’s gonna be the party recipe for Crying Suns launch day?

I’m hesitating between Caroline’s chocolate cake or Mathias’ tiramisu :)

(While this interview was mainly an exchange between Alt-Shift CEO and art director Frédéric Lopez, game-designer Vincent Noël and producer/co-writer Julien Cotret provided valuable insights to some of the answers. __Ed.)

Crying Suns is out on PC/Mac and published by Humble Bundle.
You can get it from Humble Bundle store, GOG or Steam.
Don’t forget there’s a demo available if you wish to try the game first!

Follow the game via Twitter for more beautiful pixelart GIFs in your feed, or get all news from Alt-Shift’s studio account.

Listen to its wonderfully dark and ambient OST from Hammer Sharx via Bandcamp:
https://cryingsuns.bandcamp.com/album/crying-suns-original-soundtrack

And finally, follow us on @GOFIG_news for more indie games news ;)