From an art pipeline perspective, how do you create cozy, intimate scenes that remain visually engaging over dozens of hours of dialogue-heavy gameplay?
Anna Winterstein: The biggest part of what keeps the game alive over hours of gameplay is the characters’ reactions to what’s going on. Their shifting expressions and poses take the game from a static comic book to a world that feels alive and inhabited. Our character artist, Dan, did an exceptional job at representing the characters’ personalities through their faces and hand movements. Then the big challenge, of course, is to integrate these animations into the game and make sure that they accompany the story properly; that is also true of every other dynamic aspect, such as music, sound effects, camera movements, etc.
We use spreadsheets that allow us to display the game’s script next to what we call the “staging” and to ensure that each line is directed appropriately, much as if we were making a movie. The writers did a lot of work on staging the days that they wrote, and we also had the support of a staging designer, Fede, who took on quite a chunk of that time-consuming task!
The Coffee Talk series is known for blending fantasy elements with grounded personal stories. How did Japanese mythology and yokai culture influence character design and worldbuilding in this entry?
Anna Winterstein: One of the specificities of Coffee Talk is that it uses its fantasy setting as a metaphor or an allegory for real-world situations. When moving the game to Japan and coming up with a whole new cast, we had a dual goal: we wanted both to reflect the immense richness and beauty of Japanese mythology and lore, but also to ensure we picked characters that would feel relevant in the current world and could carry the stories and themes we wanted to tell.
These aspects ended up feeding off each other. In the early brainstorming sessions I mentioned previously, we had a lot of back and forth on “We like this character, what themes do they evoke, how would that fit in the game?” and the other way round, “This is a theme we may want to explore, what would be a good character for it?” A crucial point is that Japan is very much its own society with its own challenges, and we wanted to tell stories that felt realistic and did justice to their setting, while still being relatable to our players across the world, of course.
AloJapan.com