RS: I think it’s important to always be very sincere about the actual experience, and I think that’s how we approached it when it came to things around the pandemic and how different aspects of it can bleed into the world-building. For example, in 1000XResist, they all wear masks, but then we’re spinning out world-building that’s really about them wearing masks in very functional, kind of mundane, “boring” ways as well. So I think it’s always a tightrope. But really, I think our approach is always to be sincerely approaching the actual experience, as opposed to saying, for lack of a better term, addressing what is so obviously in the air. We want to engage with these things not because we want to repeat what is so obviously in the air, but to transform, reverse it, transpose it, and play with the gesture to discover new things about it.
AVC: 1000XResist was very well-received. Going into your sophomore game, do you folks feel any pressure to live up to that reception? Is that something you think about at all?
Tony Howard-Arias (from Black Tabby Publishing): You’d better! [Laughter]
RS: At the beginning of last year, I was like, “Oh yeah, the pressure doesn’t feel that intense.” But then, of course, as things unfolded, there’s mounting pressure. I remember it was at the Peabody Ceremony, and afterwards I was talking to Nhi [Do], who’s the voice of Watcher. And I was like, “Oh, man, how are we gonna live this up?” But I think usually my way around this is to put on the artist’s hat again, and be like, “Okay, what are continuations of practice? What did we discover in the last work? What are some openings and things left on the table that can kind of rupture and provide new spaces for us to explore as artists?”
And 1000XResist was that, coming from working on stage and in galleries and all that stuff, other mediums. What are continuations of practice of what we’ve discovered and explored? How can we go deeper in some aspects? I think a good example of that is the use of full motion video in Prove You’re Human. I guess it’s known because I’ve spoken about this before, where so much of the full motion video used in 1000XResist was a desperate move on my part artistically at that point, because we were so tired at the end of that specific chapter. And we also had the coincidence of having shot a film in Hong Kong in the year 2017, and so we’re working with the same group of filmmakers who shot that film for Prove You’re Human.
And it’s like, how can we take this thing that we have experience and are comfortable doing and really extend this into the diegesis of Prove You’re Human. So in this game, the virtual world is diegetically represented as real-time 3D, and things that are happening outside of the virtual world are represented with film and full motion video, so incorporating that from the very beginning of the fiction as a way of depicting diegesis. So to answer that question, we do feel pressure, of course. You know, you try to turn it off and you get into the weeds of thinking like an artist again.
AVC: A clear genre thread between 1000XResist and Prove You’re Human is that they’re both sci-fi stories. What makes you interested in sci-fi as a storytelling tool?
RS: All fiction allows you to do this to a certain degree, but sci-fi, from its very bare building blocks, lets you craft a space. You’re really an architect of this abstract space that you’re building and sculpting so that players or audiences or whoever can enter it and then reverberate their own thoughts and feelings inside of it. And I think, especially with science fiction and speculative storytelling, you really get to tell interesting lies. And those interesting lies are kind of my way into a lot of this. What kind of interesting lie can we engage with that breaks open thoughts and feelings that we wouldn’t be able to break open if we weren’t to tell such an interesting lie? And so that’s always my draw to that. Additionally, for us so many of the people at the studio are people of color, and so I think the future is a setting where we can perhaps see ourselves existing. As opposed to, it’d be hard for us to 100% look deep into the deep past.
AVC: There’s a very deeply personal element to 1000XResist and how it explores themes around the immigrant experience and so on. Do you think of Prove You’re Human as similarly personal, or is it maybe more abstract in its scope?
RS: It’s personal, perhaps in a different way than 1000XResist, and part of it is working with our main actor, who’s playing Santana, because in this way, her whole body is represented in the game in ways that we’ve never done before. And part of that is that there’s a photogrammetry-scanned model of her as the player character. She appears in these full motion videos, and so there’s a longer ongoing collaboration with her to understand how to build this character and how that becomes more personal over time. I think for us, there’s always an angle in which we want to make all of the works that we do extremely personal. And that’s part of being porous, you know, one with the world, and then also with ourselves. It’ll be very hard to say exactly how that will play out, but perhaps when it’s done, it’ll be easier to enumerate “Okay, these are the ways we found our way into it.”
AVC: Abby and Tony, what made you interested in creating Black Tabby Publishing?
Tony Howard-Arias: I think that a lot of it is wanting to contribute, in a small way, to a better publishing landscape, just providing extra options to people. I think that there are some things that are unique to our approach that we’ve talked about with each other, or with friends in the industry like Remy, that we felt like we had an opportunity here to put into practice. So, one of the things that I think is worth highlighting is that for the two games we’ve signed so far, we’ve taken both of them just on paper pitches. So they’re both vetted teams that have finished projects under their belts, who we felt like we could trust with funding and resources from the very beginning of the development process, and that saves them a huge hassle of wondering, “Well, are we going to sign something for this project. Do we have to pitch something else? How long is it going to take for us to be able to get started?”
And it also means that we’re able to come in at the very beginning of the process as partners and sort of work on the concepting of a project from that ideation phase. The term that Remy has used to describe what we’ve been doing is dramaturgy. I also like to talk about the role of editors in a traditional book publishing house, where we’re not making the project, but we know about it from the very beginning, and we are having regular conversations where we can offer an outside perspective that’s still rooted in the fact that we’re artists, at our core.
Abby Howard: We’re a small team that, because of how small we are, have had to see every piece of a project come together. So we’re people who have an understanding of how a game gets made, and pitfalls that games can fall into, and directions where you can see something veering off course, and being able to then see that before it happens, and correcting it to help guide something to its conclusion.
TH: Yeah, and for this early stage partnership that we’re exploring, like this concept, it’s something that’s easy to talk up, just in private or on social media. Like to say “People with money should come in and fund these proven artists immediately,” without something very concrete to go off.
AH: Yeah, “Why are they holding back from doing this?” And so maybe in however long it takes for Prove You’re Human to finish, we will be eating these words. But for now, we are happy to indulge in this experiment, and we’re very happy to be in a place where we can do that.
TH: And I think that the nature of this relationship has already shaped the game in interesting ways, where the conversations we’ve had carried into the writers’ room, and they have transformed the project from that initial paper pitch into something that I think a lot of people are really going to resonate with. And if we weren’t having this dialog from the very beginning, would the project have, you know, gone along that same course of transformation? Probably not. Would it have still been a very good game, given Remi’s track record? I would say probably yes. But I’m excited.
AVC: You mentioned that having game dev experience really changes the relationship between publisher and developer. How would you say it contrasts with the more traditional publishers you folks have worked with?
TH: I would say the most important aspect of this is actually a fiscal aspect, which is we’re still primarily a development house. Our revenue comes from internal projects that we develop, that’s where the majority of our time and effort goes. But that also means that we’re not beholden to a lot of the necessities of a traditional publishing model, right? There’s a lot of publishers out there where, you know, maybe one out of every 10 to 20 games they sign is a huge hit, and then that sort of carries everything else. But that also means they need to sign a lot of titles.
AH: They have a full staff of employees who are dedicated to various different aspects of publishing, because it is a massive undertaking, which is also why we’re taking on very small, kind of manageable amounts of projects, and the scope is also smaller for them.
TH: Right, with this smaller scope and without the pressure of “We need to find the next hit,” and “We need to keep signing,” we can really sit down and focus on the small number of titles in our roster and give them our full attention. Then beyond that, it’s just the conversations about art that we can have and pulling from our own experience. We’re not just developers. We self-published Scarlet Hollow. We self-published the PC version of Slay The Princess. So we have, we’ve had to very directly interface with both the creation process and the process of putting things out in the world. And I think that these sales numbers for the titles that we’ve made in-house demonstrate that we, at least with those two, knew what we were doing, eventually for Scarlet Hollow.
AH: Let’s see if we can carry that over.
TH: And I think there’s this aspect of creation, and especially the modern era, where any art you make is creating a dialogue between you and your audience. Art is a form of communication, and marketing becomes an extension of that. So I think we’re in a unique position where we’ve already had to develop and refine the interplay of creation and communication with our own work, and that’s something that we can bring into the early conversations we’re having with the studios we’ve signed.
AVC: Remy, what would you say are the benefits of working with a publisher that’s made up of developers?
RS: I think that something we perhaps don’t think about a lot is that developing a game is a very embodied experience. And there’s a lot of strange order of operations that you have to undertake that allows development to go smoothly. Marketing often does not really 100% consider what that is. And so you get a lot of crossed wires sometimes. So I think what’s been really nice and interesting is that working with Tony and Abby, who are developers themselves, they’ve had the embodied experience of making a game and releasing it and launching it, and understanding what it feels like to be in the early phase, what it feels like to be in the end phases. And so when it comes to actually doing some of the publishing side of it, I think it becomes very organic because of that.
And that seems to be what’s emerging to be one of the most interesting differences, kind of where developers are on the other side. But specifically, I should not just say developers, but the developers of the very specific type of game that you make as well, right? So it’s not Tony and Abby make roguelike card games. For example, if you were making a roguelike card game, and you have a publisher that also made roguelike anything, there’s a lot of things that I’m sure would emerge there, as well as you come to making and publishing ads. But our area is very specifically narrative driven games, which has so many interesting development challenges that I think you really have to go through it to understand what those are.
TH: Yeah, and that’s something I would also stress. A unique aspect of our publisher, we’re almost looking at it as building a label. So, the games we’ve signed are kind of in our area of expertise; they’re narrative-forward. They’re funny. There’s a darkness at their heart sometimes—I would say that’s maybe a little more true for Prove You’re Human than the one we’ve signed with SmallBu [ The studio behind Later Alligator — Ed ]. But it’s something we feel like we can actually contribute personal expertise to discussions about the work. And at the same time, we think that they’re a strong fit for the audience we’ve already built with our previous projects.
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