For a long time I'd been thinking about the video games of my childhood and how they created incredibly engaging story lines and profound character empathy using only a minimum of character animation. In Final Fantasy IV, for instance, characters could only face left, right, forward and back, put their heads down and die (unless they were engaged in a fight sequence, when they could also cast spells and turn into frogs.) But in context, even the simple gesture of a tiny character putting his head down was an unmistakably legible emotional cue.
The interface between the epic and the everyday is one of my most lasting fascinations, so I decided to give my adventurers modern dialogue and recognizable concerns. I wanted to explore how they experienced the predicament--constant travail in quest of a goal that's never fully explained--and how, in their own different ways, they might long for something else. |
