From the first moments I played Sword of the Sea on Summer Game Fest Play Days, to the great games created a few years ago, to the moment I was playing the latest games from Matt Nava’s game studio Giant Squid, I knew it was something like a gaming journey.
I played the beginning of the game. You start as an unknown character in the sand. Start surfing through the sand that looks like an SSX snowboarder. Except that you’re not on a snowboard. You ride your sword and glide across the sand as if you were on a hoverboard.
Oddly, the snowboarding experience was the inspiration for Matt Nava, the creative director of the game and founder of Giant Squid. He told me he was inspired by both a snowboarder and surfer and a sense of fast moving. When you’re in the moment, he said these extreme sports would become contemplative. It’s about going back to nature and connecting with it.
We’ve seen this kind of game in flowers. There, you can also convert the city from gray to green in your journey as you slide out of the sand or other peaceful games. Sword of the Sea has images of the company’s previous games, Pathless and Abzu. You don’t use it in violence while you swing the sword around as a mysterious character with the sea sword. As that character, you’re looking for something, but I didn’t learn what it was in my short demo.
There is beautiful music in the game, but you play the game in silence. There is no dialogue. There are no stories told. It’s like a video game version of a poem or a silent movie. In the game, you move around and solve puzzles, and when you do so you convert the sand into seawater. It’s a very satisfying experience.
I thought it was strange how giant squid was roaming around in this game, but other industries struggled due to lack of funding, high costs and changing gamer preferences. However, Nava revealed in our conversation that Giant Squid was on the brink for some time until PlayStation supported the company. It was an interesting chat in the middle of a very chaotic demo day at the Summer Game Fest.
This is an edited transcript for our interview.
Gamesbeat: What inspiration is yours for this? It feels like you’re watching a lot of travel and your first game here.
Matt Nava: And then it was our game. It was all about moving momentum really fast. That’s all the ideas. But really, the inspiration is from being a snowboarder and surfing yourself. When you’re actually doing something like that, you’re moving fast, and it’s extreme, but it’s really this kind of meditation. I’m really interested in the meditative and spiritual aspects of those extreme sports. Usually, when a video game depicts an extreme sport, it is only about its surface level. It’s not about the real reason people go back to surfing. You want to be natural. You want to connect with nature. You want to explore.
There is this kind of magical feeling you can get. That’s what we’re trying to achieve in this game. Take movement and speed, but enter that flow state and start connecting to the scene.
GamesBeat: Is it all silent? No one tells, is there a story?
Nava: Yes, there is no dialogue in the game. There’s definitely a character. You will meet another mystical character along the way. There is a story that unfolds as you pass through this world. There are plenty of different biomes to explore beyond the sand. The trailer shows that it was just released in the showcase. There are areas with a lot of snow. We tell stories in a story of a kind of atmosphere.
Gamesbeat: Do you still need a story designer to do that?
Nava: oh yeah. There was a writer in this game. It’s hilarious. We said, “Okay, don’t write the words, but please help us.” It’s great. In later versions there are few fragments of lore that you can find and read to learn more about the world’s backstory. You can read small poems about history. It’s very subtle and it’s our way.
Gamesbeat: Is it connected directly to your past games?
Nava: All of our games are connected in some way. What we want to do is come up with those connections for the players. We will definitely give them some clues and something. But we don’t spell out exactly how they connect. There are images from Pathless and Abzu, so if you play those games, you will recognize a few things. Certainly you can see the connection space.
Gamesbeat: animation and environments, both seem to be areas where you already know what you’re doing. Sand and the sea. Was there anything very familiar about doing this or did you need to learn more?
Nava: It’s interesting. “I played the sand game. I played the water game. This is easy.” But then I added this new one. In other words, the terrain is animated. It’s always running on every frame. In other words, we had to invent this new technology. This is a very custom technology that allows you to travel at high speeds in this wave. It was familiar, but it was a whole new challenge. It was so much fun.
Gamesbeat: What timing do you keep in mind? Is this still scheduled for release?
Nava: Yes, it will be released soon on August 19th. You have to finish this. We’re almost done.
GamesBeat: Which platform do you go to?
Nava: It will be available on the PS5 and PC, Steam and Epic Games stores. On the first day of the PS5, the PlayStation Plus service will be available.
Gamesbeat: Do you learn a lot about the hero, or does he remain mystical?
Nava: He is very mysterious. You learn more about him through these little pieces of lore you read in the game. He is at first like this empty armor suit. You watch the drops strike him, bringing him back to life. He is like this creature of the sky. He’s looking for something.
GamesBeat: How do you compare development to past projects? Did you move faster?
Nava: Every game I make takes about 3-4 years. This has been about four years of work so far. It started during the pandemic right after passless shipments. It was the first game we started remotely as a team. We had to understand it all. The teams gathered. It’s pretty surprising that they came.
Gamesbeat: How many people are there on your team now?
Nava: There are 16 or 17 people. A medium-sized team.
GamesBeat: Is that intentional?
Nava: That’s our identity. We like to keep it small. We are basically a close group of friends who play games.
Gamesbeat: There is a sword, but in general your game is non-violent. Do I have to use a sword?
Nava: It’s interesting. The first game I made with swords, we’re not fighting or anything. There’s something you cut. You saw the little thing I call the species of the sea. He interacts with it and slashes, and water comes out. There will be a kind of antagonist you will meet later. There’s a moment when it’s scripted. But yeah, there’s no moment of fighting in the game. It’s really about movement. The sword is part of lore.
GamesBeat: Are you thinking of this something that everyone can understand? If someone doesn’t know what to do next, is it a failure?
Nava: One of the big challenges when designing the game was to allow you to actually play and discover ways to play without having to research anything. Just a self-guided guide. We secretly teach you things as you go. At first, you will see a small text that tells you how you will jump, etc. But we do such a secret. If the player has already jumped before viewing that text, it will not display the text. We understand that you already know how to jump. We don’t need to tell you. We are trying to get you to join the game without getting in the way. It’s not a reminder that you’re playing the game.
Gamesbeat: Is it your own engine?
Nava: It’s an unrealistic engine 5, but our team is unique in that we do so many custom renders despite us being very small. It doesn’t look like every other unrealistic engine game. It has a very unique visual style, and it’s really because of the custom technology we put unrealistically on top.
GamesBeat: What’s difficult to accomplish?
Nava: The biggest challenge is to make sure that the character feels just right in action. We’ve been working on how it feels to get out of the jump and interact with the movement of the waves. We do a few things – you go faster on the sand. You go even faster on the water. Tiles will slow down. It automatically moves at speeds you feel you’re anywhere, even without player speed control. Ensuring that everything feels perfectly good when you’re moving is something we’ve been working on for four years.
Later in the game, you discover an environment with snow and lava. Some very surreal environments. We take these scenery you saw before. You saw the desert landscape. You saw the water. But it’s not like this. You have never seen a mountain of water. You have never seen such terrain move. There are absolutely no places you wouldn’t see in a game like this.
This was one of the biggest challenges I had when I was pitching this game. I came up with concept art. “Imagine this animation. Imagine these waves moving.” “You’re just showing me a picture of the desert.” You have to see it moving to understand that. But once you feel that, everyone says, “Okay, I’ll get it.”
GamesBeat: How did you raise funds for this game?
Nava: We are affiliated with Sony. Sony is our financial backer. They were great partners. They understood the game early and believed in us, believing in our team. We have had close partnerships with them in the past. We worked with them to ship Abzu on the PS4 for consoles only. They have always been close friends in the studio. They have an incredible team at PlayStation Indies.
GamesBeat: Have you ever said how well past games have done so far?
Nava: I don’t have those numbers on hand, but the good thing is that it’s enough for us to continue. They were successful. We still need to get funding from big companies, but everything in our game has found a fanbase. We have a trailer and have a discrepancy. Everyone was hooked. It’s really fun to watch. They’re already doing new fan art, which is a huge morale boost for the team.
Gamesbeat: It seems like he’s roaming around here, even while the rest of the industry is struggling.
Nava: It was a difficult time for so many studios to close. We were on the brink for a while. Last year was really tough. We fought hard and fought hard. Sony really came and helped me. They made it so we could continue and finish the game. I am truly grateful to them for the hard work they had.
