THE MAKING 0F.... AMERICAN ARCADIA

How a contrast of perspectives added extra layers to a side-scrolling platform game

- JON BAILES

They say the camera never lies, but that doesn’t mean it always tells the whole truth. So accustomed are we to the concept of a side-scrolling platform game whose viewpoint exists purely as our window into a world that it’s a shock to discover it might be someone else’s perspective too, someone keeping tabs on our every move. Fortunately, in American Arcadia, that someone is on your side, under your control even, along with the little running man at the centre of your screen.

It may have been no small feat to collapse first- and third-person views together like this, but for Madrid’s Out Of The Blue Games, the idea felt like a natural next step. While still developing their first game, Call Of The Sea, the studio heads decided they needed a second project that could be lined up to follow soon after. “For a small studio like ours, it’s good to keep doing games and not wait after you release the first one,” Tatiana Delgado, studio co-founder and creative director, tells us. They called a meeting of the design team and the core of what would become American Arcadia was spawned in that session. “Sometimes the magic flows,” as Delgado puts it.

Initially, they were keen to make a side-scrolling game, a desire that merged with a shared interest in dystopian escape films such as The Truman Show, Logan’s Run and The Island, and TV series The Prisoner. Yet their experience with the firstperson Call Of The Sea also led them to wonder if they could incorporate that perspective somehow. “We thought, ‘OK, what if you have someone inside this dystopia and someone outside helping that person?’” Delgado recalls. “And everything came together.”