GDC: Silent Enemy - Vander Caballero Interview
6We sat down with Minority Media's Vander Caballero to discuss their next game - Silent Enemy. A game that has its origin in Native American traditions, while also attempting to take on bullying. At first the game was meant to simply feature Cree traditions and hunting lifestyle, but things took a different turn.
"When we finished Papo we started getting all these mails from people thanking us. "Thank you for doing Papo - my father was an alcoholic and it heloed me to cope with this." And then we'd get a mail every week, even if the game has been out already six months right now we'd get these amazing e-mails from people. And then one of the guys in the team, Ruben, who was taking care of the project he came up to me and said "we cannot do a game about hunting, it's not a Minority game - we will not be helping anyone". And then I said "okay, so you find an angle, we'll do it". But it has to be really emotional. What we learned with Papo is that actually games can help other people. Can help them to cope with reality, it's not about escaping. We want to make games that are more like books in that you get something at the end, you get a learning out of it."
That angle was bullying, and so Minority found another important subject to tackle.
"We're doing character development in games that do not actually help us at all in life. If we do a game about bullying in where you will be defeating the bully by fighting with him. We have missed the point. You don't fight bullying by fighting back that way. You have to develop different ways to cope with the bullies, and that's what we want to do interactively."
"We started on the iOS platform, we started on the touch mechanic and we were having a lot of fun with the touch, controlling spirits, freezing water, it's really cool. And then what happened was... we needed to try the platform. And the Ouya guys came and said - "oh, that could work really well on a Ouya controller" and they gave us the controller with the touch pad and the analog. And they gave us a devkit and we started writing and "Boom" it was a perfect fit."
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