“I just want you to be Bob Ross.”
In a shed behind his house, Tomas Sala is building an ocean.
Oceans are his thing, of course, and he’s built them before.
But the shed is new.
Today, he’s working on a follow-up,Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles.
Emphasis on the ish.
Genre is a wonderful problem here.
But anyway, that shed!
Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles
‘I’m living the Roald Dahl lifestyle,’ Sala tells me.
‘Working from my garden.
Which is just smashing.’
The game Sala’s building isn’t just a very different genre to The Falconeer.
It’s a very different way of putting a game out into the world.
That’s very much on purpose.
It’s free to play.
It changes over time.
Sala adds and subtracts and can explore feedback.
Turns out I’m absolutely wrong about that.
He thinks about that thought for a second and adjusts it.
‘I’ll have money stresses in two years, let’s put it like that.’
And that’s a great position to be in when you’re making something?
‘It’s like unlocking a part of your brain,’ Sala laughs.
‘It’s just opens up to do functional stuff, instead of worrying about money.
Just less money stress!
It’s just, holy shit!
It’s like billionaires do one hit after the other?
It’s because they have all this available brainspace.
“Oh, let’s do this, oh, yeah.”
That’s, that’s how it works.
They have no stress!’
This was not Sala’s state of mind when I last saw him.
By the end of The Falconeer, ‘I was gutted,’ Sala says.
He got COVID, he sent out the final press build.
He fixed a bug and made the AI ‘killer’.
‘And that was stress compounding,’ he says.
‘And then it’s an Xbox launch title.
‘Okay, now you’re going to update, fix it up, be the loving developer.
So I did that till I couldn’t do it anymore.
‘When you put a book out you know, what are people going to think?’
‘Is it gonna do what I wanted to do?
Those thoughts are a weight that comes down towards the end.
Your launch is gonna be great.
It’s your creative bubble.
And then you have to go out and that’s where the rubber hits the road.
You have the tunnel vision where it’s possible for you to’t objectively see things.
At the end, I could still do it all.
But I was a machine.
I was living on the ideas I instigated a year earlier.
Enter the evolving demo.
It was a city builder, but strung across the encrusted archipelagos of the Falconeer’s ocean world.
But it is, well, unusual.
‘People went, “Ah, I’ve been playing this game for twenty years, muscle memory!”
‘But that’s fine!
‘And that’s actually working for me,’ he continues.
‘I get to interact, I get to respond, get to improve the game.
You had better ensure it’s polished as heck.
He trails off for a second.
‘You want to c’mon everybody.
You want to connect with everyone.
And when you might’t, it hurts.
And yet people embraced it.
They had to step across towards Sala and his idea of what the game should be.
‘Well, you have to become me,’ Sala says immediately.
‘This is my problem in life.
Because [my partner] said, what’s the most fun you had?
Ah, making the little towns.
Okay, why don’t you turn people into you?
So like, a city builder?
That’s easily accessible, it’s a popular genre that can make more money.
And it was super different.
It’s just one two mouse clicks.
It’s like, okay, this is going to be my accessible game for everybody.’
‘And then I keep adding on stuff,’ Sala laughs.
Not everyone can rotate and orbit around stuff.
So again, I’ve made something which is…
It’s because I’m by myself.
I can’t move towards the player.’
Sala makes it sound chaotic.
But it doesn’t feel chaotic to play Bulwark.
Why shouldn’t a game start with the creator addressing you personally?
Why shouldn’t the spaces of the game be wild oceans, deep and dense and completely inhospitable?
And within this design, there’s plenty of conscious thought.
‘So there’s things I want,’ Sala agrees.
‘I didn’t want an interface that’s a layer on top of the game.
Because I have this theory that we’re making games to turn people into enjoyment machines, right?
And games where people are more engaged in being effective.
So if you take something like Factorio or even Age of Wonders, it’s overwhelming.
you’re also not in the game,’ he continues.
‘And when you use a controller, as someone said, controllers like playing a guitar?
your fingers are doing it based on what you feel.’
Because then it’s not about controlling the machine.
Sala defines this kind of creativity as being engaged, I think.
Being engaged beyond the point where you’re solving puzzles or thinking about collecting resources.
It’s deeper than that, but also simpler.
‘It’s merely: what happens if I do this?
Or, you know, look at this little cove, I can make little pirates.’
‘I just want you to be Bob Ross.
Because that’s a valid, authentic creative experience which I enjoy.’
A free-roaming camera would break his simple interaction system.
So he creates what he calls shortcuts.
He has a zeppelin already, so that’s the way they can fly around and explore.
That’s his solution.
And between the conscious design and the shortcuts, the game emerges.
‘It is a Tomas Simulator,’ he says.
The game is a reflection of the designer?
‘That’s why it clicks with some people,’ he laughs.
‘Because I’m a human being they’ll dive into it and get fascinated by things.’
It’s a city builder, sure, but where’s the space to build?
There are no broad expanses for streets and squares and tidy civic life.
Instead you encrust yourself on these spars of stone that emerge from the thrashing sea.
So survival is precarious.
But is that really what Bulwark is getting at?
The more I talk to Sala the more I realise it might go a bit deeper.
The more I listen to Sala the more I realise he’s saying that creativity is precarious.
So much of Bulwark is essentially reinforcing, so much is gantry-work.
And all the while the sea is all around you, not to mention other civilisations growing out there.
Everything is a negotiation.
‘Consciously,’ Sala says, ‘everything I make is about to tip over.’
‘I’ve seen that myself.
There’s a tweet that I’ve read about unstable design.
By nature it’s so interesting.
In a game, if you make something too solid, it’s not interesting.
But seduction can also be fear.
‘Creativity is messy for me,’ he says.
‘It’s going in there and seeing what happens.
It’s stirring the kettle forever and ever.
You are entering a place where chaotic creativity is appreciated.’
‘Bob Ross is not a joke,’ he says.
‘You watch Bob Ross.
And it’s pushing paint around.
But anything can be anything.
That’s just a little bit of skill, or just that you dare to do it.’
He leans forward now, it seems, warming to this idea.
‘Because it’s not even the skill.
It’s just: are you going to do this?
‘It’s the point I had to teach myself.
When you first learn to draw or or do anything creatively, you make something nice.
And then you don’t want to fuck it up.
You actually want to wrap it up and it’s done.
‘And sometimes you fuck up.
And sometimes you get somewhere nicer.
His eyes gleam on the monitor of my computer.
‘You keep going, just to find out what’s there.’
