The duo decided to shelve the game for a time, but after Perrin gifted Tatangelo a copy of Soviet Space Dogs, a book filled with illustrations and reference material from the early days of the Soviet space program, 2pt had found their inspiration once more. ‘It was just a complete mess,’ recalls Tatangelo. Tatangelo tried adding a jetpack, but things just weren’t coming together, and the game lacked the tactile interaction with the environment that makes the final game so satisfying. The control scheme originally saw the cosmonauts reaching for wherever an analogue stick was pointed using any part of their body, which felt off and the movement systems felt too loose. However, initial prototyping of Heavenly Bodies hit a wall fairly quickly.
The initial desire, according to Tatangelo, was to solve the fundamental mechanical problem of movement in space.
‘You can’t fake that stuff, and I think we probably both spotted it in each other.’ Soon afterwards, 2pt Interactive was formed.Īfter years of establishing themselves with client design work and small scale games, the origins of Heavenly Bodies began to form. Tatangelo describes Perrin’s work as ‘analogue, traditional, illustrated stuff that had this kind of heart, which didn’t look contrived, or just coming from something that he’d seen,’ he says. From Perrin’s view, it was Tatangelo’s nature to appreciate detail, combined with his technical proficiency- aesthetics, but aesthetics that justify themselves mechanically - which was key to fuelling their working partnership. Perrin and Tatangelo connected almost immediately. ‘We had really similar values,’ says Perrin, ‘from a practice and aesthetic point of view – and, yeah, it was a long time ago, but the goals and values still align.’ Image: 2pt Interactive ‘It was essentially a playdate’, admits Tatangelo when recounting his and Perrin’s meeting as organised by Lade. Tatangelo and Perrin met at RMIT University in Melbourne, brought together by study in the Bachelor of Design/Games, and encouragement from Jennifer Lade, a Senior Lecturer in RMIT’s School of Design. The birth of 2pt Interactive and Heavenly Bodies You look at a lot of her designs and it feels like gravity is still there, there’s this sense of orientation – you sit on a chair, and the roof is above you.’ ‘Because no-one could say if it would work or if it wouldn’t. ‘What’s really interesting is - because her work was so grounded in building apartment blocks on earth - nobody had actually gone up into space yet, so her take on it, and her ideas around what she thought cosmonauts might need or want is quite interesting,’ Joshua Tatangelo told GamesHub of her influence on the game. Much like Balashova tried to find some middle point between the familiar apartment and the foreign space station, Heavenly Bodies tries to use that same grey area to create puzzles and obstacles out of seemingly simple tasks, which honestly feels like an extremely human compulsion. Much of her work remains in orbit around earth to this day.ĭissonance of experience is core to upcoming Australian-made game Heavenly Bodies: earth & space, gravity & weightlessness, art & science, intention & outcome.
‘I love my job since striving for harmony and determining the correct dimensions - still to this day - fascinated me, but to put it briefly, space has never appealed to me the same way architecture does’, Balashova said at the time.
0 kommentar(er)
