Had the pleasure to talk with James Mielke, Creative Director of Tigertron. Let’s learn more about the studio and their virtual reality game, Jupiter & Mars. You can pick up the game right now for the PlayStation 4.
Can you tell us a little bit about the history of Tigertron, how was it formed. What does the name mean?
“Tigertron” is a portmanteau of “tiger” and “electronic,” which was inspired by our goal of bringing nature and technology together. We established the company in late-2015, although work didn’t begin on our first game until early 2017. I invited Sam Kennedy to join me in this venture—a risky venture at that—because I wanted to try and do something different with the video game medium, and try and focus on environmental causes as the catalyst for our game ideas.
Can you explain to our audience what the game Jupiter & Mars is to those that are not familiar with it?
Jupiter & Mars is an adventure game where you control two dolphins—Jupiter in first-person and her partner Mars in 3rd-person—who are on a mission to restore troubled areas of the ocean, at the request of the Elder Whales, an ancient race of guardians watching over the seven seas.
Do you believe that Jupiter & Mars is the spiritual successor to a game like Ecco the Dolphin?
To many people it seems that way, as there aren’t many games with dolphins as main characters, but to be honest I’ve never finished an Ecco game. I’ve always respected them, because I like dolphins, and I like the work of Ed Annunziata, but I never set out to pick up the Ecco baton, as cool as that would have been. I had my own story I wanted to tell of Jupiter and Mars’s relationship.
Who came up with the graphic style of Jupiter & Mars?
I guess that would be me. Having worked at places like Q Entertainment on games like Child of Eden and Lumines Electronic Symphony, this sort of aesthetic is sort of burned into my DNA at this point. Plus, I’ve spent decades DJing in clubs, so that neon accenting is just a visual style I think is fun. We knew that we wouldn’t have the budget to pull off a photorealistic game, so we decided to avoid even trying to compete in that arena, and went for something more stylistic.
How many people were involved in making Jupiter & Mars. What are there various roles?
At the peak of development probably around 20, if you include folks in production roles, but on average it was around 10-15 core developers. Our budget for the game was actually quite small, so we had to go lean in the early months of development, working with a single game designer, a single 2D artist, and a few modelers and animators. Once we had most of the game mapped out, we beefed up the staff to create additional game assets.
Were there any lessons learned from making Jupiter & Mars that will apply to future games you make?
As a PSVR-compatible game there was a lot of trial and error making the game initially for virtual reality. When we started it was still the early days of knowing the best practices for what works and what doesn’t in VR.
A lot of the post-release critique around the game has been regarding pacing, but early on when designing this for VR we didn’t know how long people would be comfortable wearing the headset, so we designed the game to be played for short periods of time, so people could enjoy it in bite-sized chunks.
I think we’ve seen lots of other games come out since we began development that support a lot of the things we wanted to do, but were advised not to. After all, we’d hate people to have Jupiter & Mars be their first VR game, and end up with motion sickness. They’d never want to play another VR game after that, so we were very careful.
Fortunately, with all of these lessons learned, if we do another VR game we’ll have a better idea of what works and what doesn’t. So the development process should be a lot smoother.
What does the future hold for Tigertron? What projects are you currently working on?
We’re hard at work on our second game in the same future Earth that Jupiter & Mars is set in. We have a lot of ideas, but it remains to be seen what platforms are the right fit for which ideas. I think it’ll be cool once we have a few more games under our belt and people can see how they all work together.
Currently your game is digital only. Any chance that Jupiter & Mars could get a physical release for the Playstation VR maybe with the help of Limited Run Games or Perp Games?
As a collector myself, Jupiter & Mars in a box is something I personally want to happen. So we’re hoping an opportunity to put the game on a disc and stick it in an eco-friendly box becomes a reality, but we don’t have anything to announce at this point.
Were there any challenges or difficulties when making this game for the Playstation VR?
I don’t think anything was particularly difficult—we had our ‘head tilt’ control scheme designed from Day 1—but the challenge was finding enough time to go through trial and error to find out what worked and what didn’t. For example, accelerating had to be done in a very consistent way, meaning we couldn’t have the player slingshot from a slow to a fast top speed. That was a no-no in terms of triggering motion sickness.
Many of the really dolphin-y things we wanted to do, like get a speed boost, or jump out of the water and do flips were basically in the motion sickness “danger zone,” so to be on the safe side we didn’t put them in Jupiter & Mars. But having seen how Wipeout handled it, maybe this is something we could implement in the future. There’s a difference between Wipeout, which takes place on a linear track, and Jupiter & Mars, though. If you hit a speed boost in J&M and then turned and rammed straight into a rock wall, how would that make you feel in VR? This is the kind of thing we had to consider.
Do you have any advice for other VR developers who are also hoping to create a high quality VR game for the Playstation VR?
That’s a hard question, because it really depends on what kind of game you’re making. But I think one piece of advice that probably applies to anyone making a VR game, especially if it’s destined to be playable with or without VR, is to design it for VR first and foremost. Meaning, don’t design a regular non-VR game and hope it will work just as well in VR. It sounds kind of obvious to say so, but there are so many things you take for granted in non-VR that you assume will just work in VR but doesn’t. It’s a lot easier to make a VR game work in non-VR than the other way around.
Before we end this interview is there anything else you’d like to share?
I think Jupiter & Mars is a game that will appeal most to people looking to dive into a game world unlike any other game out there. If you can take the time to explore the space and take it in at your leisure, I think you’ll find it a very unique experience. Thanks for the opportunity to chat with you!
