Creativity is from the work to 1
The style is clear and refreshing, which is probably the first impression of most players on the works of Grasshopper Studios.
Like the paper-cut silhouette style of "Killer 7" and the Cult element of "Heroes No More", players are all dazzled. You may be wondering, where did these creations come from? Often, this is closely related to the creator's personal growth experience.
On April 20, at the 2022 N.GAME NetEase Game Developer Summit, Tsuyoshi Suda, founder of Grasshopper Studio and famous game producer, revealed that artistic inspiration comes from two aspects, one is personal growth insights, and the other is team members and external creators. He laughed and said that condensing everyone's ideas into the work is his best game making skill.
Right now, the trend towards globalization of games is unstoppable. For game creators, it's both an opportunity and a challenge. In response to this trend, Suda Tsuyoshi believes that whether the game is facing the global market or the regional market, the key point is how much energy the game itself has and how to convey an interesting game experience to players.
Whether a game is interesting or not may depend on the creator's strong personal aesthetic taste, or it may adopt a popular gameplay on the market. Dig deeper, and it comes back to the question of how games should balance artistry and commerciality.
Tsuyoshi Suda has always said that Kusanagi Studio insists on doing creative innovation, which is a work from 0 to 1. As for commercialization, it works from 1 to 10 or to 100. He said that since creating Grasshopper, he has basically not made a game with a sense of explosion.
The following is a transcript shared by Tsuyoshi Suda, founder of Grasshopper Studios and famous game producer Tsuyoshi Suda, slightly edited:
How do you balance the artistry and commerciality of the game?
Rather than making games for commercial purposes, fundamentally, my first job was at a publisher, where I worked as a so-called professional director with a strong IP that the company provided, and I just had to make the game. For me, what is fundamentally not the personality of the writer, but the state of mind of making a product.
First of all, I think the most basic thing is to do every job that the company gives you. Since then, I have independently created this studio called Grasshopper, and in the process I realized that in order to create commercial value, I must first create something new. New inventions that arise from subcultures to mainstream cultures, and that's where I started. The idea that our job is from 0 to 1 is buried somewhere in my mind, and I think that turning 1 into 10 or 100 can also be called a business act, and the businessman who does it is not our role, we are just constantly inventing, creating new ideas over and over again.
This work from 0 to 1 is our strongest strength, and after that, it will one day blossom and bear fruit, and it may become thousands. So, instead of taking the liberty of caring about business, the market, and so on, such as exploring what kind of games are popular in the world now, the current trends, and so on, compared to these behaviors, the current era, including the game industry, not only our industry, the current overall trend of the world, is the things that are felt in daily life, how to bring them to the game. What games we should be making now, I sometimes think about and care about this, sometimes unconsciously, anyway, I often think about putting these popular things into the game. After I founded Grasshopper, I basically didn't make games with the consciousness of making blockbusters.
A source of artistic inspiration
In fact, every work is different, and I have indeed been inspired by various things, first of all, within me, like blood flowing in my body, which may have come from what I saw and heard when I was young or the most sensitive adolescence. I think it's all in my roots, and these may be the real sources of creativity, and sometimes it's possible to make content from these alone. If it is almost meaningful, seek more stimuli, such as the stimuli of the times, absorb them and output them to produce content.
And then there are other people, I'm just the core of my work and my team, and I still need to use a lot of external forces, in short, with the power of the creators, many of them are excellent artists in Japan and abroad, and our style is to use these creativity to make games. Of course, the most important thing is how I integrate the ideas created by the employees, and as a producer, I make judgments and then move forward with them.
First of all, this internal factor of my own is the fundamental, and with the strength of the staff, the power of more external creators around me, no matter who thinks, I will try to make it a similar "dish", and implement these ideas in the work, I think this may be my best game making skills.
The reason why this has become my root is also related to my professional director, how to cook the raw materials given by the company, perhaps what I learned in the first step of my career, which I cultivated during my five years at Human. Not only do I like it, how to make a work with a given ingredient, I always compare it to cooking, as if no matter what ingredients are served, I can serve delicious food. It's not a top chef's production, but whether it's something that the masses love or something that the core fans love, as long as you bring it to me, I can manage to make it into a dish.
I have this awareness, which is probably one of the reasons why people say that grasshopper's work was born out of various ideas. So it's not that I'm alone, it's how to gather everyone's ideas, and I think this kind of process is my area of expertise.
Artistic style conception & production process
Drawing some original drawings to conceive, then setting visual goals, determining the art style of the game, something like an art blueprint, and then assembling it in 3D is a popular practice in the industry, but grasshoppers do not do it the same. As far as we are concerned, it is constantly improving at the same time as the production, except for the adjustment or adjustment, and finally the art is completed. While synchronizing with the system, we constantly improve the art.
The characteristic of grasshopper is that the blueprint itself is a script, with the script I created as the cornerstone, and there are many situations in which the plot is promoted, of course, there are many different approaches. In this case, my suggestions and the story I created were assigned to each production site, and the content was done by me and other people, including other art leaders, to promote the production of art, which is the general grasshopper style.
Although there are also places that are separated from the actual work, in the script, in the case of the story-driven game production style, I often put the overall image of the character in my mind in each scene, and to a certain extent, consolidate their art style, and then create the script.
Some people, after reading my script, will say that it is easy to associate with the picture, I will think and create for each situation or scene in my mind, which is also directly related to my script and art style, which may also be a feature of our game. Depending on the situation, like game design or a design similar to boss battles, I would try to take it as an idea, incorporate it into a scene or write it, and it would become something like a datasheet. In addition, it can also become a reference for fine art and play a role.
Imagine the future of the gaming industry
The future of video games that I foresee is that by the time of the PS7, the hardware may no longer be a console, and I think it may be a plug-in, a strange plug-in, from which you can plug in and enter the game world. I have a favorite movie, david Cornenberg, called Sensory Game, which is the story of the near future, which has an unpleasant creature or something like that, or an inorganic thing, and inserts it into the navel or the hole in the spine, and when it is inserted, it can fully enter the game world, enter the VR world. This experience was made by the game designers, and there is such an incredible movie that is very famous as an alternative film.
I think one day the game console, maybe like the world that Cronenberg depicted, the game console should be a creature, like parasitism in the human body, I think maybe such a existence will become a game console, maybe it will be an insect, put a small insect in your navel, it will twist and drill in, and then you can play games and so on. While I think this is difficult to achieve, we cannot deny its possibility.
How do you view the opportunities and challenges that globalization brings to games?
Regardless of the current era, for example, with Japan as a stage, even though all the characters appearing are Japanese, there are many works that have achieved great success overseas. I don't think these factors matter anymore, just consider how much energy the game itself has, no matter where the stage is, whether it's facing the world or not, just think about how to convey an interesting game experience to gamers, I think the winner is the one with the high energy, which is the story I told in an interview.
Advice for newcomers to the game industry
If I had to make a suggestion to young people, maybe I would suggest pushing my limits. Now in this online world, whatever it is, aren't all kinds of things on the web easier to reach? It's easy to find anything, as long as the search comes out very quickly, but this is called forming your own cultural circle, and I think it is protected to a certain extent, and you can waste your time by spending your time only on the things you like. My advice is to reach out to something outside of your own cultural circle.
Recently I started to get hooked on X-Men again, and X-Men made me feel really good, and while X-Men has a lot of movies and games, there are still a lot of new-generation characters who haven't appeared yet. I think it would be fun to make a video game with a new X-Men character like this, and for a long time I've wanted to make Marvel games in Grasshopper, and to be honest I think Deadpool is the best match for our studio, but I think it would be good if it was X-Men. For people who make content, the unknown world, the things that are not good at, by touching and peeping and experiencing them, can become a big stimulus, it can be said to expand the possibilities, or people often say to broaden their horizons, which I did when I was younger.
In addition to what I like, I also go into contact with some external things and things that I am not good at, which I think was a great inspiration for me when I was young, and it is still my precious asset to this day, and it is also the origin of my content creation. When I stopped and looked back, it turned out that I was playing the game in this mood, it was a starting point that you could look back and make you not forget that feeling, and I often talked about it.
Specifically, at first my favorite band was called The Smiths, and he was the director of the video clips for that band, the film director named Derek Jarman. At that time, there were a lot of film directors shooting PV, although the topic was a bit off the road, the famous movie "The Silence of the Lambs", its director was Jonathan Dymmy, before Jonathan Dame filmed New Order's PV "Perfect Kiss", people who switched from PV to make movies, it was very common at the time, and it is now the same. When I saw that idea, I saw Derek Jarman's PV and I was shocked, and while the music was great, the images were also great. Although Derek Jarman's work has survived, it has not been possible to watch it in so-called streaming media as it does now, and there was not even a DVD of Derek Jarman's work at that time, when his work was accidentally released for a limited time in an independent cinema in Tokyo, and if that opportunity was missed, it may not be seen in this lifetime.
Anyway, I went to see it, digging deep into Derek Jarman, and although I was watching a movie, it wasn't a movie, what was I watching? I would ask myself and answer myself as I watched. This time in the cinema is a very precious time, and even in retrospect, there has never been a movie that I can experience. You simply don't know what you're seeing and I think it was a great experience. Things outside his own cultural circle can provide a completely different experience than before, and his work has that power.
I think pushing my limits is this act of peering into the unknown. If I had to make a suggestion, that would be what I would like to convey.
"Moved a small bench to class"
N.GAME is an annual industry exchange event organized by NetEase Interactive Entertainment Learning and Development, which has been successfully held for seven sessions so far. The theme of this year's year is "The Future is Now", inviting 20 heavy guests at home and abroad, university scholars to gather together to share industry research and development experience, cutting-edge research results and future development trends.