A Masterpiece Lost in Its Own Dimension, The Making Of Fez - Masters of Indiedev
The beauty of Fez and the fury of its creator
On today’s masters of indiedev, I would like to share one title I love, one that I’ve been thinking about during the last few years, we are going to cover:
Pixel Art and PICO-8! ❤️
Fez Hands-On 🎮
Development process 📝
The Author
Behind Fez my favourite platform indie game.
But if you think about the name of the videogame, you realize Fez is not anymore at the top of indie games on youtube, videogames newsletter, social media… is gone. It was released on 2012 but other games from this period can be seen again and again.
Probably none of your friends has mentioned this game in years, right?
There’s a strong reason for that silence — we can’t ignore the person behind it: Phil Fish.
But let’s focus on the game now 😊
Emotions are so difficult to describe and that’s why it is difficult to describe in which way you could be passionate about an interactive experience. Emotions are our main driver.
Fez was released during the period of the indie boom, at that moment it was kind of “easy” to come with a fresh idea and have success, the market was not saturated as it is now — around 60 games are released Daily on Steam platform.
But Fez didn’t came from the lucky timing that other titles benefited, the production level of this game was ahead of the average indie titles released back then (Late 2000’s)
Pixel Art and Pico-8
The usage of colors and shades stand out for their brightness and saturation, the author wanted to create a positive vibe around the character and his actions, calling for exploration showing incrementally those purple blocks
Those structures contains a meta lenguage within the game, characters that at the beginning of our session we don’t understand…
In terms of art design, the game is mostly built with those elements because I don’t want to share any spoiler.
As you can see above, I extracted the main colors of most of the scenes on Fez and they are really saturated colors with high predominance of cold colors
Cool colors can make a space feel more serene and calming or be associated with sadness and depression*
Reimagining Fez Art (PICO-8 Palette)
Looking into the details of the building blocks of the platform, you quickly realice there are tetris pieces. Smart decision because looking at those blocks is so pleasing to our eyes, you feel really comfortable with the landscape.
Within my style and simplifying the concept I wanted to re-create the idea so we apply Pixel Art concepts at the same time we go through this title.
Masters of Indiedev and some inspiration for us hobbyst creators 🎨
As you can see, Pico-8 palette is powerful enough to allow us to re-imagine, if you are interested on the pixel-art process, please let me know! 👇
Bonus! From Aseprite to picoCAD
Fez Hands-On
The walls are covered in symbols, paintings, and fragments of a language we don’t understand—though we know it can be deciphered. Most of the messages we encounter are written in that strange script, and many of the puzzles revolve around trying to decode it… and then solve it, which isn’t always as simple as it seems.
Fez invites us to start the game with a blank paper on our Notebook to understand the world, to read the intention, to connect with the author.
The whole videogame is involved under a mistery. The story starts with other villagers speaking about you, concerned of what you did… but you don’t know anything about that… how come a tiny creature would be doing anything bad?
Gomez is the name of our character, it feels heavy at the same time the response and precision of the controls are really well designed.
There is no other platform game with this perfect balance between being a little bit slippery and heavy at the same time, the speed and weight resulting in a really satisfying game feel, was perfectly calculated by the author.
As you can see at the quick Gameplay. Fez has been designed to be played not by us controlling Gomez, which I would say was the secondary target of the author, but we being captured by the Level Design and the possibilities at the number of interactions we are capable to do on each world scene.
The rotation of the world is absolutely insane, during the last 13 years of indie titles I’ve never seen such an impactul feedback after player press the button, we are both playing with Gomez and with the environment itself.
Development Process
Source of information: Wikipedia and Indie Game: The Movie
Fez is a masterpiece and deserve space on my site, but speaking about art (as I consider videogames) requires also reflect about authors intention and author itself, games are created by humans (unfortunately, maybe not anymore in the future…)
The development of this title took 5 years, a breakdown
People behind
Phil Fish. 2D-3D Artist and Director
Renaud Bédard. Lead Programmer and hobbyist experience in 3D graphics
Tools
Microsoft Visual C# Express and XNA Game Studio Express.[10]
The level editor Fezzer, was coded from scratch in XNA and inspired by SketchUp. (Source Edge)
Bédard wrote the game engine, Trixel Technology, which turns 2D tiles (”triles”) into sides of a 3D cube pixel
Fish created pixel art in Photoshop for each tiled side (”trile”) of the 3D trixel that Bédard’s custom software compiled into 3D game assets, which Fish would extrude as surfaces in Fezzer to build levels. Fish found the level design process “overwhelming”, and Bédard has said he was relieved that it was not his job.
Fish compared his design process to playing with Lego blocks and planned the more involved levels in graph paper to first visualize the 2D views before building the levels in the 3D software.
Source: Wikipedia
At the time Phil team started working on Fez (Around 2008) the tools and engines for gamedev were not on the shape they are now and probably at that time they had more obstacules than enablements to create the videogame vision they had.
That doesn’t mean that you as game designer could have a vision that doesn’t fit with the current tools and then you create a side-tool to design levels or to personalize your characters.
Fish also sought to emulate Ueda’s “design by subtraction” philosophy, where the Ico development team would periodically remove parts of the game so as to leave only what was essential to their vision. In this way, ideas like player health and object weight puzzles were gradually struck from Fez
He made a personal challenge of designing a game without relying on “established mechanics”
Source: Wikipedia
That’s a really interesting methodology, you first start creating a prototype with the standard systems and mechanics to then start removing things that doesn’t provide any value to the experience, Fez is again unique on that aspect.
The Author
Phil Fish has been surrounded by polemic and the story ends on this way.
We will never know what kind of person was Phil Fish as he disappeared from everywhere, but you can find quotes and facts about Phil Fish yelling at people on social media being quite controversial everytime he spoke up.
He literally mentioned “Japanese games sucks” but one of his references was Fumito Ueda’s Ico game, so it could be Phil being through bipolar disorder (BD) after the pressure and extreme perfectionism put into his child Fez.
Phil Fish vanished from the industry, leaving behind both controversy and one of the most memorable indie worlds ever built. Maybe that’s what Fez truly is — a mysterious message from its own creator, meant to be decoded just like the game itself.