“Paper's Please during the housing crisis” - Sa Chalub

This is, yet another, start. When I first started writing here I had a plan. Writing about art and technology is always interesting of course, but the project that I most sought to do was connecting and interviewing other game developers and creators within that scope. Recently I've had the pleasure of doing just that. 

“My name is Sacha Chalub, I am a game artist, currently freelancing living in Berlin, trying to do the game art gig in Berlin.”

Like many people in the industry in this past year, myself included, Sa hit a rough patch with all the layoffs going on. His answer to that? Seek community.

“I think one of the best ways to combat that [the layoffs] … is to create a more cohesive and united community of developers. So I became involved … with the gameworkers collective here in Berlin which focuses a lot on Cooperatives and Cooperative Initiatives which I would say is perfectly suited for game studies. It’s a collaborative work of creatives and you should theoretically own all of it together. It’s games, the effort of one person very rarely amounts to the entire product.”

I made Sa's acquaintance at meeting of the Berlin Game Worker Cooperatives. For more information on them as well as what a Cooperative is and if it might be useful for your field, you can visit https://gwc.berlin/. 

Back to the focus though. As for who Sa is, well we work in games, there is a certain amount of Nerd in all of us. He balances this out with his other major passion, martial arts. MMA, Jiu Jitsu, Boxing and Muay Thai, as well as an avid enjoyer of board games, he's not someone you want to piss off in Monopoly. 

As for where he started and what inspired his art,

“I have a background in design, I took a while to figure out what I wanted to do professionally in my career. I was trained as an architect for two years, important terminology there, I didn't study architecture, and I just fell in love with design. Like finding the mix between art and utility. I’ve always been extremely passionate about video games, they always felt like a very effective way to learn about things. I always talk about how my door into Greek mythology was God of War, and I think a lot of people can say the same … it was just a very interesting intersection of all these things and I was like, "okay let's take the leap, let's actually try to do this and hopefully excel at this type of design.” So yea my focus is environment art, which you know, architecture nerd, environment art and video games you know.”

Besides God of War, Sa also lists the Dishonored series as one of his primary inspirations. The Dishonored games are renown for their intricate and clever level design that tells the story and shapes gameplay through its architecture and pathing. 

“They have a vision that most other companies don’t. And I think it’s a different way of how to make games and how to make 3D space feel a certain way. … A lot of little things clicked in my head, I was like this is something I want to do right. It has none of the cons and all of the pros, like maybe I should do that.”

Now as for what Sa is actually working on, he's currently focused on two different projects. Both are still very early on, with one having just finished preproduction. I'll let him give you the elevator pitch though.

“Paper’s Please during the housing crisis. You play the role of a guy just trying to make do, make his money, by helping people move out of their apartments that have been bought by big companies and have been rebuilt. So housing projects are coming in but they’re displacing a large amount of the population. The way that the game goes is you get to know these people, get involved in their narratives, and if we do the job right, you’ll fall in love with them and want to do your best to help them out as much as you can. Basically gameplay is driving around town and going from point A to B. Trying to find enough hours in the day to help out these people, make your own money, and get to the next day. Much like Paper’s Please where you have the expense screen at the end, we have systems similar to that where you have a certain amount of jobs, they are scattered throughout the city. Try to find a route that works, that gets you enough time to do all those jobs, make your own money, and help the people in the most need.”

In terms of stylization of the city, Sa describes it as a 1970s American city, but nowhere specific. “That’s kind of the point, it's happening everywhere.”

As for the core of the game, Sa and his team are playing on your empathy. 

“the idea is really hitting the player where it counts, making the player care for these characters. Like hey if you don’t do three jobs a day that's fine you can make it to the next level. But Mrs. McCarty doesn’t get to find her new apartment … You find out all this information by going to Mrs. McCarty’s apartment, talking to her, and being like, okay when do I need to be here, how much money can you give me for this, and so on so forth. We want to push the player to make tough decisions and try to play optimally because they care.”

It's easy to imagine the heartbreak you'd feel with letting a little old woman sleep out on the streets for a night. Maybe not finding her the next day. Maybe only finding her purse. 

As for Sa's second project, there isn't too much yet to say about it. It is however in a completely different direction. As opposed to the narrative driven highly emotional, “intense and honestly hard to play kind of game”, the other project links back to his love of mixed martial arts. A fighting game. The inspiration for this one somewhere along the lines of Friends Vs. Friends, with the team still workshopping whether it'll be more 1v1 or arena based. 

With such a difference in tone, from narrative to “big in your face action-action-action”, I couldn't help but wonder if he had a preference. 

“I think that’s one of the great parts of working in game design, game art, is that you can do both. I find it difficult to say if I like one more than the other because they have their own challenges. Especially for an artist. Getting the art direction right on a sad moment, is much harder than getting it on a big explosion, or this split second moment where you counter a strike or dodge a shot. So although I love narrative games, you wake up every moment, you go to work, and you go, okay how do I solve this, how do I make this work. Meanwhile when you’re working on more action games you go, “okay what's the weirdest thing that can happen. What’s the most in your face, over the top”. 

Some of the best games often have a mixture of over the top almost comedic moments, along with deep dramatic emotional moments. One of Sa's favorite's Disco Elysium encapsulates this well. From imagined dialogue from an egregiously ugly tie, to deeply traumatic explorations of trauma and loss of a loved one. An explorative game like Disco Elysium is understandably inspiring.

"You can do abstract narrative abstract games about communism like what? I get how the game isn’t for everyone, it’s a lot of reading, it's a lot of like classic roleplaying of like clicking through options and getting information. But I played that and I went, “Oh , this is why we make games. This is it. This is great”.

While discussing the inspirations for the fighting game he's working on, including Friends vs Friends, Power Chord, Lethal League Blaze, and Persona, one of Sa's key ideals made a showing. A principle of graphic design first art direction. 

“There are some games that when I look at them I think there’s this focus on legibility and communication and just immediate readability that’s very similar to stuff like graphic design. You want to get a message, maybe in some more subtle ways, mix or layer your meanings, but it’s just very graphical, readable, in your face … Games that just jump out at you.”

An example he gave being the distinction between something like The Last of Us series vs Persona. The Last of Us artistically dips into some very common themes. Realistic, post apocalyptic, beautiful but gritty. But what game it is exactly isn't always visible. As opposed to Persona where you can recognize it based off a menu or character shape or pose. You can even tell if its the first or the third by these same things. Similarly Akira vs Ghost in The Shell. You're able to distinguish Akira in contrast to so much other art and media of the time. It's art sends the message of what it is.

The identity of a game expressed through the art. Obviously a simple and common idea, but taken to the utmost degree. Art not merely supporting the message but focused purely on communicating it. From there we went into what I'm happy to say was my favorite section of the interview. Starting with his inspiration for his more narrative driven taxi driver game. 

“this might not be super helpful for most people, but Berlin has been an enormous inspiration, the city itself, the way that not just the architecture in it but the way that Berlin feels is something that we’ll try to display, even though the game is probably going to be set in the United States. That feeling, that griminess of the city, we want to get that in there somewhere… a lot of 70s design, that classic 70s graphic design if you look at like movie posters from the 70s are some of the best ever made. So putting that into the UI or graphic identity is a big thing, you probably might’ve noticed how I always talk about graphic identity and like communicating identity a lot. I think that’s something that is super important in the indie scene. Independent of the game you’re making, if it’s super unique or if it’s in these well trodden genres, to like show what you’ve got, to show this individual very personal identity. Artistically, in the way that you write, in the way that you make visual art and stuff like that” 

Coming from New York I can definitely understand that sort of grimy undertone. And as with all of his art, we came back to the theme of identity. This time to the identity of a city. The city he's building firstly.

“we want to create levels, and the only level we’re really going to have is the city, create something that is filled with… how can I put this, with characters, with places, that kind of have an aura that showcase that identity. We want the deli on the corner, the old school, the tenement neighborhood that has tiny streets you have to cross all the time and you’re unsure where you are. We want to kind of showcase, the word that comes to me is character, showcase character. I think that those big cities offer that. We always talk about how big cities are very anonymous, like you can just go under the radar and no one cares about you, but at the same time, when you have that moment of identifying with something and remembering it and caring about it. It becomes this kind of lighthouse point. That’s one feeling that we really want to get, as they’re playing for a few hours or a few levels, whatever it may be, going oh I know where I am because I know that so and so’s deli is there and the office of so and so is there. Kind of mapping the city for yourself.”

In my own travels through europe finding those lighthouse landmarks have been one of my favorite parts of exploring a new city. A coffee shop in Rome, a particular statue in Barcelona, the Bastille in Paris, all these served as my waypoints and safe zones. These all contribute to the identity you discover in a city. Knowing that his game was heavily influenced by Berlin, I decided to ask what he thought it has.

 “I think that Berlin is a young city. Which makes no sense. If you look at cities in Brazil, they’re colonial cities. Well not anymore, but these are cities that were founded and built and the foundations of those cities are colonial cities because that’s our history. In Europe, that history is completely different. You have parts of Berlin that go back to the middle ages. Like parts of the city that you can go to right now and look at stones that have been there for who knows how long. Right, like you have historians who go through tours and tell you like why this part of the city is completely different to that. And somehow Berlin feels young. And that has to do with the history of Germany and the massive regime changes that have occurred over hundreds of periods of history. Obviously World War 2 we can always remember that, but like the Berlin wall. The effect of the Berlin Wall on statistical data about Berlin is incredible. You can look at statistical maps and it looks like the wall is still there … I think because of those massive, I was going to say revolutions as in revolving cycles, but again revolution would be a perfectly usable word for these several events. Berlin keeps itself young, it keeps itself this shifting identity. I think it’s a city where you can come in and not lose parts of yourself that you took from home. I never felt more Brazilian than in Berlin. Because of contrast, because you realize, Oh right we’re coming from different places and instead of having these massive crashes, those things are celebrated. Not to say Germany or Berlin doesn’t have a racism problem, but there's a culture of celebrating these differences. I was talking to a friend of mine recently and he said something that I found extremely funny, is that, “the most german thing you can be is Turkish” and yea you have generations and generations of migration, and that identity is distinctly German, it's also distinctly Turkish, but it’s a new thing. It’s together. One day hopefully this country and maybe sooner than that this city is going to embrace that identity a bit more and have less of these racist distinctions or xenophobic distinctions.”

This revolving identity, ever changing and shifting and developing new identities from is something I think is crucial to any city's survival. They don't all have to have the same “young” energy as Berlin, but change is inevitable. From the melting pot of New York to the newer Turkish-German identity of Berlin. Change and the embracing of it is what creates new identities. It's what creates new communities. To be able to take those identities, those communities, and to communicate them through your art? Well I most certainly look forward to seeing where his projects go. 

There is more to the interview, some section's I've skipped or cut out from these. Feel free to read through that if you'd like. If you want to find Sa  you can find him as @SaTheWitch on most social media platforms and he will gradually be posting updates on his projects.