![]() As you’ll be soul-jumping a lot throughout the game, it needed to be impactful but not overwhelming or exhausting. For the sound effects, we wanted something that wasn’t too violent and loud. The sparkly, glowing effects were designed as if Tchia’s magical glowing eye was emitting them. The visual effects actually came out a bit late in the development of the feature we realized it lacked a bit of a punch. Q: How did you go about creating and designing the visual effects and sound design for the soul-jumping mechanic? RELATED: PlayStation Console Exclusive Tchia Gets New Gameplay Trailer at Game Awards ![]() There are no objectively “overpowered” objects because most of them will only be useful for a specific purpose, so it balances itself out. I think that sense of organic discovery and getting better by tinkering ultimately helps keep you engaged. Once you realize that an oil lamp can create a fireball, for example, you won’t look at them as another random prop for the rest of your playthrough. It’s up to the player to find out which ability they can use to help in specific situations, which is part of the fun. Like I mentioned, some animals and objects won’t be of much use for combat or locomotion. Q: How did you balance the different abilities and strengths of the animals and objects Tchia can control with the overall difficulty of the game? But we were also okay with the fact that some animals and objects are just fun to control, and don’t have to serve a deeper purpose. Some do, of course, like a dog’s ability to dig up treasures will be helpful for a treasure hunt. What was liberating on the design front was to realize and accept that not every animal or object should have a purpose or be of significant importance. That was definitely a challenge in terms of the programming and animation workload it required, but we built our systems smartly enough that we didn’t need to re-do anything from scratch for every new object or animal. Once we were fully committed to the sandbox, toy-like aspect of our design philosophy, we knew we had to make almost everything possessable by soul-jumping. Q: Can you describe the process of designing and implementing the different abilities of the animals and objects Tchia can soul-jump into? From there, we designed our world to incorporate fun and interesting ways to use those mechanics. We designed Tchia as a toy box, where every mechanic could stand on its own as a self-sufficient little nugget of fun. That evolution was informed by the fact that New Caledonian folklore and legends often involve shapeshifting and animals taking human forms and vice versa, so it felt thematically relevant. Q: How did your team come up with the concept of soul-jumping into objects and animals in Tchia? ![]() So after that experimentation, it became what you see, warping into objects and animals that lets Tchia traverse the world while soul-jumping. This was somewhat better, but it still didn’t help with locomotion since you would always go back to square one when you finish your soul-jumping. Then it evolved into possession but with Tchia staying in place in a trance-like state. At first, it was just a simple telekinesis ability, which was fun but fairly limited since it didn’t help with locomotion and was cumbersome in combat situations. Soul-jumping went through several iterations. Q: Did you experiment with different ways of implementing the soul-jumping ability before settling on the final version? If so, can you describe some of those early iterations? ![]()
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