Sky: Children of the Light recently launched on Nintendo Switch after two years of being exclusively available on mobile. It’s a live-service game with full support for both cross-play and cross-progression – quite a shift from developer thatgamecompany’s previous games, Flow, Journey, and Flower. While maintaining a live-service game requires a lot of work, it also presents developers with unique opportunities that aren't afforded to studios that focus on more traditional models
“When we first launched the game we’d spent almost two years crafting the main storyline – kind of like Journey’s sister game”, Jenova Chen, co-founder and creative director of thatgamecompany tells me. “But then we started to operate Sky as a live[-service] game – even when we launched the game we had already been in alpha and beta for a year and a half. There are people who got to know each other in alpha and got married, so we were like, ‘Uhhh, how are we going to keep ourselves excited to keep the game going?’
RELATED: The Lack Of Voice In ThatGameCompany's Games Allows My Own To Sing
“That’s the biggest change from launching a premium title and just being done with it. Now you have to keep the people excited about coming back and so, for me, I feel I cannot, as an indie [dev], settle on just doing the same thing – it feels soul-crushing. So we keep coming up with ways to challenge ourselves to do something different, and going forward I have some pretty exciting things to announce next year. We’re doing things nobody else is doing.”
Sky has several worlds available for players to explore, each with different stories, puzzles, and characters to interact with – one even allows you to turn a desert into an oasis. Every three months a new expansion is added. Chen calls these updates “seasons”, and notes that making a game that is constantly being expanded is very different to how he and his team used to make games.
Chen says that releasing a new season every three months allows him and the rest of the team to experiment and try things they normally wouldn’t be able to risk in a full game. Chen explains, “When we make a premium title, you don’t have the freedom to try something and fail at it – it’s like your launch is the end.
“With Sky, we learned so much in maintaining a live game. You get to hear everything the players are saying. ‘I don’t like this thing, I like that thing,’ and we’ll still have time to adjust it and fix things. And then the next patch the thing the player didn’t like is gone. For me, compared to premium and live games today, I definitely appreciate live games. I think overall it allows the company to enter a more stable environment where we’re allowed to take risks that if we were in a three-year project we probably would not.”
The game’s latest season is inspired by French story The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a favourite of Chen’s. In previous interviews, he’s described Sky as a theme park, with each season representing a new section that opens its gates for people to play and explore the wonderful new world within.
“Initially, when we launched the game it was a game with [an] immense story,” Chen says. “Today, every single season we are opening a new land. All the characters are inspired by the literature, it’s one of my favourite books. Obviously, just like any theme park, as the new attraction opens, you get to go to the park. You can interact with the Little Prince, you can play hide-and-seek. You go explore and meet all the characters from the book. Sky is a game focused on human connection, friendships between real people, and we hope that by playing Sky in the world of the Little Prince you will also build a unique friendship with the Prince.”
The Little Prince season is just the latest in a long line of story and gameplay expansions that have been added since Sky first launched. These expansions not only add more puzzles and worlds for you to engage with, but also delve into the game’s rich lore.
“Yesterday, we released a new story trailer on the Nintendo channel and it’s talking about the world that happened before the players arrived in the land of Sky,” Chen tells me. “And you can see we’re not just sitting around doing nothing – we were working on this game for seven years. There’s massive lore behind the world of Sky. And certainly a lot of that was inspired by the Journey ethos. It’s quite an expansive world. There’s quite a lot of interesting lore in this game and each of the seasons we reveal a little bit [more]. So we really see this as a long-term television programme where we will unfold the world little by little.”
As well as creating a bigger world, thatgamecompany has been looking at the way people play and finding ways to improve the experience for everyone. There’s a guide system designed to ensure that experienced players can actively help newcomers, while a full translation system is currently being built to facilitate connection between players regardless of where they are in the world.
“We’ve been working on a translation system for a while and it’s in the beta,” Chen says. “We’ve seen so many people from so many different countries – we want to help them communicate more frequently. This feature might happen next quarter. That’s what I like about the live game these days – I can promise things and we will deliver.”
Even though this is the company’s first experience with a live game, Chen seems confident about the future, even if the work is different. Sky is a game brimming with life, with plenty of wonderful worlds to explore, but Chen assures me there’s more to come.
“We’ve planned all kinds of seasons until the middle of 2022,” he says. “I feel like I’ve been making eight different games.”
Next: Making Mobile Gaming More Accessible In Africa And The Middle East
