How Sony saved Sword of the Sea

Giant Squid released its third game, Sword of the Sea, in August this year, following on from Abzû in 2016 and The Pathless in 2020.

The game, which sees the player surf-gliding across rolling dunes and icy mountains, has been met with a warm critical reception. Eurogamer awarded it five stars, while GamesRadar called it “simultaneously exhilarating and meditative”, and the PlayStation 5 version of Sword of the Sea currently boasts a ‘generally favorable’ score of 88 on Metacritic.

While the connection with the company’s previous games is all over Sword of the Sea, for creative director Matt Nava – who co-founded Giant Squid in 2013 – this release also marked an important homage to Thatgamecompany’s Journey, on which he served as an art director.

“What I’m really happy about is that the messaging has been clear and people have understood how it’s connected, and that they’ve reacted in a way that is positive about that. That’s very satisfying,” Nava says, smiling over our video call.

Similarities between Journey and Sword of the Sea, however, extend beyond their shared love for hyper-smooth movement and ambiguous storytelling.

“It’s fantastic that Sony has a dedicated group of people that really care about the artistic aspect of the medium”

While the development costs of Sword of the Sea never pushed the studio to bankruptcy, like Journey did with Thatgamecompany, both projects were ultimately saved by Sony’s trust in the process (along with some self-funding in the latter case).

“We wouldn’t be here without them, even before this game,” Nava remarks. “But on Sword of the Sea specifically, we were able to work with [Sony] directly. Halfway through development – as it usually goes – you need a little more cash to get it out the door; things take longer than you think [they will] and you need that extra funding.”

The much-needed financial lifeline emerged in the form of PlayStation Indies, one of Sony’s many initiatives dedicated to “spotlight and support the best of the best indie games.”

Since the program’s launch in 2020, more than a dozen indie titles, including Pacific Drive, Recompile, and Maquette, have received support and funding from Sony.

“It’s just fantastic that Sony has a program like that. [That] this big, powerful company has a dedicated group of people inside that really care about the artistic aspect of the medium,” says Nava.

Becoming a PlayStation Indie

This belief in the artistic vision of Giant Squid “by a couple of individuals” over at PlayStation Indies, then, was the push that helped Sword of the Sea to see the light of day.

“They were able to help us by collaborating with the PlayStation Plus team. They’re different parts of Sony, but they communicated with each other, and they were able to say, ‘Okay, we’ll pitch in. We’ll cover this.’,” Nava explains.

Getting backing from the PlayStation Plus department, which requires a lot “of planning and shifting around [in order to] make sure it works with the other” titles, Nava adds, doesn’t come without certain obligations.

As part of Giant Squid’s deal with PlayStation, Sword of the Sea was to become a PlayStation Plus day-one title, instead of being published independently.

According to the creative director, trading a measure of independence for that critical polish time can be a double-edged sword.

“On the one hand, you’re giving away the game for free to all these people who are already subscribed. But at the same time, way more people are playing it – you’re getting more eyes on the game. And that’s tremendously valuable as well,” he says. “You never know how that balance is going to play out for you and your specific game. It can help you, [or] it can hurt you.”

Although there’s little information on whether all PlayStation Plus day-one games get the same deal, Sword of the Sea was still self-published with additional publishing on Sony’s end. “It’s kind of hard to explain,” Nava begins.

“Technically, we self-published this game. That let us directly control the storefronts and have a lot of control in the marketing in a way that we hadn’t done before.”

While he didn’t specify exactly how much time this deal afforded Giant Squid’s roughly 20-person team, Nava calls the partnership with PlayStation Plus a “learning process.”

“It was really wonderful for us because that extra control helped us in the final moments of getting this game out the door. We were able to do some crazy tricks and get some fixes at the last second. And, man, it saved the game.”

Working against the clock

It might not have been Shigeru Miyamoto that coined it, but the old game development biz saying “a delayed game is eventually good, but a bad game is bad forever” remains broadly true.

And while exceptions like No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 prove that years of post-launch work can work as a redemption arc, most smaller studios – Giant Squid included – don’t have that kind of luxury. They have to make every second count, even when time works against you.

For Nava, this rings true even after a decade-plus experience leading a studio and three successfully published titles.

“Every game I’ve worked on, it’s been an act of faith from everybody involved to believe that it will become great. At the beginning, it’s so simple: you don’t have all the parts, and you’re kind of saying, ‘Okay, you have to imagine [how] to fill in the blanks.’ And then at the very last second, you get the whole thing for the first time – you get to see it all together.

“Now [that] you can see the whole experience, that lets you tune it up holistically. And [during] that final period, you can [make] big changes. You can manipulate the broader experience with the knowledge of how the game feels altogether.”

Nava continues: “You’re also at the peak of your ability to build the game. You know how to build this game because you figured that out. You’re completely empowered. But then the only thing you don’t have is any time. You have to fight to get time at the end, so that when you have that knowledge and holistic understanding, you can make those sweeping changes.”

One of those changes, Nava recalls, was fixing Sword of the Sea’s cutscenes that were always put off because of more immediate polish work on the game’s mechanics.

“For a very long time, the fog in these scenes [were] all the wrong colour,” he remembers. “There’s a scary scene, and it’s supposed to be misty and spooky-looking. But for a long time, it was very clear. It looked like a gorgeous sunset.”

Naturally, Nava likens the final push to reach “the level of polish [they] all dreamed of” to Journey, whose final, long-overdue version left three of 25 play testers crying, according to Thatgamecompany’s Jenova Chen (who recently spoke with GamesIndustry.biz about the company’s transmedia goals).

“With Journey, we were able to do that. But that game was rough until we did that. It was a chore. And then it finally came together in a really nice way. Sword of the Sea got the time like that, too, [but] just barely,” Nava remembers. “Just coordinating that last push… it was a lot that we got it.”

Rolling with the punches

Navigating ‘co-publishing’ with PlayStation after bringing the studio and the project back from the financial brink was an important lesson for Nava. But so was adapting to a post-COVID industry, which completely reshaped how both AAA and indie studios around the world approached making games.

“We had a little bit of experience working remotely,” he says, referencing the final stretch of The Pathless’ development.

“But starting a project is very different than finishing one. When you’re finishing it, everybody knows exactly what they’re trying to do, and they have a very clear deadline. The beginning… I don’t know what this is yet. That was where we had to learn just how we kind of ideate and come up with new ideas together if we’re not in the same room.”

While Nava and the team were able to complete Sword of the Sea under one roof, for many Giant Squid employees, starting a new project in the midst of the pandemic was just as unfamiliar and terrifying as it was for the game’s creative director.

It wasn’t simply a matter of adapting to new tools or adding Zoom meetings to make up for the lack of in-person brainstorming sessions – it came down to Giant Squid adjusting to the new reality of remote work.

“It took us a while to figure that out. It came down to [the] way we thought about the work. How we made sure everybody had something to do and they would, even without having to talk to anybody, know where to go next. [We] made sure everybody has the game plan,” says Nava.

In many ways, the current situation in the games industry is more terrifying than it was at the start of Sword of the Sea’s development in 2020, in the midst of a pandemic. According to video game artist Farhan Noor’s layoff tracker, there have been an estimated 38,000 layoffs in the industry since the start of 2022: so how is this industry turbulence affecting Giant Squid’s next steps?”

“It’s something that we’re always thinking about,” Nava admits. “The process that you have at these kinds of studios is that you get that funding, you spend it all as you make the game. And now, at the end, the game hasn’t made enough sales yet to bring in cash because all of the funding people have to recoup first.

“So there’s this little gap where you’re like, ‘How do we keep this show on the road?’ Is there another way to approach this so that we can achieve this thing that we’re doing more sustainably?”

He concludes: “What’s important to me is this core team that we’ve managed to keep together. I’ve just got to keep those people together. So I’m trying to figure out how to make it work. And every time we do it, I think about what was really tough about that.”