"People never belonged by the sea. It has always been our enemy.
A harsh, unforgiving, alien world. Deprived of the very things that sustain us: air and light above, solid ground beneath our feet. People drown, people die, they become lost at sea. The sea never loved us. But, until the Krake came, it had never hunted us either.
To isolate our city, to create the Surface, was a massive undertaking. It required all our ingenuity, our grit, and the sacrifice of countless lives across decades. Some in the city forget these sacrifices now. But we do not. It is our duty to honor what was built by maintaining the dry floodplain that surrounds and protects us, and keeping the sea far from our walls.
When the eternal cloud came, and the first drops of the waterfall-without-end fell, we knew we had been anointed by the sky. Every choice we had made was the right one, and fresh water, unsullied by the poisonous creatures and bitter salt of the sea, was ours as long as we kept the order.
And order is required. The High Commissioner, our Dear Leader, his lieutenants, his officers, the sweepers, the barkers, the pipe scrubbers, and the churners, each of us has a role to play. We are all part of the machine. And that machine is life.
We have sworn never to return to the sea. To imprison anyone who does. Order above all. We are the Surfacers.
It always had to be. Even before the day that the first Krake attacked."
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Hi, Zach here, writer and creative director of Sub-Verge. It’s exciting to slowly unveil this world we’ve built, drop by drop, and these posts can provide a peek beneath the surface – both of the world of Sub-Verge and our process in creating it. Hope you like fishy puns, because you’re going to catch a netful here!
The seed of the idea came many years ago, in conversations with my friend Darren Randall. We had met, improbably, in a birthing class in Helsinki, Finland. Both our wives were due around the same time. Darren and his wife were in Finland for his job at Remedy; he’s an (astoundingly talented) game animator. I had come with my wife for a job at Aalto University. As the only two English-speaking dads in the group, we were also the most terrified. That was an instant bond, and as our families (and new babies) became friends, he told me about game development and the games industry, something I had a growing curiosity about, mostly due to the brilliant students I had at Aalto.
I had become frustrated with the ebook version of a novel (Bats of the Republic) I had published a few years before, which was interactive (in a paper way) itself. The ebook that the publisher insisted on did a poor job of capturing the experience of the book, even the interactive parts of it, and, with future works, I wanted to see if I could do something that would better anticipate the ebook format.
I started to look into enhanced books (a thing growing in popularity at that moment, on tablets, that has since fizzled). I had always been a print designer, and I felt nervous about making the leap into the digital space. My students didn’t see that divide, and Darren was encouraging, so I tried to gather some Finnish ‘sisu’ (grit and bravery) to give the interactive digital world a try.
Darren wasn’t around much longer after our kids were born – his skills were in high demand, and he moved on to Ubisoft in Toronto. When the frozen seas of Finland got too much for us one winter, I took another job, this time at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.
Since Darren was Australian, I called him up to tell him the news and to ask if he might know anyone down under that we could meet. He had an unbelievable response: he’d just taken a job at Wētā Game Studio and was planning a move to Wellington himself. This still feels like an astounding coincidence. Even more so, because when we arrived, the Airbnb we rented for our first few months was literally a stone’s throw from where Darren and his family were.
Watching our kids, by this time almost 3, reconnect and play in the long green grass under blooming pohutukawa trees, we indulged in dad fantasies, which really all boiled down to: what if we had time to make art? We started kicking around ideas for a game. We’d have the studio version of a jam band in the garage, just noodling around with game ideas. To be clear: with tiny kids, this is a total fantasy.
Still, we talked it through. Darren was a sharp critic. He shot down idea after idea. I wanted to do a cult game, where you knocked on doors trying to recruit members. Nope. A shape pattern game about psychedelic memory. Nope. Finally, a game where you had to talk your way out of a sinking bathysphere. Darren said... maybe that one. And I knew I was onto something!
Darren quickly had another job, at Guerrilla, and his family packed up for the Netherlands. But the hook was in me; I had already begun to write and sketch ideas for Sub-Verge...
*All concept sketches by the game’s Art Director, Tiia Reijonen, who I met at Aalto in Finland. Except that last one. That’s all me.
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I'll be sharing more from below the surface in another Transmission soon, but until then please wishlist the game (this helps us *hugely*) and sign up to the newsletter for more.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3487020