Art can be a vessel for channeling mindful and meditative experiences, helping to create a mindset of simply being. Video games can also offer the same kind of power, whether they actively encourage these thinking practices or not. Either way, the developer of the upcomingindie puzzle platformerUnleaving,Orangutan Matter, recognized the potential of a hand-painted game to capture those experiences. Yet, there’s no imposing message behind the experience. The developers instead leave the game’s meaning in the hands of the player, asUnleavingoffers an introspective journey that’s up for interpretation, just as art often is in its various shades and forms.
WhileUnleaving’s game experience is up for players to decide, cultivating a sense of mindfulness through the artistic process was also very important for the developers and their choice of other features like its music. Game Rant recently sat down with developers Sura Karnawi and Saif Jabur to discuss the deep, mindful, hand-painted art process behind creatingUnleaving, including their mindful art approaches and stop-motion painting techniques. Karnawi and Jabur also explained why this approach was crucial and talked about the importance of art more widely, including the idea of making chaos beautiful through painting. A closer look at Orangutan Matters' development processes also showcases how all these things come into play.The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
The Making of Unleaving
Q: What inspired you to makeUnleaving, andhow did your journey making the game begin?
Jabur: We both lived in England before we came to Canada. At some point, I went with Sura to Knaresborough, if you know that town. They have this beautiful bridge called Knaresborough Bridge, and we went up a hill that overlooks the bridge. The train came past the bridge, and we could see the reflection in the water. That sounds very poetic, but it’s the truth. It felt like we had a metaphysical experience, and at that point, we felt this could become something really creative as an idea. Actually, the bridge ended up in the game in some form, but it was like a character for the idea of creating the game.
Karnawi: For both of us, it’s the love of art and love of video games, especially puzzle platformers, and to be specificgames likeLimbo. For me, I’m always drawn to art. I’ve always done art. As Saif said, it comes from these moments of vulnerability. For me, as someone who experienced displacement due to war and worked as a woman in software engineering for years, I experienced a feeling of alienation - you feel like you’re home but not home, if that makes any sense. All these feelings, that’s kind of a theme I experienced a lot. I feel like I want to express that in a medium like a video game.
Q: We understand the title is inspired by Gerald Manley Hopkins’ poem ‘Spring to Fall: To a Young Child’ about the transient nature of life. How much isUnleavingbuilt around that concept, and why did you hone in on that poem as well?
Jabur: In fact, the name of the game came in later development, believe it or not. The idea was we wanted to examine deeper things about life throughthe perspective of a child. Eventually, as we were learning, we landed upon this poem, which looks at a child called Margaret. The poem examines the transient nature of life and mortality, and those themes are intrinsic to the messages of the story as well. That’s how we eventually came upon the name ofUnleaving. It’s using a child as a curios perspective to those deeper themes, adult themes.
Q: Is mindfulness quite prominent in your thinking behind the game and is that experience important for the game?
Karnawi: Yes, absolutely. It’s because of my experience just attending art galleries. In one of the sessions, we were encouraged just to sit and pay attention to one piece of art. Normally, when you go to a museum or art gallery, you just move from one to the other. Especially now, our focus is dropping. Our attention span is from four seconds to three seconds;even goldfish have three seconds.
By that practice of just paying attention, your impulse is just to move to the next thing. Just resisting that impulse and sitting there, you’ll notice this surrender to kind of another realm. You feel like there is no resistance, and you’re just there.
Jabur: Being in the moment.
Karnawi:Being in the moment, yeah, with all your thoughts. Everything drops, and you’re just there watching a painting. Obviously, my passion for art and for what it brings - this is one of the reasons that I felt very motivated to make art, to make paintings, and to make it into a game asan interactive experience. Video games are such a powerful medium with a huge base of audiences.
The Role of Art in Video Games
Q: How do you feel about the meditative, mindful part of art, and how that translates to actually making a game? Does it feel the same as doing art in practice versus translating that into a game?
Karnawi:How I made the game - it was all me being in that mindset because everything came from intention. You have to be very intentional with your work. If you are not intentional, it will come through your work as not fitting. If you’re intentional and you’re mindful, even while I’m doing this work, I was consciously choosing to listen to specific kinds of music that elevate that sense of me, so I can be reflected through art and the process.
One person I listened to was Alicia Enstrom. Her tracks are used throughout the game. Her music also came from the same place we were making the game. We listened to thousands of tracks, but her tracks were the ones that were aligned with it. When we talked to her - and we talked about how she made music - it was a very similar process and similar field we are trying to reach.
Jabur: Yeah, the process was almost like…we call it an inverted pyramid. Mostpuzzle platformers, in particular, progress mechanically, as puzzle A will teach you one thing, puzzle B will teach you another thing, and then they combine. But we wanted the puzzles to be guided by the narrative. You progress through the story, not knowing what the next thing is going to be. That way, we could sort of nurture the process rather than control it.
A lot of studios do that kind of process, like Studio Ghibli. They basically don’t have an ending to their story, and they just let the story unfold. We did a kind of similar process where we got different perspectives from different collaborators, and we just let the narrative come forward on its own. I think it came to be something unpredictable, and it affected us personally in different ways as well.
Q: You made the comparison with Studio Ghibli. Were there any particularStudio Ghibli moviesthat inspired the game?
Jabur: The newest one we watched wasThe Boy and the Heron, but it’s different.
Karnawi:One of the first inspirations wasPrincess Mononoke.
Jabur: I think the idea is that Hayao Miyazaki didn’t shy away from presenting violent, deeper themes. When he was challenged about that, he said younger audiences should really acknowledge that such things exist online, and he was not the only artist. There was an artist in Australia called Sean Tam. We also wanted to bring such an approach that deeper themes can be presented to a younger audience in a poetic way, not in a forced way. It’s a personal experience that you put your own meaning into.
Karnawi:You also portray the fullness of life, not just focusing on one side and ignoring the other. Because by ignoring part of humanity, you’re not fully acknowledging the reality of your life.
Jabur: Yeah, it’s basically very organic. The process was very unpredictable in many ways. It was challenging at the beginning, but it just unfolded on its own in a way.
Q: How are you approaching the metaphorical nature of the game versus the more or less physical nature of a video game?
Karnawi: Your question is just reflective of the perfect balance.
Jabur: It’s quite difficult because I think the gaming medium, like film, is very restrictive. Everything has to be very precise. Using a medium like the organic arts, the traditional sort of hand-painted art, one of the challenges we set up to approach was to ensure that every frame of a painting is a new one, not even repeated.
As you progress through the game, every background you see, you’ve never seen it before. That was done with intention because we wanted that particular segment of the game to reflect a certain emotion, a certain part of the narrative. You couldn’t do that if you repeat things. I think the human mind is very adept at recognizing patterns, but that was our sort of way to express ourselves.
The other fold was to add some text because the deeper meanings require some time and some elaboration, but at the same time, we didn’t want to self-impose our meaning. We put only a few poetic texts across the game. You could run past them, but overall it is like a merge of art and a few lines of text.
Q: Can you tell us a bit about the protagonist and the story, and how you’re telling it through the environmental painting?
Jabur: We were asked a lot by people: why did you choose a child? I think that answer’s quite simple, as it is not innocent, but kind of pure and curious to examine deeper themes through the perspective of a child. To sort of look at everything and absorb it all in. I believe William Wordsworth said that “the child is the father of man,” and that can be interpreted in a million ways. We chose to interpret the curious part of the human psyche as you are kind of innocent, but more importantly, you want to look at everything with a fresh set of eyes.
Karnawi:We also spent a lot of time - in the very early stages - on who will be doing the translation of that to a character. We contacted a number of artists, but the one that we ended up working with is someone whose name is Diala Brisly. She’s award-winning, lives in France, and is an artist who experienced trauma herself. She had to go through the depths of all our emotions and introspection to connect to this character and also wasinfluenced by Tim Burtonas well, the style ofCoraline. Both helped her make that character, which ended up having red hair too.
Q: How would you describe the game’s art style and were there any inspirations? You mentioned Tim Burton’sCoralinewith the protagonist.
Karnawi:The art style came from a really long process of trials. There were a lot of trials. I wouldn’t say error because error is such a defined word. I don’t believe there are errors; there are only trials. It just came from this passion to bring to life this atmospheric world. You know paintings like Turner.
Jabur: J.M.W Turner.
Karnawi: Yeah, J.M.W. Turner. I have this book and I always looked at his art. At the same time,the physics of puzzle platformersis very precise, and we asked how you can marry the two and how you balance this atmospheric world with these precise physics-based puzzles. It came from okay, “We need to embrace both of them and how can we bring them together?”
We contacted maybe hundreds of artists just to work with us. We had to go through a lot of art styles and trials until we, at the end, worked with someone who is in Vancouver. He’s a graphite artist. The texture is a little bit thick and can work with acrylic. We also had to adjust the color to make it a little bit desaturated to be close to the graphite, so it was a lot of trials until we got to a point.
At the same time, I had to work with a fine art consultant all the time just to make sure that we were preserving that every frame was hand-painted. It has to look like a proper composition of a painting. I had to consult with her all the time - her name is Asmaa. I had to consult at the same time with an expert-level designer, who can preserve the essence of a puzzle, where you have clear goals. You have to make sure that the puzzles are intact. His name is Francois. I had to consult with both Francois and Asmaa and, at the same time, experiment with what comes in between.
The art style is like yin and yang. It’s a lot of work to get to that balance where it’s a painting and also, at the same time, a proper puzzle platformer as well. It’s like you cannot deny the one without the other.
We also had to keep in mind that we want to think about accessibility and stuff like that, to talk to like AbleGamers at some point and just ask them what they think of it. We try our best just to make itaccessible to someone with visual impairmentsand to apply a black-and-white filter just to make sure the contrast is okay. There are a lot of things to think about, but I think it was worth the process to go through a lot of that, a lot of playtesting as well. A lot of people gave us a lot of feedback.
Jabur: Yeah, I just want to add to the art process itself. I think from the get-go, we saw that chaos is beautiful. You’ll see in some parts of the game, you can see paper creases, like the paint splatter.
Karnawi: Where the two backgrounds meet, you may see a line.
Jabur: Yeah, but we merge it nicely. We did our best.
Karnawi: But if you focus, you can see it.
Jabur: Yeah, but you would see that the actual sort of textured nature of this traditional art, you could almost feel it is there. It exists on a physical piece of paper somewhere in the world, and I think this evokes a whole different realm of emotions and immersion that we thought was fitting for the story.
Puzzles and Art in Unleaving
Q: The art style hasstop-motion animationeffects as well, which seem like it almost brings the painting to life. Is that the feeling you’re going for or was there another reason you went for that traditional hand-painted style?
Jabur: Not a lot of people in the world can actually do this type of art, there are very few masters, but we trialed different techniques. We call it painting animation. I’m not sure if that’s a word that exists, but that’s the word we chose. We paint an acrylic sort of painting, and we say we want to transition feeling Y from A to B. We start capturing. We have an overhead scanner, which we can talk about later, but that captures frames as we paint the painting into a different one. We basically merge those paintings together.
You have special and key moments where the painting becomes something else. Like it kind of breathes, it lives. A lot of backgrounds in the game, they’re actually loops of breathing paintings. That’s the way we thought about it from the get-go: that the backgrounds are very essential to telling the emotions and the narrative.
Karnawi:I’m glad that you’re able to see it that way. We had no expectations, but you mentioned that it feels alive to you. It means a lot to us. That’s the feeling we were after, just make it alive, how we can make it alive. Also, while we were doing it, we were looking for references, and we couldn’t find a lot of references about stop-motion painting animation. There was only one movie.
There are a lot of painting animation styles, but not as stop-motion necessarily. There is a movie, if you’ve heard of it, calledLoving Vincent. It uses 65,000 paintings and I contacted a number of the artists that worked withLoving Vincent. They didn’t work with us on this project, but maybe in future ones. We didn’t know aboutLoving Vincentuntil later, but it confirmed what we were doing and the challenges we were experiencing. Just like where each frame kind of gives it life through the brushstrokes. You have key frames, and then you have other frames just to kind of bring it to life. It was really nice just to see another movie that came in and have done it similar to us.
Q: Can you tell us a bit more about the surreal world and the types of puzzles and skill-based challenges players might face?
Jabur:The game is very classical in the sense it does not reinvent the wheel. It’s reminiscent of the old classical games likeLimbothat we know and love, and we just wanted to use those types of puzzles to indicate the vulnerability of the character. The character doesn’t have any special powers or abilities and doesn’t gain any new skills, rather than the emotional skill set, let’s say.
There will be some unusual changes in the music mechanics that are guided by the narrative, rather than mechanical progression in many puzzle platformers. I wouldn’t say there’s anything new, and the game is very sort of classical based on what is very well-known. The narrative itself sort of guides a different set of puzzles for the game. Some worlds are segments in the game that are very experiential – there aren’t many skill-based puzzles. We want the player to guide the story forward, rather than trying to break through it. Sometimes we feel like there are too many puzzles, so now it’s time for an experiential part of the game.
Karnawi: As Saif said, we’re trying to keep it at that level at the same time. There are moments where you have to embrace some of your skills to solve some of the puzzles. We call it a Leap of Faith when you have to remember to do a jump or something. It’s like in life. You go through something, and you just need to kind of just make that jump or something. It’s up to players how they see it because if we add our own meaning, then there’s nothing left. It’s really up to them how they see it.
Jabur: A lot of the game, especially level design, revolves around the type of theme of the game, like how we structured the levels. In one particular world, the world revolves around itself in a spiral to reflect that certain theme or ideas in the game. There were lots of thoughts put in about how some of the puzzles merge with the story itself.
It’s very difficult to speak about the puzzles without revealing the story.
Unleaving is Orangutan Matter’s First Game
Q: We understand that this is your studio’s very first game. What would you say have been some of your big triumphs in kickstarting all of this?
Jabur: One of the hardest things I would say is working as a couple on such a large-scope project was very challenging. Eventually, we had to realize that ideas and thoughts all have to be respected and nurtured. We say that there is no idea better than the other one. The progress was very sort of organic. We didn’t want to control any idea, just let it all flow. I think eventually we even encouraged our collaborators to bring forward their ideas, and we did not want to control the progress in any way. But I think one of the hardest things is basically for us to grow as a couple.
Karnawi: Whenever we speak about it, it will maybe not necessarily conventionally answer your question because, when we made the game, we had to kind of redefine a lot of things. Our triumph is not the same as maybe how I thought about it before our trials. Maybe the way I think about it is me getting over this section that my opinion matters more than the other [both laugh]. If that makes any sense because in that way, you’re willing to learn and unlearn.
Yet, that doesn’t mean you’re not guided or anything. I’m very committed and passionate, but during that process, I was willing to unlearn a lot of things to get to the flow of making something that’s original. I would also say the biggest triumph is just letting go and shedding off a lot of things to make something authentic, organic, and true. That’s the way I see it, at least.
Q: What do you feel have been some of the biggest challenges in the development process?
Jabur: I think one of the hardest ones in terms of development is deciding from the get-go that every frame needs to be a painting. That means that every background has to be fresh and new, and nothing is reused. How many paintings have you painted? I would argue it’s thousands.
Karnawi: Thousands.
Jabur: Yeah, that’s not a lie. I mean, we have up to 7000 scans.
Karnawi: We have thousands of scans, thousands of trials.
Jabur: Because you paint on top, you scan it in, throw it away, and bring another paper.
Karnawi: At the beginning, I was very attached to art - not just me, but even other artists that we worked with. There are two main artists: the character artist and the environment artist. There is a process consultant and also a level designer. We all have to embrace this - whatever we say, whatever we do, it can just go to waste. We had to all let go of anything that we produced and felt heartbroken at the beginning of it all. I’m just literally ripping away my paintings, but I had to live with it. So, we were hand painting yet, at the same time, integrating the puzzle elements into it. We were thinking if it was apoint-and-click, would it be easier?
Jabur: Exactly.
Karnawi: …Because it’s one static image. But with this one, there are so many layers, so we had to paint it first, and then I had to reverse-engineer the painting. I was a software engineer and I used my software engineering brain to analyze the paintings. Like, “Oh, okay, here I am painting this layer.” Then, I had to think, as I painted the other layer, about how I’m going to rethink the whole thing as 15-17 different layers, so I could have the freedom to assemble the same painting in a different layer.
Jabur:One of the things that really matters in the design of such a game is you have to pre-plan everything. It’s not like you’re doing things digitally where you can just change things on the go. Once you paint something and scan it, that’s it. You cannot change it or make the paper bigger if you need to. We had to know the movement of the camera and how much it is zoomed in because that will determine the resolution of the image we need to insert there.
In certain places, the cameras zooms down, so we need the actual piece of art to be much larger. I had to tell Sura, “Now you need to draw on A3 instead of A4 because the camera will be thrown out.” That’s the challenge in terms of the background for the visual assets and interactives. We realized very soon that things can be changed quite dramatically, depending on the level design, and that’s why we needed a high level of flexibility. We created a palette of hundreds of small pieces. I gave that palette to Sura, and she created the ground.
Karnawi: But each level is like that. We’re not talking about the whole game, because it didn’t work for the whole game. We’re talking about the first chapter, for example. We would have to do the same exact process for each because we have to stay true the fact that every frame is different. At the same time, we have to be intentional. The same process would be repeated for each different chapter. That’s when you have to create these small assets, just to ensure that we give it that unique feel.
Jabur:Yeah, so each world has a different asset palette, let’s say, to build the ground. Each background is painted fresh. It’s never old, always.
It sounds like a lot of work has gone into it, but it’s really rewarding, I imagine, to see it all come together.
Jabur:We’re very exhausted [both laugh].
Q: In the modern gaming world, it’s sometimes easy to forget that video games are art at their core. Do you have any messages that you hope to communicate through the game about art in general, the role of art in video games, in life, or in technology? The importance of art?
Karnawi: The importance of art. That’s a good question. I think, especially now with artificial intelligence around, there’s an endless production of art. There are so many things that come out of artificial intelligence, but Istrongly believethat intentional art, thehand-painted artphysically, has a different kind of feel to it. No matter what the machine does, humans will be doing something even more beautiful and touching. I feel by itself, producing something intentional with a lot of emotions behind it, people can relate more because it was done by humans just like them.
If you do something without intention versus doing something with intent, there is a difference. I feel like art is an invitation for people just to slow down and wonder, especially in this world. The world revolves around control. We’re invited just to kind of constantly take control over one, two, three, and just to act and behave maybe in a certain way. There is not much space for us to be ourselves, and I think art is kind of the opposite. It allows us to let go of control and just be vulnerable and just be curious and wonder.
If there is anything in the game, I think I would say that to make something original, to make something not necessarily meaningful, but something that speaks the truth, your truth, you have to question a lot of the notions of what’s a failure and what’s a success. Just to question what’s given to you, because that can be paralyzing sometimes. For example, if you want to make a game, if you want to make art, you know, you have to do X and it’s called success. If you don’t do that, it will be a failure. You have to question that, and just say what it means to you and redefine it your way. That’s the message, I guess. That’s what I can do through art. It’s just to question everything.
Q: Is there anything else that you’d like to add or tell our readers?
Karnawi:I think I feel we talked a lot [both laugh].
Jabur: I think as any aspiring sort of creator, an artist of any creative medium, a developer, you just wish that the player or the experience would leave with questions. Leave the experience thinking, maybe not even about it, about yourself, about life. That’s like, the biggest aspiration we can hope for is this could be an introspective journey for the player.
Karnawi:I think it’s related to the previous point that I mentioned. It’s about just questioning the inherited notion that you’re given when you want to do something. Question what it means: success, failure. Because, again, it has paralyzed people, and we’re living in this world where you’re kind of encouraged to control things, but in reality, life is much bigger than that. You have brains that are small in comparison. Accept our vulnerability and embrace it - that will let everything flow.
Jabur: Yeah, that’s core to the story, in fact. We approach the narrative through the scope of vulnerability and what it means to be faced with different belief systems that, in their absolute terms, promise control. Maybe that’s not the right answer to be fulfilled, but that’s up to the player to decide.
Karnawi: And be like a child: curious. Over the past few years, I’ve embraced a guiding principle: ‘The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.’ This philosophy has shaped not only my creative project but also how I approach life, influencing both my professional and personal journey.
[END]
