The pleasure of transforming sand to water in Sword of the Sea | Matt Nava interview

From the first moment I played Sword of the Sea at the Summer Game Fest Play Days, I knew that it was like the game Journey, which led down from that wonderful game created years ago to the moment when I was playing the latest game from Matt Nava’s game studio, Giant Squid.

I played the beginning of the game. You start out as a nameless character in the sand. You start surfing through the sand, sort of like a snowboarder in SSX. Except you’re not riding on a snowboard. You ride on a sword, gliding above the sand as if you were on a hoverboard.

Oddly enough, the experience of snowboarding was the inspiration for Matt Nava, creative director on the game and founder of Giant Squid. He told me that he was inspired by being both a snowboarder and a surfer and the sensation of moving fast. When you’re in that moment, he said that these extreme sports become meditative. It’s about being back in nature and connecting with it.

We’ve seen these kinds of games in Flower, where you convert a city from gray to greenery, in Journey as you slide through the sand, and in other peaceful games as well. There are images from The Pathless and Abzu, the company’s previous games, in Sword of the Sea. While you wield a sword as a mysterious character in Sword of the Sea, you don’t use it in violence. As that character, you are searching for something, but I didn’t learn what that was in my short demo.

The game has beautiful music, but you play the game in silence. There’s no dialogue. No spoken narrative. It’s like the video game version of a poem, or a silent film. In the game, you move around, solve puzzles, and when you do so you convert the sand to sea water. It’s a very satisfying experience.

I noted it was odd how Giant Squid was hitting its stride with this game, while the rest of the industry was struggling due to lack of funding, high costs and changing gamer tastes. But Nava revealed in our conversation that Giant Squid was on the brink for a while until PlayStation backed the company. It was an interesting chat in the middle of a very chaotic demo day at the Summer Game Fest.

Here is an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: What are some of the inspirations for this? I feel like I see a lot of Journey here, and your first game as well.

Matt Nava: And even The Pathless, which was our game after that. It was all about moving really fast and momentum. It’s all of those ideas. But really, the inspiration is just from being a snowboarder and going surfing myself. When you’re actually doing that stuff, you’re moving fast, and it’s extreme, but it’s really this kind of meditation. I’m really interested in the meditative, spiritual side of those extreme sports. Usually when video games portray extreme sports, it’s very much about just the surface level of it. It’s not about the real reason that people go back to surf. You want to be in nature. You want to connect with nature. You want to explore.

There’s this kind of magical sensation you can get. That’s what we’re trying to achieve with this game. Take the movement and the speed, but let you get into that flow state and start to connect with the scene.

GamesBeat: Is it all silent? Nobody speaking, no narrative?

Nava: Yeah, there’s no dialogue in the game. There are definitely characters. You’ll meet another mysterious character along the way. There will be a story that plays out as you make your way through this world. There are lots of different biomes to explore beyond the sand. You’ll see in the trailer that we just put out at the showcase. There are snowy areas and other things. We’re telling the story with a kind of atmospheric narrative.

GamesBeat: Do you still need a narrative designer for that?

Nava: Oh, yeah. We’ve had a writer on this game. It’s hilarious. We’re like, “Okay, don’t write any words, but please help us.” It’s great. In the later version, there are little lore fragments you can find and read to learn more about the backstory of the world. You’ll be able to read some little poems about the history. It’s very subtle, the way we do it.

GamesBeat: Is that directly connected to your past games at all?

Nava: All of our games are connected in some way. What we like to do is let the players come up with those connections. We’ll definitely give them some clues and things to go on. But we never spell out exactly how they connect. We have imagery from The Pathless and from Abzu, so if you played those games you’ll recognize some things. You’ll see that connecting space, for sure.

GamesBeat: The animation and the environment, it seems like these are both areas where you already know what you’re doing. The sand and the sea. Was there something that was very familiar about doing this, or did you have to learn more?

Nava: It’s funny. I thought, “I did a sand game. I did a water game. This will be easy.” But then we added this new thing, which is that the terrain is animating. It’s constantly moving in every frame. That meant we had to invent this new tech. This is a very custom piece of technology that we made so that you can move with this wave at high speed. It was familiar, but also a totally new challenge. It was a lot of fun.

GamesBeat: What timing do you have in mind? Is this scheduled for release yet?

Nava: Yeah, it’s going to be out on August 19, pretty soon. We have to finish this thing. We’re almost done.

GamesBeat: What platforms is it going to?

Nava: It’s going to be on PS5 and PC, Steam and Epic Games Store. Day one on PS5 it’s going to be on the PlayStation Plus service.

GamesBeat: Do you learn much about the main character, or does he remain mysterious?

Nava: He’s very mysterious. You do learn more about him through the lore that you read in the game, these little fragments. He’s kind of this empty suit of armor in the beginning. You see that droplet hit him and make him come to life. He’s kind of this empty creature. He’s searching for something.

GamesBeat: How would you compare the development to past projects? Has it moved faster?

Nava: Every game that I make takes about three or four years. This one is about four years of work so far. We started it during the pandemic, right after The Pathless shipped. It was the first game we started remotely as a team. We had to figure that all out. The team came together. It’s pretty amazing what they’ve pulled off.

GamesBeat: How many people are on the team now?

Nava: We have 16 or 17 people. A medium-sized team.

GamesBeat: And that’s intentional?

Nava: That’s our identity. We like to keep it small. We’re a close group of friends, basically, making weird, out-there games.

GamesBeat: There’s a sword, but generally your games have been non-violent. Do you have to use the sword?

Nava: It’s funny. The first game I made with a sword, we’re not doing combat or anything. There are things that you cut. You saw the little–what I call ocean seeds, where he interacts and slashes it and the water comes out. Later on there’s going to be a kind of antagonist you meet. There are scripted moments. But yeah, there’s no moment to moment combat in the game. It’s really about the movement. The sword is part of the lore.

GamesBeat: Do you consider this something that anybody should be able to figure out? Is it a failure if someone doesn’t know what to do next?

Nava: One of our big challenges when we designed the game was to make it so that you can really just play and discover how to play without needing to look anything up. Just self-guided. We secretly teach you things as you go. In the beginning we show a little text that tells you how you jump and so forth. But we do secret stuff like–if a player already jumps before we show them that text, we just don’t show the text. We understand that you already know how to jump. We don’t need to tell you. We’re trying to get out of your way and let you be in the game, not remind you that you’re playing a game.

GamesBeat: Is it your own engine?

Nava: It’s Unreal Engine 5, but our team is unique in that even though we’re quite small, we do quite a lot of custom rendering. It doesn’t look like all the other Unreal Engine games. It has a very unique visual style, and that’s really because of the custom tech that we put on top of Unreal.

GamesBeat: What’s difficult about getting that done?

Nava: The biggest challenge is getting that character movement to feel just right. We’ve been working on how it feels to go off the jumps and interact with the movement of the waves. We do some things like–you go faster on the sand. You go even faster on the water. You go slower on tile. Without having any kind of speed control for the player, you just automatically go at the speed that feels right everywhere. Just making sure that it all feels perfectly good when you’re moving is the thing we’ve kept working on for four years.

Later in the game you’re going to discover environments that have snow and lava. Some very surreal environments. We’re taking these landscapes that you’ve seen before. You’ve seen a desert landscape. You’ve seen the water. But not like this. You’ve never seen a mountain of water. You’ve never seen the terrain moving like that. There’s going to be places that you don’t expect to see in a game like this at all.

That was one of the biggest challenges when I was pitching this game. I’d come up with a piece of concept art. “Imagine this animated. Imagine these waves moving.” “You’re just showing me a picture of the desert.” You have to see it in motion to understand it. But once you do, once you feel it, then everybody says, “Okay, I get it.”

GamesBeat: How did you finance this game?

Nava: We’re partnered with Sony. Sony’s been our financial backer. They’ve been great partners. They understood the game early and believed in us, believed in the team. We’ve had a close partnership with them in the past. We worked with them to ship Abzu as a console exclusive back in the day on the PS4. They’ve always been close friends of the studio. They have a great team at PlayStation Indies.

GamesBeat: Have you said how well your past games have done so far?

Nava: I don’t have those numbers on hand, but the good thing is that it’s enough for us to keep going. They’ve been successful. We still need to get funding from big companies, but every one of our games has found its fanbase. We put out our trailer and we have our Discord. Everyone was going crazy. It’s really fun to see. They’re doing new fan art already, which is a big morale boost for the team.

GamesBeat: It seems like you’re hitting a stride here, even while the rest of the industry has struggled.

Nava: It’s been a tough time with so many studios closing. We were on the brink for a while. Last year was really rough. We persevered and fought hard. Sony really came in and helped us. They made it so we could continue and finish the game. We’re grateful to them for helping us make it through a really hard time.