[Penny's Big Breakaway] Interview de Tom Fry, directeur artistique d'Evening Star : son parcours, le rôle de la créativité et de l'innovation dans leur dernier projet

If you were to introduce yourself and your background, what could you tell our readers?

Hello and hi, my name is Tom Fry! I seldom speak in rhyming couplets which maybe is why I’m not the best at solving riddles but I’m improving day by day, I promise. According to my Instagram profile, it appears to say that I am a; digital & traditional artist, vintage gaming & tech enthusiast, fluff & whisker detectorist, alarm & siren beatboxist, and heat & spice arsonist. Oh, and I live in the UK and would subsist purely on a diet of croissants if only I had the metabolism of a hummingbird.

You're an Art Director. Could you explain your job and how it usually works relating to a video game?

Tom: Some might call me an Art Director, but most of the time people just shout, “Oy! Baldy!” and that usually snaps me into action. I’ve long been fascinated by the relationship between art and technology, particularly within the context of video games where interactivity with the medium is so deeply interwoven.

I have to don many hats in my job which lends a fair degree of variation to my weeks - something I truly relish. One day I may be creating concept art, the next, character modeling and animation or branding and UI design. I love to sit and chew the fat with artists, designers and engineers alike which is an essential part of the role. Every day brings a new challenge with regard to realising our collective vision and it is a thrill - dare I say it, magical - to see how we can manipulate machines to deliver a transporting mise en scene for our audience.

Penny's Big Breakaway is the first video game from Evening Star, a studio you co-founded in 2018. What inspired you to create this project?

Tom: It’s always been our goal at Evening Star to build a body of work that is spearheaded by our own unique IP. Penny’s inception can be traced back a few years to when we embarked on a team exercise to brainstorm different verbs - actions one could perform in a video game that might be intriguing as a foundational mechanic. One of those verbs was “yo-yoing” which quickly resonated with the wider team and the ideas snowballed from there - including conjuring the idea of a penguin snowball, so, there you have it!

How did the project evolve? Was your role as art director involved at every stage of the project (design, development, testing)?

Tom: It perhaps goes without saying that it’s impossible to envision the entire product from the outset - you can’t eat the whole elephant at once! A lot of ideas would be addressed in sequence with one informing the next and it’s an intrinsic part of Evening Star’s culture that all members of the team from Junior through to Senior are involved in the creative and feedback processes from the very beginning. The wacky, technicolour result you see in PBB should speak to this harmonious concert of ideas that came from so many different directions within our stable of talented developers.

So, yes, I was indeed involved at all stages of the project if not directly working on, say, the level design, I of course would constantly test it and sit and discuss with the other designers on a regular basis about the interplay between the art and the design to ensure the potential of both is synced and maximised.

What artistic aspects of Penny's Big Breakaway are you most proud of?

Tom: As a passionate animator and fan of animation in general I would have to say - surprise - the character animation. Across all aspects of the project, we set a number of strict parameters to ensure the scope of the project did not creep whilst driving extreme focus into certain areas where we felt they’d have the most bang for buck in terms of overall polish, and so, animation was a key priority early on. I love the Penguins which were animated by our Senior Artist, Rémi Benoist and Sailor Sheila’s cutscene ‘emotes’ which were finessed by Kieran Gates.

I would be remiss however if I did not heap praise on our supremely skilled Junior Environment Artists Claire Warren and Natalia Beltran who also poured many hours into our beautiful Bauhaus-inspired abstract geometric landscapes which I hope will make a strong impression on our audience. Vanillatown is very much an idealised vision of somewhere I could take a prolonged holiday, Penguin mobs aplenty.

Conversely, are there any elements that you were unable to integrate into the game, or for which the mechanics weren't convincing?

Tom: “An artist’s work is never done” is a haggard old phrase and for better or worse, it applies to every project I’ve ever worked on, but you have to call pens down at some point and ship! The absolute truth is that with Penny, I look at the product holistically and I am extremely satisfied with all that we were able to achieve. Speaking for the art, my expectations were exceeded in many areas where I thought we would not have time to see certain aspects to fruition, yet we did. We knew the timeline we had from the start and my outlook was calibrated accordingly. Of course, I will always have ideas and technical approaches to challenges that I would love to explore on future projects.

What are the next steps for Evening Star in terms of game development? Will Penny's Big Breakaway receive any additional content, either free or as DLC?

Tom: As the game has only just come out I would say to our audience - buy PBB with money! We love Penny and hope you do too, and if you would like to see more, then please, support us however you can and that likelihood in the future for expanding and exploring her adventures further will increase.