Interview: Ivan Zanotti

8 years ago

If indie gaming was a country, Ivan Zanotti would be one of our national treasures. He effectively created a new and exciting subgenre of horror with his indie masterpiece Imscared - A Pixelated Nightmare. He’s gone on to mess with our heads while combining emotion, platforming, and puzzle solving in games like Collapse, Collide and NothingElse. His most recent release (as of this writing), the collaboration Calm Time, explores new territory in terms of the way horror is portrayed in games.

You might think that the man behind such heavy works would be morose or withdrawn, but Ivan is humble and down-to-earth, approachable and friendly, receptive to criticism and responsive to feedback. And he’s always apologizing for his English, which is actually quite good for a non-native speaker! I’d been in touch with Ivan before, and it was a pleasure to be able to ask him some questions in an interview setting.

Hi Ivan, thanks so much for taking time to talk to me. Lets’ start with a little background. You live in Italy, I know. Did you grow up there?

Hi Paul, it’s always a pleasure talk to you!

Yes, I grew up here in Italy. It’s a beautiful place, too bad every kind of art is really underestimated in my country.
At least it is like this with videogames.

What were your most memorable gaming experiences growing up? What games really left their mark on you?

Megaman and Silent Hill are my most precious experiences. I love those two games.

Megaman raised me as a platform lover, and Silent Hill as a weird kid.

How did you get into playing, and then making indie games? What developers have really influenced you?

I have to thank my brother Fabio for loving videogames: I constantly looked at him playing on the NES, then following his route I mastered all the Megaman X’s for the SNES.

Then I began to create something: I spent one year or so toying with Game Maker 5, trying to create my own terrible Megaman fangames. The experience was great, but I stopped and began to draw comics.

Some years passed, but my passion for game creation was not dead: I loved things like Horror Point & Click (I remember a thing called “NFH Propaganda”, when I was 16 that thing was great), but then—in 2009, I think—Terry Cavanagh and his “Don’t Look Back” popped up in my browser.

That game was brilliant: “I want to do something that beautiful too!”, I thought. So, some years later (with that game always on my mind), I began creating a little game called MonoKroma.

What’s the Italian indie game scene like?

Like I said before, our country doesn’t worry too much about art like the world thinks.

We have a lot of potential. We have great ideas but no possibilities.

In any case, thanks to the Indie scene, we can try to shine and walk this road all by ourselves.

I want to talk a little bit about each of your games. Let’s start with your first release, One Day, the World. Actually, before you made that game, you were working on a couple of other games that are so far unfinished, weren’t you? Dilemma and Teardrop, I think. What were those projects like?

I think there’s a bit of mistake, here: my first project was a game called MonoKroma (and you can find the awful preview on YouTube, too!). Then I canned that project and began working on Teardrop, like you said.

“This game can be great”, I thought when making the art for it. It’s a game I really want to complete, in the future: colorful, dynamic and—I hope—great to play.

When One Day, the World came to my mind, I couldn’t do anything except stop working on Teardrop and give all of myself to the new project. I really loved the idea behind One Day.

Concerning Dilemma, that was a game started after One Day: it was a Megaman-ish game, but then evolved in my mind and it needed much more skill to be created.

And you ended up doing One Day instead, from conception to release. How did you get the idea for the story and the atmosphere? It seems to set the trend for your future releases—a sort of eerie, surreal style that you would further develop.

One Day is a homage to Terry Cavanagh and his Don’t Look Back. I loved how Terry created a great scenario by using something like three colors. I kind of copycatted him for the limited palette choice, and I feel guilty in a certain way!

For the story, the creatures and the general atmosphere I used my own weird thoughts and nothing else (heheh). My games are, like you said, eerie/surreal and I really do nothing special to make them that way. They exit naturally from my mind like this.

In a certain way, I really like what I do and I love to make games in my “style”.

You were working on a remake—One Day, the World: Retold. Was that ever completed?

Sadly, no. But it’s always on the to-do list.

One Day was buggy and tedious. The story was also something I wanted to stretch a bit more, giving more space to Helper (Helper was playable in the version I was building)!

One thing I love about your games, from One Day to your latest release, is the sound design. Spare, effective use of sound effects and some great music. Do you compose the music yourself?

The sound design is like the rest: something that comes out of my mind. I think that sound is something essential for a game and I do everything to keep it good and vivid.

I do compose the games’ soundtracks all by myself. To be sincere, I don’t know a thing about music theory. Like for my games, I simply create something that I like.

Do you have any formal artistic or musical training?

Nothing like that. I began composing stuff around 2006, just for the love of music. I started creating hip hop beats full of violins, pianos and stuff like that. Then I moved to ambient music.

The One Day soundtrack is an example of this.

Ok, back to the games. So, your second release was the one that really put you on the map. Imscared - A Pixelated Nightmare is popular and also influential. Hell, you’ve basically created a subgenre of pixelated first-person horror games. There have been some cool descendants, like 7Days and I See You. And the style is a welcome antidote to the Slender-likes out there, which seems to be the other direction indie horror has taken over the last year or so. So how did you come up with it? Were you consciously trying to do something different with interactive horror?

Thanks for the compliments, Paul!

Imscared was something meant to be like this from the beginning. I always thought that “cool graphics” killed the player’s fantasy, in a certain way. The first Silent Hill, compared to the new ones, was not scary because of the Japanese team that worked on them (well, they are great with horror stuff). The thing that makes the first Silent Hill a great horror experience is the graphical limitation and the filthy sounds. It’s something really different from our reality, so it scares us.

Having a highly polished monster doesn’t scare me. I can’t work my imagination on something so detailed.

I wanted to do something different and powerful, something that people wouldn’t forget because their imagination worked a lot.

And the 4th wall-breaking, the different files… Did anything inspire you to use these techniques?

I was inspired by some ARG games on the internet, taking the player to a totally different tier.

“A game that exits from itself is great”, I thought, so I began creating it with two simple ideas in mind: keep the game aspect really simple and deceive the player into thinking there’s something that doesn’t feel “right” when playing.

So, you recently ran a partially successful crowdfunding campaign to make an updated, expanded, Oculus Rift compatible special edition of Imscared. Though you didn’t hit your goal, are you still making the game? Everyone wants more White Face!

The campaign was something that really frightened me. Asking people to offer money for making something disturbed me in a certain way.

I’m always afraid that my games aren’t so great, for the gamers.

In any case, the funding was a success to me and my self-esteem. I really do want to create a new version of Imscared, full of new content and with Oculus Rift support. I’m saving that money for the Oculus and I will develop the new Imscared soon—Oculus or not—that’s for sure.

Is the game a complete rebuild? An expansion and polish? There’s so much potential for horror and mind-tricks with Oculus Rift, too. But it wouldn’t be required, right?

The game is a complete rebuild, yes; a lot of things were programmed badly and now I have more potential. Also, I’m reprogramming it with GameMaker Studio (this way I can publish Imscared on Mac and Linux too).

The old things will be enhanced and a lot of new stuff will be implemented. Obviously, the Oculus Rift version will have some things that a game without it couldn’t have.

By the way, what did you think of the crowdfunding experience? Do you think the campaign would have been more “successful” if you had been able to put it on Kickstarter instead of Indiegogo? (For the record, I do.)

Choosing IndieGogo was something unavoidable, in a certain way. Here in Italy it’s a bit tricky to use Kickstarter (for payments and stuff) and I didn’t have much time to do it, with [my day job doing] the iOS programmer work.

Someone told me “make a new campaign now that you have time. Make the campaign on Kickstarter!”. I’d love to, but I also think it’s a bit stupid to do another campaign for the same product. I don’t know, I want to but it feels weird.

Well, it would have my support! Alright, that brings us to Collapse, Collide, a tricky little platformer with an awesome atmosphere and a real personal, emotional, and philosophical core. It feels like almost anyone could relate to the themes. Is it a metaphor for a specific time in your life, or for a specific thing in people’s lives? Or for life in general?

You know, some people would think that my favourite game, among those I created, would be Imscared. But Collapse, Collide takes the cake.

I love Collapse, Collide. It’s my personal interpretation of life—life in general. I made it to remind myself about what I can do and what I can accomplish. I really hope that the game sent the same message to everyone.

Collapse, Collide has some awesome secret levels with some ridiculously tough platforming and a cameo by a familiar face. I thought I had made it to the last one, but it turns out there’s another one after it, which I can’t beat!

Oh, the secret levels in Collapse… [big grin]

There are three secret levels in the game. You can obtain two of them by finding a noose and a little rotating orb (Helper!). Two of the secret levels are an homage to my previous games, One Day and Imscared (with the last one having White Face chasing you and leaving a little remainder in the game folder). The third level is something I did to challenge my platform skills, a level really hard to beat!

So after Collapse, Collide, you started work on a game that remains unfinished: Fireworks. What’s the game about, and is it still something you’re working on?

Fireworks is a collaboration between me and a great friend, a guy called David. It’s difficult to find someone with a gift for storytelling, and David’s one of those people.

When he presented to me his story and proposed to me the collaboration, I was enchanted. Fireworks has a story that everyone should listen to. So why not play it, instead?

I really want to make that game, it has priority over everything besides PLE.

More on that one in a bit. So after that, I believe you started work on A Case of Stress, which is a project I’m really excited about. Kind of a GameBoy-inspired top-down horror-adventure with first-person sequences. Is that right?

A Case of Stress stressed me. Really! I was working on it every day after work, and that little brat seemed to be always at the same point.

It was VERY difficult to make all the things I had in mind for the game, so I’m writing and enhancing the game script as time flows. I think it will be great.

What’s its status right now?

Like I said, I’m working on the script: the new year will be perfect for getting back to work on the game itself.

ACoS will be something divided in chapters, so I want to fill the new year with ACoS chapters.

Your next completed game is the incredible NothingElse, a return to pixelated horror, but from a sidescrolling perspective this time. And true to it’s title, it plays like nothing else, kind of a mix of profile-view exploring and action with first-person point’n’click styled puzzles. And a brand new scary villain to torment us in our dreams. That scene where it’s pursuing you is just so creepy! Also, it tackles serious themes like abuse. So how did this game come into being?

NothingElse was “the thing that will kill the hate for A Case of Stress”. I loved it, I had a great time making this game.

The phase [in which] I made NothingElse was really awful, to me: job payments were absent for about three months, our family was moving to a new home, and I was facing up a lot of other problems (I’m also looking at you, A Case of Stress). Initially the game was supposed to be something like Collapse, Collide, a thing to free my hate towards that phase of my life. The result was the same, but with a different style.

Like someone pointed out, I was really inspired by Home by Benjamin Rivers (that game is gold). I wanted to mess with that style, mixed with the first-person point’n click style taken from A Case of Stress. I wanted to do something more with this game, like multiple endings.

I think that the story wasn’t understood by many players. For example Phil, the “Alien Green monster” isn’t a villain, it’s your only hope. If you’re searching for a villain in NothingElse, look at the clown/rabbit.

That brings us up to 1ime L0ver, which you made for Ludum Dare 27, where the theme was “10 Seconds”. It’s one of my favorite games from the event. It’s a much more light-hearted game than we’re used to seeing from you. It still has some dark elements, but it’s more of a cartoony version of spooky. Did you have fun making it? Was there anything you didn’t have time to include?

My girlfriend keeps telling me that my games are always weird and dark (in fact she really wants to play Teardrop or Fireworks!). I developed 1imeL0ver to make something funny to play, a game that represented my stupid side.

I was really uncertain about the ending. Initially, the game would end after the “I love you” sentence… But I wanted it to be a little, funny break from my weird works. So…

In any case, I’d love to make a longer version of the game (without the time bombs everyone hated).

Alright, now we’re up to PLE: Peculiar Life Experience. Could you tell me a little about it?

PLE was an idea I kept reminding myself of. It initially was a game that tried to break our everyday life, but then evolved into something more studied and plot-worked [oriented].

So I contacted an old friend, Bellini Virgil: he is a 3D artist and I really wanted him to create PLE with me.

The game will create a lot of questions while playing, but differently from Imscared. It will leave a lot of explanations to theorize the meaning of everything. PLE will also work on the 4th wall, but not like its white-faced predecessor.

Your most recent release was a collaboration with Virgil and RevoLab: Calm Time, which was started for the Game Jolt “Party” Contest, though it was completed after the contest deadline. What was the collaboration experience like? Is this a one-time thing?

I really wanted to work with RevoLab—the Revo programmer, Adriano, is someone I really esteem—he’s a great programmer and I have a lot to learn from him.

We want to enhance Calm Time, as time goes by. The game has a lot of potential and one week wasn’t enough.

Calm Time is an extremely brutal and disturbing game. What techniques did you use to make it such an effective horror experience?

I really wanted to disturb the players this time. I rarely use things like brutal violence in my scripts (except for the ending of NothingElse), and I wrote Calm Time to challenge the emotive side of the player, to challenge their ethic.

In Calm Time I studied the graphics and the sounds to be powerful and effective. Some players felt awful and weird playing it. I loved this thing, it was exactly the reaction I wanted: repulsion.

There’s a Vine you posted of some of your unfinished games. I recognized all except two, I believe (and we’ve mentioned them all above). What’s the one where you’re like a little white ball leaving a trail? And the other one where you’re a ball of electricity or energy?

The first one is something I was making for the Game Jolt’s “Chaos” Competition. It’s a platformer game I’d really love to keep developing (maybe something short I will finish this new year).

The second one (if I understood the one are you talking about), is One Day - Retold. To be precise, a portion of the game when you’re using Helper.

Oh! I didn’t recognize Helper on his own! Finally, who are some developers doing stuff that you enjoy these days?

Like always, Terry Cavanagh. I think he will sue me for being a stalker, one day or another. The RevoLab guys are also a valuable option. I’ve seen some of their “backstage” things and I’m really, really interested.

I also want to see something new from AskiiSoft: Tower of Heaven was a blast, when I played it years ago!

Well have you played Pause Ahead? That’s their latest.

Thank you so much, Ivan!

Thanks to you, Paul, and as always sorry for my English!

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