Interview: Karla Zimonja, co-founder of Gone Home games studio Fullbright

Well let’s see. I started out working on 2D animation for TV, moving into games when a friend in the industry asked me to come work with them. I didn’t know how to use 3D animation programs, so I assumed it wouldn’t work. They persisted, though, and eventually I caved and said yes, doing some test animations in Lightwave 3D, a janky old 3D program. I stayed with that company for a few years and moved to various other animation positions before burning out and then I taught for a little while.

After that the games industry again beckoned, and I became a researcher for the Bioshock 2 team. From there I was able to expand into a lot of other aspects of that production, and during that time I started working with Steve Gaynor, who later became one of the co-founders of our company, Fullbright, where I remain to this day.

Having experienced both sides of the games industry, the huge teams and budgets of AAA as well as small, self-published, indie productions, which would you say you prefer?

Well one of the benefits of working on Minerva’s Den (DLC for Bioshock 2) was that it ended up being a small core team nested within this huge studio. So from that we got the benefits of having a small unit, and we worked together as a closely connected group. So that experience was very different from having a core team of, like, a 100 or something. So, yeah, I would say I definitely prefer working in a small team.

Like being in your own band?

Kind of. It’s funny how many times the band comparison comes up when we talk about Fullbright, but yeah, as a small team you get to do so many more things within it, and really get to understand the shape and scope of the whole project. Everyone helps each other out, and there’s just generally a better idea of what’s going on at a particular time. It also helps to prevent people making decisions that end up going in the wrong direction, and not working out in the greater scheme of things.

What’s your experience been like as a woman in the games industry? Has it got any better since you started out?

In our own company we’re kind of bucking the trend. We’ve got eight people at the moment, with three of those being men. It’s hard to compare us to the AAA industry at large, but the gender ratio of the games industry remains imbalanced. I think indie devs definitely have the opportunity to avoid replicating what’s found in the rest of the games industry, but not everyone takes that choice. I mean, if you leave the big budget games industry and operate outside it, chances are that a lot of the people that join you are coming from the big budget games industry, and so the gender ratio is carried over into your new venture.

In Gone Home, there was a strong narrative that focused on the sexual awakening of a teenage girl. The story was profoundly different from those usually tackled in games. Do you think videogames offer a good medium for telling narratively driven, personal stories?

Well, I think that games have the unique ability to give you an experience that you couldn’t otherwise have and that there’s no real borders to that. I know that answer sounds a little broad, but I see no reason why these personal and specific stories can’t work well in videogames.

Gone Home was very grounded in a specific time and place (the Pacific Northwest in the ’90s) and a lot of people were able to connect with that. Your new game Tacoma is set in 2088, on a lunar transfer station. In order to maintain that same sense of grounding, have you had to do a lot of research into where the human race is heading?

Hell yes! I’m personally a research fanatic, so we’ve done a tonne of research. Although science fiction is usually not about the world you know (that’s kinda the point), concepts existing in the world today are those that will inspire and shape the future. So, in terms of my research, it’s really best to know about the way things currently work, what exists now. Then you’re able to make a sound construction on top of this base of what we know in the present.

A definite gambit of ours is that we take all of these concepts which could just be taken to be wacky sci-fi things, and we keep them grounded in reality by knowing their analogues in today’s world. For example, we’ve managed to learn a lot by just looking at the experience and day to day life of astronauts living on the International Space Station, they raise a lot of issues that arise from living in space that are applicable to Tacoma.

In what we’ve seen of Tacoma so far, model representations of people act out scenes involving the missing crew. It looks like the cast of Tacoma is going to be bigger than that of Gone Home, which had a tight focus on the Greenbriar family. Has that been a difficult experience, writing for and coping with a larger cast of characters?

It has been difficult, yes. It’s definitely a different proposition to the story we explored in Gone Home. I mean, an example would be how, in film, smaller casts let you get to know characters better since each of them have more screen time, whereas a larger cast leaves less time to focus on each character. So yeah, it is a challenge that we’ve had to address, but we’ve found it to be an interesting situation, it’s a different structure to what we’ve done before. As a team we see it as a fun challenge to overcome, instead of looking at it as an insurmountable challenge. Who wants to produce the same thing over and over? In Gone Home we’ve already explored a very close-in portrait, so we thought it would be interesting to try something a little different.

In literature the reader fills in some of the gaps, the text itself isn’t information overload because that wouldn’t be fun to read and some of the joy comes from engaging your brain. In your games you present a fixed 3D space, but the story threads are left for the player to tease and pull at, filling in the gaps. Would you say this is an important part of Fullbright’s design ethos?

Definitely! I think that idea is at the core of the games that we make in a lot of ways. It’s very important that the player has some work to do mentally, otherwise you lose a certain amount of buy-in.