INTERVIEW: WILL GWASERA OF DALLIENCE GAMES

BY JARRETT GREEN

As we rapidly approach The Game Awards season, conversations about the best game released this year are starting to ramp up, but I can’t help but still be thinking about another Geoff Keighley-related event, Steam Next Fest.

Though not directly tied to the man anymore, the week-long demo bazaar that happens multiple times a year all started as the Steam Game Festival, which was a tie-in event for the 2019 awards show. Now, it’s the sort of regular event that drives a lot of traffic to corners of Valve’s marketplace that might have never had its dust disturbed before, introducing players and press alike to tiny glimpses of the next wave of games. This can also be a coming out party for special indies that might have gotten lost in the shuffle without these dedicated events to prepare for.

YASUKE: A Lost Descendant is one of those indies, I believe. A flashy 3D action game in the vein of Platinum Games, Dallience Studios has made an impression both at Steam Next Fest and this past Summer Games Fest. Their current demo is definitely still alpha-level, but the foundations of standout beat em up are there. Stance-based combat that adjusts your offense meaningfully. Fast and free movement where your momentum can also become a weapon of its own. All wrapped in energetic animation techniques that evoke that stop-motion style of films like Into the Spider-verse. 

I got to chat with creative director Will Gwasera briefly about Next Fest, YASUKE’s inspirations, and the sort of toxic nature of online spaces these days.

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Jarrett: How important is Steam Next Fest for a developer your size? What are factors you look at to determine if it was a successful period for you?

Will: Every festival has allowed us to level up, including GDC and Day of the Devs in March, or the MIX Summer Showcase in June. It’s always great to get more eyes on the game. Steam NextFest puts us on the main page, and that is a big deal for indie studios! We also meet new contributors and partners, and get useful feedback to make the game better.

Can we get some stats on the Dallience Studios team? (Size, key figures, maybe a short recap of how you were all brought together.)

The development team itself is just over 20 members. I personally wouldn’t want to label any single few people as “key figures” as everyone brings just as much importance and value to the team and project. YASUKE first formed with myself and one of my friends, who is one of our character concept artists. Originally, I was naive enough to think I could handle all the actual development work myself, but after a few months I decided to open it up to new members joining. From there I invited some people I worked with on my last fangame project (Demon Slayer: Kibutsuji’s Curse, this was the project that actually founded Dallience Studios), and alongside them some friends from my old Dragon Ball Xenoverse modding days (back in 2016-2019) which had gotten me into game development. After that it was fresh new faces that either I found around the internet or they reached out to me!

What afrofuturist sources or media would you say inspires your team the most as you develop Yasuke?

That’s kind of the thing, there isn’t really a specific “afrofuturist” media that inspires us whilst working on YASUKE. There’s afro media and there’s futurist media, and we’re bringing the two together in our own light. 

Some media that has been inspiring us towards our story and world include: Spider-Verse Trilogy, Arcane, Cyberpunk 2077/Edgerunners, The Last of Us, Attack On Titan, and a few more.

We’ve seen a lot of anime-inspired action games, but Yasuke stands out both because of the protagonists’ design and the sort of stop-motion style animation effect you have going. Can you talk through how you landed on this visual trick and what you’re hoping it conveys about the overall vibe of The Lost Descendant?

We’re still trying to perfect the stop motion animation work. Of course, taking inspiration and liberty from Spider-Verse, doing it in a game essence is a whole different story. ArcSystemWorks is a big inspiration for visuals and doing said animation in game format. However, due to their games’ nature of being 2.5D fighters, they can control all the camera angles and camera framerate to make it that much smoother and perfect. In our case with it being a player controlled camera, it’s much harder to get it to mesh just right but we’re on the right track. The main reason we went with this style is because the whole purpose of this game is to feel as if you are watching an anime. We want you to be immersed with some of the artistic decisions we’ll be making like maybe even changing the character models art style during different scenes to convey as if a different 2D artist was drawing the scene!

The music is heavily and obviously Afrobeat heavy. How important is it to you for this sound to be the signature sound of this game, and can you shed some light on the process of researching and developing the musical direction?

The music is EXTREMELY important to this game’s life. From the fact that, as far as I’m aware, it’s not common at all to have a game’s soundtrack to be afrobeats centred, it’s also to display the diversity with the characters amongst the story. This however extends further than just African culture/heritage, the diversity in our game is extensive and we want to try and portray that as best we can in certain aspects such as the music. For example our characters all come from our version of real life equivalent countries. And thus means that, though the main music genre is afrobeats, we take inspiration and musical influence from the countries they inspire from and mix it within the afrobeats to create a new sound.

The action game inspirations on Yasuke are pretty clear. What are you hoping this game could add to the genre that games like Ninja Gaiden or Devil May Cry made famous?

A merge of things spoken about in prior questions I think would be what adds us to those same games but in a different light. From the music being the type that you can’t help but add to your playlist, to the high intensity action scenes and story that’ll look like it’s 2D animated at times (some being playable sequences of course). Getting all of those in this genre of game will just solidify it as something great in it’s own right.

With rhetoric becoming more and more toxic especially around topics of race, any worries about developing and releasing a game with a black protagonist in an African setting into this climate?

I used to get worried or let these comments affect me but honestly now… I kinda just don’t care. There’s not much we can do about it, the racism is always going to be present. We get told to “make our own characters” so we do so, and yet when we do there’s still going to be racist remarks. So as far as I’m concerned we’re creating something for the people who will enjoy it and the people who aren’t racist, simple as.

What’s your favorite thing to tell people about this game?

Hmm I’d honestly have to say the fact that everything that has been seen is basically the tip of the iceberg for what’s planned with this game. My favourite things I can’t talk about because they haven’t been shown publicly yet, and most of them won’t be until the game is out so you can experience whilst playing. But if I had to hint at anything… After I wrote the final chapter of the game, the finalized version that is as there was many reworks, I genuinely shed tears after reading it through. I’m extremely proud of how the game ends and I can’t wait for us to work on it as it’ll be a visual and emotional spectacle. As long as we cook it up exactly how it’s envisioned in my brain, I truly believe it could go down as a greatly remembered final fight in story games. Some media that inspired that final chapter include: Tengen vs Gyutaro / Rengoku vs Akaza – Demon Slayer, Simon vs Anti-Spiral – Gurren Lagann, Naruto vs Sasuke – Naruto Shippuden, and some Dragon Ball scenes I can’t mention as that would spoil a bit too much!