Summary
Long Gone Dayswill provide players with the perspective of Rourke, a man born into a military army who knows nothing but taking orders. When he is finally sent to the surface, he finds our his idolized military company is not what he thought it was.
Players have raved aboutLong Gone Days' different approach to the war genre, and in a recent interview with Game Rant, the This I Dreamt development team talked about how the 20-year-old game was created.The interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
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Q: For our readers, can you tell us a bit about yourself and Long Gone Days?
Gormaz: I’m Camila. I’m the artist. I’m co-writer ofLong Gone Days. I am the original creator because it’s the story I started writing when I was 12 years old.
Videla: I’m Pablo Videla. I’m the co-writer alongside Camilla of the story, and I am also the game and level designer of the game.
Valderrama: My name is Camilo Valderrama. I am the programmer of the game. I work on game systems and all the coding stuff.
Q: Can you give our readers a brief summary of whatLong Gone Daysis about?
Videla:Long Gone Daysis the story of a soldier from a private military company called The Core. Our protagonist’s name is Rourke and he is a novice soldier who is being sent on their first mission. But while that mission begins, he starts to notice that the real purpose of the mission was a bit dark. He decided to abandon his post and desert from the army and attempt to stop the plans from his military. So along the way, he meets with different people, all of them civilians who are suffering the consequences of the actions of his military company. And with them, they form like the main party of the game, and they try to stop the evil plans of this army.
Gormaz: One of the key aspects of the game is that since it’s set in the real world every local speaks their own language. And it’s important to make locals join your team so that they can translate what other NPCs says for you to understand them. And that’s the only way you may communicate with them, and it’s something that players really like about the game.
Valderrama: All I can say is that it’s a war game, but it focuses on very specific aspects that are human relationships. We don’t focus too much on blood and the kind of military weapons like explosions and killing. This game is more about a friendship and kind of finding the best of the people you meet during your event.
Q: Camila, you’ve been working on the development team since you were 12 years old. How old are you now, and also tell me what your relationship with video games was at such a young age?
Gormaz: I’m now 32 years old. When I was little, I didn’t have any consoles at home. But I did have a very dear friend of mine who invited me to their home, and she had a Super Nintendo and that’s where I met Kirby. I playedKirby Superstarfor the very first time, and I fell in love with video games. And since I didn’t have a console at home once I went home, I will draw levels on my notebooks. That was like my first approach to game development. And as I grew older, I started doing activity books like really little things or dress up dolls and I really liked doing interactive things.
And when I was about 10 years old, I learned a bit of HTML, so I started doing these like hyperlink games, and then I learned Flash. And when I was about 12 years old, I found out about RPG Maker and there was a Hispanic community on RPG Maker, and I really wanted to be part of it, so I needed some kind of story to make again.
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And that’s when I started writingLong Gone Days. Even though when I played Kirby there weren’t many games that I liked, but until I playedFinal Fantasy. That’s when I knew what I wanted to do when I grew older. I really liked playing games and I really liked that especially inFinal Fantasy VIIIthat it was set in something that looked more like the present because most RPGs I played back then were either set in medieval times or in a fantasy world and I really liked it, because it reminded me of my anime and I wanted something closer to that. So that’s why I started writing something in the present without any magic or stuff like that.
Q: Game development studios in Chile aren’t as common as most other countries. What do you think are the pros and cons of this, if any?
Videla: I was thinking that one of the pros is that the community, it’s a bit small, so pretty much everyone knows each other. You can see the work of everyone and also share your knowledge and share your games. It’s like a really small, tight-knit community. I think that that makes it a bit special, because when a new project is announced from a Chilean developer you feel like the rest of the developers are so cheering for you and wanting you to succeed. But I think that one of the cons is that - I think it’s something that happens to a lot of places outside the US or the main business hubs regarding game development - for example, if you want to attend a show, like something like PAX or GDC, it’s really expensive. It’s really hard for a small team to go to those kinds of events. So you don’t get to meet people from the industry, and also you don’t have so much exposure, so you are kind of forced to get some sort of partnership with maybe a US publisher or European publisher to be in on those kinds of events and have a more massive like recognition from the players.
Gormaz: Marketing is pretty hard from this part of the country because I noticed that even though I have reached out to a lot of people on Twitter, for example it really changes the way they see you once they meet you in person. We have visited the US like two times and the contacts that helped me the most are the ones that actually met me in person. I think we could reach way more people if we could be present in more events in the US.
Videla: Camilo went to PAX this year, and it was like a very big opportunity for us to show the game both to players and to the press. And it was like a really positive experience for us and for the game …because it allowed a lot of new players to know about the game, to find something new, maybe a new perspective of storytelling or game development. And I think it was a really positive experience overall.
Valderrama: It was a great experience. It’s definitely really nice to meet people in person, kind of seeing them playing your game, hear their reactions and all that good stuff. And I would love for more opportunities like that to exist in Chile, like more big events like PAX and others. Hopefully in the future, the industry develops more there, and we can have those big events there as well so it’s more accessible to those developers that can’t travel and spend a huge amount of money attending to these events.
Gormaz: I wanted to mention that Chile and I believe Argentina and Mexico are the countries in Latin America that have the biggest [video game] industries.
Q:Can you explore how Rourke as a character was created?
Gormaz: Since this is a story that I began to write when I was 12 years old, I’ll be honest, there’s not such a big reason for why some things were decided. But as it happens, sometimes main characters are kind of like an outlet for the writers to explore that more emotional side, like in a world where emotions are not seen like a good thing especially for men. I wanted to explore what it would be like to grow up in a setting like that… It was only natural that he was the protagonist. I don’t think he’s too similar to me, but he does have some fears, some stuff that resonates with me.
Q:So he wasn’t modeled after any specific person or another character, like some other video game characters?
Gormaz: When I first assigned the characters, as I said, I hadn’t played too many video games back then because I didn’t have a console, so I always read these like, Nintendo magazines. I think I was inspired by Crono fromChrono, and that’s why his hair is red, and the one with the glasses was actually inspired by Link. I hadn’t played those games, but I just liked how the characters looked. But then they evolved a lot since then, so they don’t resemble them too much any more.
Videla:I think that their personalities evolved a lot over time. And right now in the final version of the game, they are their own unique characters. And I think what we tried to do with Rourke was that he’s someone who’s been a bit isolated from the world, so it helped us to use him as a device to show the different cultures and the different places that we visit from a new perspective and to help him learn a bit about what it’s like to be a person outside your chosen role. Because for example, one of the things that we did in the game is that most of the side quests are related to doing different kind of works or different kinds of expressions.
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So it’s something that it’s really fun to work because of his upbringing in a military kind of society. So he has the time to explore, for example, he [has a] more creative side, so he can maybe try to play a musical instrument. He can try to create art. He tries photography and a lot of different creative outlets for him that are new that we sometimes think that are not normal in our own lives, but for him as it’s something new, it has a bigger impact on the player and the development of this character.
Q: Rourke meets other characters in the game. In your minds, how do these characters influence him?
Videla:The first character that he meets is called Adair. He is also a part of the military alongside him and at the beginning of the game, and he’s tries to follow the rules a bit more. He’s more strict in that sense, so each time that work feels like he should leave the military or that he should try to stop the mission that they’re doing, he’s like a bit on the opposite side. He’s trying to follow what he’s instructed to do. But over time he starts to turn around and flip his point of view and start to see the point of view of Rourke and support him in what he’s trying to do.
Gormaz:And I think something great about Adair is that he is seen initially as the usual calm and calculating person, but as the game progresses, you learn that he’s actually a very caring friend, and he’s always taking care of Rourke’s mental stability, which is part of being like a combat medic.
Videla:Later he meets Ivan and Lynn. Ivan is a native from the first real life place that they go to that’s called Kaliningrad. It’s like a Russian territory, but outside Russia. It’s more in central Europe. One of the inspirations that we had is where Camilla was also a very big fan of [Fydor] Dostoevsky. We basically based him on a character of a novel, but maybe she can explain it better than me.
Gormaz:
Ivan is based on a character that was also called Ivan from the novel,Humiliated and Insulted. And this is a character that I was surprised about because… our first exposure to Russian characters tends to be like veterans or really cold and tough man and when I started reading Dostoevsky’s words, I was surprised to see these really sensible, sensitive characters. And in this novel, Ivan takes care of an orphan girl, and that was kind of the inspiration of why he’s living with Lynn. Well, she’s not exactly an orphan, but he takes care of her without any kind of romantic undertones or anything. They’re just friends. And I think that that was kind of unexpected for my teenage self. So it really stook with me.
Videla:So Ivan is living in Kaliningrad with Lynn. Lynn is not Russian. We never really say where she’s from, but I think that in our kind of head canon, I think she’s American, but I don’t really know. But she’s someone who’s been escaping her whole life, not for something she did, but she just wanted to feel free from parental obligations or having to follow certain rules. So she wanted to travel and kind of be free, and she ended up in Kaliningrad meeting Ivan. And they are the first two main party members that you meet on your trails. Later on, they go to Germany and in there they meet with Atiye, who’s a journalist from Turkish descent, and she is helped to investigate a political party in Germany that’s doing some like underground jobs with the main antagonist of the game.
Gormaz:Something I wanted to add is even though we have a character that represents Russia and a character that represents Germany, we wanted them to not be like, 100% from Russia. For example, Ivan his last name is actually from Ukraine. Ukraine. And Atiye, she’s from Turkish descent, but she was born and raised in Germany because In the north of Germany, there’s a lot of Turkish population.
Videla:We wanted to explore that because sometimes when I don’t know, people tell you that you are not from a country, from either country, you have this kind of crisis that you don’t belong anywhere else.That’s something we wanted to explore as well.
And the last party member is called Pascal. He’s a computer hacker who rebels against his bosses, and he can start helping the party when you meet him in Germany.
Most of the characters are trying to stop The Core for different reasons. Like Ivan and Lynn want to stop them because they took their homes, as they invaded Kaliningrad and they had to escape. Atiye is concerned with what they’re doing regarding the democracy in her country, allowing them to fund dangerous political parties in there. Pascal is fighting The Core because he sees that they are using criminal activity to gain more power and also in his country. They all have different reasons, but they all have the same desire to stop the main enemy of the game.
Q:What kind of relationship or bond do you hope a player will create or develop with the game?
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Videla:We already have a loyal fan base who have their favorite characters. I think that for the most part, the fierce element that drives them to build a connection with a single character is the artwork from Camilla… But also they seem to connect a lot regarding the small parts of the game that we have, in which they have some sort of personal time with each character when they can talk and express their fears or their hopes and what they want to achieve with trying to stop the main enemy. So I think that a lot of characters resonate with the people that play the game because of their reasons to keep fighting.
For example, Pascal, he’s trying to fight because he feels a bit guilty for having worked with this mafia guy who helped the car. And Atiye feels like she has some sort of responsibility as a journalist to show the truth. And Ivan, even though he’s shown in the game as a pacifist, he still feels that he has a place in this group to help stop this army with the confidence that he has in the rest of the party and the way that he supports them. So I think that they are different reasons, but they all seem to resonate differently with the people that play the game.
Q: Camilo, can you talk about whether you developed a specific bond with the game yourself as you were going through it?
Valderrama:From the beginning, I immediately trusted the vision that Pablo and Camilla had at that time about the game. So the story [and] the characters seem very creative, and each character had their own quality that makes them kind of unique in the genre, in my opinion. So it was kind of a very easy bonding process since day one. I wanted to work harder because I wanted to see the game developed and actually play the game and see other people playing the game. I developed this connection not only with the game, but with the team very fast.
But my favorite character is Pascal, who is actually also a hacker programmer that helps the team in that way. I like that Camilla [and] Pablo theme the character around computer science concepts as well… I didn’t write the game, but it feels like my own as well.
The team is very close, and since it’s a very small team, at any point, we all have been kind of working on different things. Camilla has been doing kind of code changes. At some point I was working on side quests, things like that. Happily I was not making art, by the way, as Camilla was in charge of that all the time. But yeah we are very happy with the results. I am very happy with the results as well, and I can’t wait to see how people enjoy the game and what comes next.
Q: The art style is a combination of like anime traits and pixel art. Why do you think that this combination of art styles matches the storytelling of the game?
Gormaz:I always liked pixel art, so ever since I was little, I fell in love with fighting games, and that’s how I fell more in love with pixel art. Something I’ve been asked a couple of times is if we had a bigger budget, would we make the game 3D or something? But my answer is that I still think that pixel art should be the style, because I think it’s really special. It’s something that I hope is not lost in the coming years.As for the anime style, it’s the style that I’m comfortable with even though I rarely watch anime, but I feel good in that style, and since I was in part inspired by JRPGs I think that’s the style we had to use.
At first I was a bit concerned about mixing pixel art with these illustrations because in most games you’ll keep the portraits in a pixel art style, but I’ll be honest and say that I made them HD because it was less time-consuming. But in the end, I fell in love with the style. I think we could portray the emotions and animate them a lot better now that it was in a normal illustration.
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Videla: I also feel the art style being in this way, helps to get the attention of maybe some players on like their first introduction to the game. Sometimes, I’ve seen comments of people saying that because of the art style, they didn’t expect the story to tackle the issues that it’s taking on, and that they are a bit surprised about it. I don’t think we had a special intention to have this sort of dissonance with the art style versus the story, but we felt that it helped a bit intrying to take on this topic for the players so they aren’t seen so raw… You still feel like the connection, you still feel empathy, you still feel immersion in the story, but it’s not something that seems a bit grotesque or maybe exploitative like [how] it may happen when you see them portrayed in a more realistic style. I think that the art style helped a lot to approach the story in a more sensitive way for the players.
Q: There are several contrasting uses of color in the game. In more somber moments, color seems to be more muted, whereas when it’s like pixel art, it seems a little more vibrant. Was that the intention? And if so, what was the goal of that?
Gormaz:By default, I tend to color things in pastable tones, which I know tends to clash a bit with the military vibe, but we did want to contrast certain instances. Pretty much everything that takes place in The Core tends to be like green with this matrix-like filter [laughs], and we want to show warm tones for the surface.
Especially that part where Rourke wakes up in a room that’s kinda pink [laugh] because it was a girl’s room, but I do like that contrast between drawing a soldier between flowers, these kind of contrasting things it’s… I don’t know, a bit poetic.
Videla:And especially when we try to have moments in which the main cast have some more wholesome moments in between the more serious topics or levels, we try to have like this change in color because it matches basically what the feeling of the scene is trying to convey. And like Camilla said, like everything that’s more related to the military - to The Core - is more like a technologic sort of aesthetic. Like maybe more glossy finishing and like more metal or plastic or something more sci-fi in a sense. While the rest of the game takes place in towns, in cities, in people’s homes, we try to make it feel more with warm tones, so it can convey the more natural side of people, more close to what the humanity of the character is. So I think that it’s something that Camilla accomplished really well on designing those places and their style of the game.
Gormaz:Yeah, something that we really used a lot of color-coded messages. I said the color is green, and it’s complimentary color, or it’s red so that’s why it contrasts well with Rourke and stuff like that.
Q:What is this game’s music trying to add to the player’s experience?
Gormaz:For the music, it was pretty hard to get to the point it is now. At the beginning, we didn’t have any budget when we started working on it, so the original soundtrack, it wasn’t original, it was just royalty-free music. But since last year, we now have an original soundtrack made by a fellow Chilean called Sebastian Martin, and I really looked for, like everywhere, for musicians. A lot of them, they saw pixel art, and they automatically thought that they had to make 8-bit music and I really didn’t want 8-bit music. Like, it doesn’t have to be that way. What I always wanted was to have a post rock-inspired music or progressive rock as well.
Martin already had his own post rock project… Once we began talking, he already knew what we needed for the game and there were almost no corrections for the tracks he sent us. We are big fans of his work. And once we started adding his tracks to the game, it feels completely different. Like at the beginning when we start implementing a scene, there’s obviously no sound effects, no music. And it feels weird, like nothing has weight. Once we started adding sound effects and stuff, it did begin to look a bit more like a movie, and you feel like you’re part of it.
Videla:And also with the soundtrack, we try to do something similar to what we discussed about the art style. We try to do different things when we are dealing with The Core, the main antagonist, and when we are trying to show scenes taking place in Kaliningrad or when you are talking to NPCs [or] when you’re talking to your party members. We try to generatea contrast between the type of instrument [and] the type of soundthat we are using in the game. We hope that that contrast is noticed by the players and appreciated because we really liked the way it came out.
Gormaz:Yeah. Like Pablo said, The Core has more like digital instruments, and once they reach the surface, you start hearing like acoustic guitars mm-hmm. So that’s also intentional.
Q: Communication is vital in this game. How does the challenge of language barriers present itself in the game and also the real world?
Videla:In the game, like Camilla said at the beginning of the interview, is that we try to make it feel like a new country is real when you visit it in the game. So you don’t really understand the signs or how the people are speaking. You kind of need to create a connection with someone to help you navigate this unknown place, and it’s a bit like how you feel when you travel somewhere, like that feeling of being in a foreigner in another country. That also helps us convey what Rourke was feeling when he left his military for the first time. Like, he was accustomed to some sort of place where there were very strict rules that he had to obey.
And he now was free to do whatever he wanted, and he was experiencing some new feelings, something that he never felt before, but it was so new to him that he was like a foreigner in this land. So we tried to do that. And also one of the inspirations we had was when you see, especially with American cinema, when you see that the main character travels to another country, everyone in that country speaking perfect English. So we wanted to avoid that because it doesn’t feel immersive [and] it doesn’t feel real and getting that sense of being kind of alone in a place is really important to the story of the game. It also helps us to connect with people from different parts of the world who played the game, because we’ve got a lot of comments from people who know Russian, people who speak German, people who speak Polish that can understand things the rest of the people can’t, so they feel a bit special.
But also they feel like they are rewarded because they are seeing their language in a video game without being translated… and it’s something that happens to us when in a movie they mention like Chile or something that it’s only ours. So that’s why we wanted to do that regarding the languages and communication in general in the game.
Q: Opposed to other war games likeCall of DutyandBattlefield,Long Gone Daystackles the human perspective of war. How do you hope that this will impact players?
Gormaz:Honestly, I wasn’t too big of a fan of military movies because I have this prejudice that they were all like, really like patriotic, like weapons are cool and stuff like that, and I hate that. But then I started watching stuff like mecha-anime where you’re able to see how it always impacts the civilians or even stuff likeBand of BrothersorThe Pacificwhere you can see the bad side of war, like how nobody wins there, and I thought that it was a good idea to show that part to people who think that war is all cool, and also to appeal to people who don’t like traditional war-themed movies and games. We get a lot of comments from people like, “oh, I thought I wouldn’t like this game because I don’t like military things.” And I was surprised. But yeah, I think it’s an important thing because there’s always a war somewhere and people need to empathize with these kinds of situations. In war games or in the news or in movies, civilians are really viewed like expendables and just like another number.
Especially, you know, that in the last couple of years I’ve been following news from different parts of the world that report about war, and it’s incredible that most of the things you see are like, “oh, this is the number of people who die” and most people just read that news and say like, “okay, well at least it wasn’t in my country.” Or sometimes they only mention it in local news if someone from our country was one of the victims, that’s the only way you get people to care.
Gormaz: We really wanted to use this game to make people conscious of the weight of the human cost of war. We also feel like the medium of video games is a really powerful way to create empathy with the people who play them, because when you are playing the game, you are taking over the role of the main character
Videla: It’s different from a movie when you’re seeing an actor [where] you are only a [spectator]. Here, you are basically making the choice to help someone, making the choice to shoot someone, and we try to make the game into a story that helps bring that empathy to the player, and to help them understand that there’s a heavy cost to war in general. That’s what we mainly want to convey with our game. And because like, even though right now Chile has been hasn’t been a part of a war… we still feel like in everywhere things are so volatile. It’s needed even if it doesn’t affect us directly, it’s needed to generate this sort of feeling of dread in people who don’t want to participate in these sorts of things. And that’s what we try to show with our main cast of characters. Like, there are people who aren’t soldiers, people who are civilians, who try to help to bring peace.
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Valderrama:I agree with Camilla and Pablo. It’s a theme, it’s a thing about empathy and kind of human relationshipsmore than a typical war game. And I just hope that people play the game with that expectation because it’s so contrasty. So usually when you buy, or when you play a war game, you kind of expect what you are going to get… [Long Gone Days] is more like about emotions, about friendship, about personal stories. So yeah. I hope that even if you come with that expectations of playing a war game, you still like the game after playing it. And I really hope that this is a first step for everyone else to experiment with those contrasts and great stories outside the kind of typical way that some some styles or topics are proposed.
Q: Is there anything else that you would like to discuss or mention?
Videla:Please buy our game [laugh].
Gormaz:I think we didn’t talk about the inspirations because well, I remember we launched the demo and the first chapter of the game on early access in 2018, and back then a lot of people thought that our main inspiration was what’s going on in the US with Donald Trump, but that wasn’t the truth. We were inspired by our own history in Chile.
For example, Pablo’s parents, they took an active role during the dictatorship and organized other people so that they could act against the [dictatorship] [by] helping others stay safe. We did hear a lot of stories from them, and we took notes to write stuff forLong Gone Days. We also watched a lot of documentaries… In Chile, there was civil unrest taking place with a lot of protesters marching, riots and stuff like that. It really like, I don’t want to say inspired us, but we did base some things from what we were living through in that moment and what affected us a lot.
Videla:Like Camilla said, during that time in 2019 when we were starting to write the last part of the game we took a lot of inspiration on our own feelings. It was pretty much a time when there was a lot of uncertainty. People didn’t really know what was happening, there was a ton of rumors and misinformation on social media. There was a lot of taking sides on, a lot of basically, like I said a lot of uncertainty. So when you’re dealing with the feeling of uncertainty and not knowing if you can trust the news or your government, it’s hard to stay calm, but at the same time, it’s hard to try to do something because you don’t really know how to act in that situation. So we tried to take those feelings into account when we were writing, with an example being how most of the civilians that you meet in that part of the game were struggling.
Also, like Camila said, my parents have always been involved in politics. When I was really little, I learned firsthand things that happened during the Pinochet directorship here in Chile. [My parents’] have shared stories about keeping yourself safe, like if you are meeting someone, use a fake name so if they get caught, they don’t get recognize you [because] they can get you as well, or stories about protests, or a time when they felt like they had arguments with people who wanted to take a more violent approach versus what they wanted to do, which was more related to politics and more like teaching people and diplomacy. So there’s a lot of inspiration in that regard, which shows with the way we attempt to make the actions that the party takes in the game feel a bit more real.
Q: Camilo, did you have one last thing that you wanted to add or mention?
Valderrama:Yeah, so we’ve been working on this game for a very, very long time. As I mentioned before, we are a very small team, and the game is huge, honestly. Like, it has a lot of dialogue, a lot of content, a lot of different kinds of scenes that you can or cannot miss during the game. I just want to always say thank you to our community. Without them, we wouldn’t been here before today, so I always really appreciate all the support that the people always give us.
[END]
Long Gone Daysis available on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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