Five years ago, I discovered « The Gecko Gods ». I was immediately charmed by the concept of a compact and tiny open world, halfway between « The Wind Waker » and « Tchia » – a game that made me dreaming on a journey. Six years on, after a few twists and turns – including illness and sweltering heat – I was lucky enough to chat with Louis Waloschek, the main developer behind this project, and to share our wonderful conversation with you on a game named now « Gecko Gods ».
To set the scene for our meeting, Gecko Gods was one of the few titles I was certain to mention in Game of Faune. Half that because I was already a fan of the game, and the other half because games featuring lizards and other geckos are few and far between – especially when they’re ambitious. There have been a few games, such as the Gex series or Playtonic Games’ Yooka-Laylee, but these games don’t make the most of their protagonists. As far as I’m aware, Gecko Gods is the first title to have truly embraced the most of its character’s abilities. After playing the game and chatting with Louis off the record, I went back over every aspect of the Gecko’s role with him, and we hope you’ll enjoy this post-mortem. And I want to insist about : we will only discussed about the animal and all the things around him. Things said, welcome to this new episode of Game of Faune !
The Starting Point
My first thought, given his obvious sympathy for the animal, was that Louis had a particular affinity for the gecko. He wouldn’t be the first animal lover to turn his love of animals into a game, as we saw it with Bug Fables a few episodes ago. And whilst Louis did indeed like the gecko, that wasn’t what led to the game’s development. Right at the start, Louis was working on a Zelda-like game set in a sort of Moroccan valley. By his own admission, the game was very generic and had been stalling for quite some time. That was when until one of his friends decided to have a go at programming, incorporating… a lizard as the main character in her project. The follow up was kind of the beginning of the project.
« Like a week later, I was always struggling with my prototype and its combat system. And I thought « What if I pulled this lizard into this valley? And maybe I could make it walk around » And then I thought like « I’m a big fan of Super Mario Galaxy as well. I thought, what if I could actually make it walk on the walls? » But one of the things that I hadn’t seen before (even in Mario Galaxy) is someone making wall movement, but keeping the camera relative to the character rather than spinning with wherever the character moved. »
Development of the game took (unsurprisingly) longer than expected, with Louis working on his own for a year and a half before a publisher (Super Rare Games) came aboard. From that point on, he thought he still had one or two years’ work left before completing the project, which actually took over five years to develop. As with any starting solo development project, many people became involved in the game’s development; the first person to join the project was Jasmine Cooper, the game’s composer. Martin Kvale was the second to join, shortly after the publisher approached Louis. They were subsequently joined by Ali Enser, who was responsible for the island architecture; Carlo Di Paolo, the game’s lead level and puzzle designer; and Dario, who handled the console ports. These five or six people (Carlo having joined the project quite late on) formed the core team.
Louis then sought out specific people on social media to help with particular aspects of the project. These included Olivia Sullivan, the key art artist, Luke, who modelled a wide variety of the islands’ insects; and Alex Stroke, the creator of the game « The Spirit of the Mouse », who designed part of the statues of the Gecko Gods and the cacti.
THE ANIMAL
The animal’s design was one of the first things to be conceived for the game, and it remained virtually unchanged right up until the game’s release, with players responding directly and very favourably to the design on social medias. Whilst the design is fairly faithful to the real animal, one significant change was made to make the creature more appealing to the audience. Its eyes are larger and more bulging, a technique often used in the design of animal characters. However, Louis doesn’t recall having any motive of attracting the public when designing the creature, He does, mention two sources of inspiration alas. The first was « A Short Hike », which influenced not only the character design but the entire game. The other is called « Gibbons: Beyond the Trees », which features Spider Monkeys capable of climbing trees.
As for the gecko’s animations, everything was procedurally generated, with the legs moving freely around the animal’s body (or the spine) as a single unit as Louis told me :
« There’s sort of four main things going on with the character controller. So mostly it relies on heavy use of inverse kinematics for the feet. It’s pretty simple. When the feet position gets too far away from its last feet position, it moves it to the new position. And when you’re doing certain actions, it just moves it to that defined position for that action. So if you’re jumping, there’s some guides in front of the gecko to move its arms forward. And when you’re swimming, it moves it side to side to give that sort of swimming motion. And so that’s the feet. Each point follows the last point wherever it moves. And each bone going down the spine is just following the last one with this moving. »
And the same goes for the tail, with one exception: it has even more freedom than legs.
Tail is essentially doing the same thing, but It has a separate controller, so it can be more independent with how it’s moving compared to the spine. Also, the tail doesn’t have to be as corrected as aggressively as the spine. So it will sort of try and correct down to a default pose, for instance, when you land, so that your spine isn’t just floating in the air. I wanted to have some kind of independence. Because you could just put the whole neck to the end of the tail on the same level. I just animate all of them with the same controller. But you wouldn’t get this fine-grained controllability of how the tail is moving independent of the body.
For the head finally, a different method was used:
The head has two parts to the animation. There’s a blend group, which is just in blending between two states of the mesh, which is just the mouth open, mouth closed state. So if you’re near bugs, the gecko will open its mouth by itself in anticipation of eating the insect. The head is just a single bone, which just points towards points of interest. I spent a fair amount of time on the point of interest system. It sort of tries to prioritize things in the environment to look at, particularly levers, and look at things that you can interact with, but also insects. And that helps make the gecko feel a lot more part of its environment and helps the player find what they’re supposed to be doing.
All these modelling choices come together in what I consider to be one of the game’s greatest achievements: the Gecko feels « alive ». It’s extremely lively and fast, and captures the behaviour of lizards and geckos very well, even if its overall design differs somewhat from what is found in nature (but not by much). It’s worth noting that you can also customise the colour of your animal by spending a few credits by destroying objects around you and beating enemies. Nevertheless, the creature’s signature colour – a flashing blue – has remained the game’s trademark. Louis wanted a creature that would stand out whilst maintaining a certain consistency in what he wanted to showcase on social media. And he actually has an anecdote about this.
« think in most of the materials we post or I posted, I just kept it to the blue gecko. Once the publisher started posting more of the marketing stuff, they were using all the colors of the geckos. But whenever I post… It was always the blue one. »
Finally, Louis and Martin managed to find the Gecko’s voicelines within a few hours, based on Yoshi’s sound. It is actually inspired by a sound made by a… samurai (!) from a previous game Martin worked on.
GAMEPLAY AND CAMERA
We spoke about it since the beginning of the trail but What is Gecko Gods exactly? Just as I thought, it’s an adventure game in which our little protagonist sets off to explore a small archipelago using an old boat he finds very early on in the game. On each island, you must solve puzzles with the aim of activating ancient statues. The game is, as mentioned earlier, similar to a Zelda-like title. But the original concept wasn’t quite the same, as many ideas were, as is the case with all video game productions, scrapped during production. Still inspired by Zelda, the game was more focused on stealth and survival, centred on exploration and the protection of a central hub, described in the interview as a nest or a house. The day/night cycle, which plays a very minor role in the final game, was intended to play a more decisive part, with creatures only emerging at night for example.However, the project’s ultimate purpose, which was to make people having fun by playing a gecko ,immediately put an end to the initial concept. The original idea was therefore abandoned because the playtests failed to deliver the expected results, and it was this decision that led to the game taking a radically different direction and shape the new way to think about it.
« It was really important to me that the world felt continuous. We never teleport the player anything for any puzzle or anything. Everywhere you get, you get to yourself, and anything you see is an interactable part of the environment. Like there’s no fake islands, there’s not really any rooms that you can’t get into, except on the desert temple for a room or two. That was one of the targets, that the world had to feel real, and if you saw something you wanted to explore, you should be able to. »
Some elements did, however, make it through to the final version. The previously named temples ,ideas borrowed from the Zelda series too, were always part of the design, as were the physics-based platforming sections. Any ideas that came together well eventually became integrated to the project’s development. Louis told me that the whole process of brainstorming and selecting ideas happened organically; no sudden changes of direction were actually made during development. Having a gecko as the main character did indeed influence the entire level design and the creation of the puzzles. The key, therefore, was to come up with ideas and puzzles that were consistent with the animal’s abilities and size. We spoke about Super Mario Galaxy as an inpiration previously but an other 3D old-fashioned platformer serve as a reference too : Ratchet & Clank. Not so old-fashioned in reality because Louis took ideas from the last entry on the series : Rift Apart. We can effectively find some moment of the game where you can walked on walls thanks to gravitational boots. The camera stays straightforward to give the impression of gravity sense. The mechanic is present since the first episode of the series on PS2 and drives the climbing mechanic on Gecko Gods.
This whole environment and the constant sense of scale had an undeniable impact on camera management. Before our meeting, Louis had the opportunity to make a breakdown video around Gecko Gods on the Unity’s Youtube channel, the biggest challenge being to position the camera whilst incorporating all the game’s elements. As the gecko requires a low-to-the-ground perspective, camera management was bound to be a critical aspect of Gecko Gods. And indeed, due to this design choice, the camera is sometimes very difficult to manage, particularly in confined spaces. The team constantly encountered this sort of problem, especially when the animal was near a lever, as the camera would invariably be sent crashing into a wall. Tosolve this problem, the developers decided to zoom in close to the lever to minimise the issue, rather than zooming out to highlight a point of interest. Numerous playtests were carried out with people who were not used to playing games, in order to fine-tune the gameplay as effectively as possible. Video game references such as Journey were also used, particularly for guiding the player’s in the environment. Several options to prevent the camera from automatically re-centring, as well as numerous bugs, have also been solved since our interview.
Despite the camera work being clunky at times, this sense of scale between the animal and its environment, a choice made entirely deliberately by the team, remains one of the game’s greatest achievements. Once again, the Zelda series and the scale of its temples are cited as inspiration. Som of these locations have been scaled down through the development by up to 20 per cent compared to their original size, to avoid being tedious to navigate. However, puzzles and the way they are presented in the environment have been designed with playfulness rather than logic in mind. The gecko’s speed has also been adjusted to prevent the player from moving too slowly through the environment or too quickly, ensuring they do not miss things or fail to engage with the surroundings. It is also possible to sprint in the game, an option left to the player’s discretion. For my part, I only used the sprint to face and defeat the game’s various enemies. As mentioned earlier, the combat system has been greatly simplified. The idea behind the combat in Gecko Gods was primarily designed to give the game a sense of rhythm, to create a contrast between calm and tension, and to guide the player through their adventure. But the fights were never intended to be difficult, and that’s exactly how they turn out in Gecko Gods. Whilst the enemies may seem a bit strange (they’re sort of like pots with legs), their origin is explained in the game’s lore.
At a point, everyone in this society had a gecko companion kind of thing like on their shoulders. I don’t know, maybe this is a spoiler[…] but the geckos were sort of the guides through the afterlife, and the actual pot creatures are humans that died without their geckos, so they get lost in pots.
The world of Gecko Gods was conceived as a cultural crossroads, blending references from numerous civilisations without necessarily aiming for anything specific. The game draws on references to Mesoamerican, Native American, Egyptian and even Islamic cultures. One of the most explicit references comes from the desert temple, where the dungeon is constructed in such a way as to evoke the passage of souls into the afterlife. The team could have developed this idea of the intersection of cultures further, but chose instead to focus on illustrating this concept.
One final point influenced the gameplay of Gecko Gods was the development platform. The game was primarily designed for release on the Switch, with all the challenges that this entailed. Concessions were therefore made, such as limiting the number of physics-based puzzles in the game, as it was « difficult to achieve a consistent physics system that runs stably and performs well on the Switch. » said Louis. That said, the final version on Switch and other platforms remains identical, with the exception of a rope bridge that has been removed from the Nintendo console and which, to my knowledge, was not present on Switch 2 either.
OTHER ANIMALS
Gecko Gods isn’t just a lIzandary adventure; it’s also the story of a few animals who come to call out to you. The first of these are birds, corvids, to be more precise. Carlo used to see crows turning up uninvited at his appartment in Berlin. This connection eventually found its way into the game quite early on in development. And whilst the birds were initially intended to be a threat to the player,their role changed as development progressed.
For a while, we were going to have no dialogue at all. Talking birds came quite late in development, because we needed some way of helping players guide the player without it. This is their main purpose in the world.
Corvids were not originally intended to be the only birds present in the archipelago, but limited development resources ultimately halted the idea. Species diversity was therefore drastically reduced, but the developers made up for this by altering the models, colour, size and shape of the corvids’ beaks. None of the birds are real.
Numerous insects (which are real, however) can also be found on the various islands; our Gecko may end up gobbling them up to complete a compendium that is as diverse as it is colourful. Here again, no keyframes were used to make the insects walk or fly. It’s all down to mathematics and shaders, which made it possible to create a number of them using minimal resources. Part of the insects was designed by Alex Stroke as said previously, with the supervision of Louis. Some animal were prioritise by report others. Wasps and Spiders (even if there aren’t insects) didn’t make the cut, because Louis didn’t want too. As for the AI, it was programmed using raycasting. The idea was to have responsive animals, capable of flying away when the Gecko was near them, and they were subsequently placed in logical locations.
We were quite selective about which insects felt we should have on each one. The red Ants were only going to be in the desert. Then in the desert itself, we tried to make sure that the insects were in good places There’s some Butterflies somewhere in the desert, but they’re mostly near the water, the same for Dragonflies. We were trying to make it like we did want them to be in places where it would have felt natural for them to be.
That’s it for this post-mortem. I hope you enjoyed it! Another huge thank you to Louis Waloschek for his great kindness, and to Dan from Super Rare Games for the opportunity to ake this interview. I invite you to check out Gecko Gods, which was a lovely game to play through ! you can find it here : https://store.steampowered.com/app/1290760/Gecko_Gods/?l=french