Small Interview

Interview added: 09-06-2022

Stadia GamesDB! (stdb): First of all, can you tell us who are Antab Studios?

Antab Studios (as): Antab Studio was officially founded by Andrea and me (Lara) in 2016. We are based in Milan, Italy.

Our main focus is developing PC and console videogames based on our IPs, trying to explore the media to test its boundaries and opportunities. We have been passionate players since a very young age, but we came from two different professional background: Andrea's career in videogame can be traced back to 2005, while I came from digital art direction, web and graphic design.

As a studio, our first title published was "Gridd: Retroenhanced", a neon arcade-shooter heavily inspired by sci-fi/hackers movies from the '80s and '90s.

stdb: And what will encounter the Stadia players when they fire for the first time FORECLOSED?

as: FORECLOSED is a narrative driven, single player action-adventure set in a cyberpunk comic book, enriched by a noir-ish story, "augmented" high-tech combat skills, and an exclusive sound track.

You play as Evan Kapnos, the "everyday guy" whose daily routine has been completely shocked by the unexpected bankruptcy of his employer, SecurTech Inc., and the consequent foreclosure of his own identity.

Evan must now fight against a mechanical and dehumanized bureaucracy, trying to escape the city before the auctioning.

In the dystopian world of FORECLOSED, citizens have a brain implant forcefully installed at birth. Thanks to this piece of tech, people are constantly connected to the Block-chain, a digital system on which every transaction is taking place. In this way, a person "exists" inside the society, and is able to benefit from its services. Of course this is not coming for free: using the neural implants, every citizen develops a forever-growing debt with the state called "identity debt".

When a person gets hired by a corp., the new employer buys his/her ID debt from the state, letting the worker dilute it over a lifetime. Only very few and very rich people can afford to buy their own "legal" identity back.

In the case of Evan Kapnos, what seems to be just a bureaucratic - yet, paradoxical - inconvenience, quickly turns to be something way bigger than him. While trying to unveil the mystery that surrounds SecurTech's bankruptcy, Evan's implants will reveal to be special, giving him telekinetic powers and letting him interface with a unique experimental weapon, the Symbiotic Gun.

The more challenges Evan will face, the more experience his implants will collect. All the Symbiotic Pistol mods and the combat powers are managable by a functional and very accessible skills' menu.

In FORECLOSED, the "comic book factor" is not just a visual choice. We have isolated some unique characteristics of comics and turned them into gameplay elements: Evan will move between panels, taking advantage of multiple cameras to look at the same scene from different point of views. Although FORECLOSED can be seen as a 3rd person action-adventure, the gameplay style is going to change several time during the story to let the players immerse themselves in the narration to a deeper level.

Integrated 3D UIs, onomatopoeias, speech bubbles, and smooth panels animations will let you feel like a real comic book hero.

stdb: What have you been inspired by to carry out FORECLOSED?

as: From a professional point of view, we wanted to challenge ourselves as a studio. Making a third person action-adventure game is quite challenging for a small team like ours, but we thought it was the right time to do it.

From a more personal point of view, we actually made a game that we would like to play. Single player action-adventure titles are our favourite, and we also consider oursleves fans of the cyberpunk genre.

Speaking about FORECLOSED's cyberpunk settings, this wasn't just a matter of personal tastes.

We want to think about how the bunch of information and data connected to a single person is becoming more and more important as our society is becoming more and more globalized and digitalized. We have a "legal identity" - so to speak - that doesn't necessarily corresponds to the human being behind it. We sincerelly thought it may be interesting to build a whole gaming experience around this topic, and so we did.

stdb: When it was decided to carry out a FORECLOSED port for Stadia?

as: We have been curious about cloud gaming since the beginning, but it was after FORECLOSED was selected to be part of the Stadia Maker Program, that we have been able to target this platform for a day one release. We are sincerely happy we passed the submission, as Google has partially supported the development letting us face the porting with more confidence.

stdb: How looks like porting a game to Stadia, does it change anything with respect to working on other platforms?

as: Each platform has its own requirements and singular traits. These are not just related to hardware, but also to "intangible" features, like the unique player experience that a platform aims to shape for its audience.

We originally designed FORECLOSED to be ported on many different hardwares. Of course we did some bug fixing, but we have also learn something new and enriched our portfolio as a studio. Stadia pleasantly surprised us not only for its good performances, but also because we found the development experience being not so different nor more complex then a non cloud-based platform.

stdb: Is the Stadia Version been developed in house?

as: Yes, we are working on Stadia internally.

We thought it was the best way for us to keep control of all kind of optimizations we needed.

stdb: Will FORECLOSED support any exclusive feature from Stadia (Crowd Choice, State Share...)?

as: With FORECLOSED we preferred to focus more on performances than unique features: we did a lot of work to keep the game at 60 fps at 4K resolution, with seamless loadings, even when multiple comic panels are on screen at the same time.

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