Brazilian trans developers reach the top with game Unsighted

A small Brazilian game studio, formed by two trans women, managed to face the American, Chinese and Japanese giants that dominate the sector.

Inspired by The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Castlevania and Dark Souls franchises, the game Unsighted narrates a world where the main non-renewable resource is running out, and salvation depends on a dark android.

The game was developed by Fernanda Dias, 30, and Tiani Pixel, 26, who form Studio Pixel Punk. The duo achieved the feat of having a game on the select list of Brazilians who achieve international prominence.

In an industry that constantly bombards consumers with the most advanced and expensive in computer graphics, Unsighted slams on the brakes and joins the wave of games that prove that low budgets and less realistic experiences don’t prevent the realization of a title of quality.

The game, which started as a prototype presented at BIG Festival 2018, an annual Brazilian event focused on indie games, took three and a half years to be developed and commercially released by American publisher (distributor) Humble Games in September 2021.

The plot of Unsighted, which embraces themes such as ecology, diversity and technology, takes place in an almost uninhabitable future in which the fall of a meteor containing the substance “anima” banishes humans once and for all and gives automata consciousness.

The discovery of this usefulness of the “anima” makes men return and go to war against the now-sentient androids, for whom the scarcity of the substance does not mean death, but the transformation into unsighted (“without vision” or “hidden”, in the translation). into Portuguese) — a violent version of themselves.

With a gameplay that mixes several mechanics from classic video games, what makes Unsighted stand out is the sense of urgency it conveys. As the “anima” substance is running out, all Autonomies have an expiration date, including the protagonist, Alma.

The game imposes a time limit to complete, which can even be turned off in the options menu, but it gives the game an end-of-the-world rhythm, and still makes the player need to choose well if he wants to save certain characters over others. .

“Unsighted takes a lot of these game formulas with which the player is familiar and tries to make a twist on top of that”, explains Fernanda.

Fernanda and Tiani caught the attention of companies that finance and distribute games by presenting, during the BIG Festival, a version of Unsighted that is still far from ready, but not incomplete.

As is commonplace in the entertainment industry, studios obtain funding to produce their works after presenting a sample of what will be done throughout production. In cinema, this is done with short films. In video games, a prototype or a demo.

Studio Pixel Punk’s differential was to have thought of the Unsighted prototype as a vertical cut of the game, that is, in which its main graphic and gameplay characteristics were presented, but without leaving aside minor details, such as menus, dialogues and customizations.

“We knew that to impress a publisher, we needed to show that we knew how to handle all the steps of development, from developing cool gameplay to an options menu”, says Tiani.

“Sometimes it seems like silly things – many people leave it to the last minute –, but the publisher knows that this is important, and that for the game to work, everything has to be implemented as soon as possible. professionalization, which was something I learned in the jobs I’ve done before”, completes the game designer.

In a country where most gamers play on their cell phones, before dedicating herself exclusively to Unsighted, Tiani perfected her programming skills with occasional work for Brazilian companies in the field.

Fresh out of college of digital games, and having experienced the culture of modders (people who modify software) and developers in the 2000s, she decided to save money to work on a copyright project she really believed in.

It was during the pre-production of the game that Tiani met Fernanda, who had studied piano at UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais) and wanted to apply her knowledge of music to the production of video games. The partnership happened and Dias ended up being responsible for creating the retrofuturistic ballads that pack Unsighted.

After dozens of publishers, both Brazilian and foreign, got in touch with the studio, the two decided to close the deal with the American company Humble Games. The company, before starting to publish independent productions in 2017, was known for the philanthropic sale of games under the system “pay what you want”, in which the user chose the price they wanted to pay for a package of selected titles.

“There are a lot of people who make the mistake of signing with the first publisher that appears, but we didn’t do that. It was a caution that we had to analyze different proposals and get to know what to expect from a proposal of this type, the type of thing that we can ask and negotiate”, explains Fernanda.

The strong presence of mobile games in the country even made Studio Pixel Punk consider launching Unsighted for cell phones, but the investment in dollars and the certainty that the game would be made available on consoles allowed for a more ambitious production.

The investment made by the publisher, the amount of which was not reported, was, according to them, only a small fraction of what studios in rich countries receive. Smaller distributors end up being interested in games made in countries like Brazil and India because of the low cost and the ease of return on capital.

That didn’t stop, however, that Unsighted was considered one of the best indie games of 2021. Or one of the best games, period.

In Polygon’s best of the year list, one of the main US vehicles for games, Unsighted was in 10th place, ahead of titles like Forza Horizon 5, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy and Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, produced and distributed. by some of the biggest companies in the industry.

The inequality of resources is reflected not only in the cost of developing the game, but also in the very structure of marketing and distribution of the games. For example, while an American indie phenomenon like Hollow Knight, which launched in 2017, has nearly 200,000 reviews on Steam, Valve’s online store, Unsighted has around 650.

What helped make the game popular was its launch at no additional cost on Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft’s game subscription service, the platform on which Unsighted was most played (the game is also available for Nintendo Switch and PS4).

Now living together in Santo André, the two developers see the foray into game development, a market that generated US$ 180.3 billion in 2021, as positive.

The publisher’s financing, the undervalued real and the game’s commercial and critical success meant that they could dedicate the last four years exclusively to working with video games, a childhood dream, and still guarantee part of the future of the studio they founded.

“With what we gain from Unsighted we can comfortably prototype for our next game, pitch [proposta] from it to a publisher and continue in this development cycle”, says Fernanda.