Update: Another World is confirmed for launch on July 8th for PS4, PS3, and PS Vita — including three-way cross buy support across those platforms. We apologize for any confusion the previous version of this post may have caused!
Video game creator Eric Chahi has left his mark on the gaming industry by designing titles that deeply immerse players in strong emotional content. Internationally acclaimed for titles such as The Time Travellers, Heart of Darkness, From Dust and, above all, Another World, Eric has created entire worlds that all bear the undeniable imprint of his personality.
Martial Hesse-Dréville is a Berlin-based engineer and freelance game developer, formerly the founder of Dancing Dots studio. Martial specialises in gameplay programming and handheld consoles. He is a perfectionist who likes nothing better than to fine-tune the details of his projects.
Another World is a part of video game lore and a very special landmark in Eric’s career. It’s a visceral game that Eric put a lot of his soul into throughout two years of development. His suggestive and non-verbal narrative gameplay gripped players’ imaginations, and has been a major influence for many developers. Now, Eric and Martial have teamed up to bring the legendary platformer to PlayStation 4.
We caught up with Eric and Martial to talk about the challenges of bringing 20 year-old game to a next-gen console.
How did the project get off the ground?
Abrial (Digital Lounge): Although the game has been released on PC and iOS, it hasn’t been released on consoles since the ‘90s.
Eric: That is not exactly true, the Atari JAGUAR version was released last year!
Martial: Ah yes! Well, then we realised it was nice to play it on a console with a real gamepad.
Eric: Seriously, today’s consoles manufacturers are more open to exotic graphics and gameplay than five years ago – especially when it comes from another time. Also I felt very comfortable with Martial’s past experience on consoles.
What were the project goals?
Abrial: Simply to deliver the original experience of Another World faithfully, with the benefits of today’s hardware and a high level of polish.
What changes or additions are being made to the game?
Martial: Since the original version, the re-editions have introduced a number of nice additions, like 256 colors backgrounds, up to 720p resolutions, more checkpoints and remastered sound effects. This version now delivers a full HD experience. The game is rendered at a higher than displayed resolution to enable clean anti-aliased polygon edges. On PS4 that’s a whopping 2560×1600 pixels! The backgrounds have been edited by Eric to a higher resolution and are now displayed in full color. The result is a noise-free, crisper, and more vibrant environment.
Eric: The animations were also refined to remove the rough edges revealed by such a high resolution rendering.
Martial: A popular fan request was to add a music soundtrack like the original game had. The Sega-CD soundtrack was added as an option and the game can now be enjoyed with a cinematic soundtrack. Finally, we took advantage of the PlayStation ecosystem by implementing useful features: cross buy, cross platform trophies and cross save for a seamless experience.
What have the main challenges been?
Martial: At first the backgrounds took a while to load between each game screen. We employed a variety of tricks like pre-loading, caching and compression to get fast, smooth transitions from one screen to the next.
Eric: Retouching the background in such high resolutions was not so easy. I had to find the equilibrium between details and vectorial design. Recently I’ve been impressed by the visual art of Sword and Sworcery by Capybara Games – how very soft shades of colour can work in pixel art. Finally, I decided to use subtler shades of light than before with some very crisp detail and razor edge polygons.
Martial: But by far the trickiest part was refining the animations.
Eric: Yes, I wanted to do this because some frames looked really unpolished in full HD. Some of the expressiveness was lost. I knew what to do artistically but wasn’t sure how to improve the original data. Should we create a new tool?
Martial: After thinking about it, we chose to keep using Eric’s polygon editor because he is efficient with it.
Eric: The original tool on Amiga running on an emulator. A 20-year-old tool that can only display 200 lines, we had to mangle the original data without breaking it.
Martial: After several sessions of data scaling, offsetting and tweaking, Eric was able to preview and edit the full HD data set in his own Amiga editor. A real “Back to the Future” challenge!
M… my caruba?!
I wish someone would make a remake of Flashback: The Quest for Identity. I had it for Genesis and it was fun to play and i beat that game; and i would like to play it on my PlayStation 4!
My Caruba
MIcruba
Mike Caruba
My caroomba
mike aruba
my caruba
macruba!
Played this way back in the day on my Amiga. Never finished it back the, so I am glad I get another crack at it.
I have never left a comment on one of these before, but after seeing this, I thought that I had to. Sony, if you want to continue your lead for this generations console wars, keep this up. I remember playing this back when it was released back in the Genesis/SNES days. Which puts me in the mid to late thirties bracket.
I think that I can safely say for the majority of us gamers that are in this bracket, that we have money to spend, and pulling on the nostalgia chains is an almost sure-fire way to keep the coffers full. I would easily drop $30.00-40.00 for some of the classics to be brought back out on the newer consoles (I don’t care which console(s) to be honest).
I’m really confused and very concerned about how ppl get so excited about these goofy titles on the ” oh so powerfull ” PS4, yet we can’t have a decent Casino style Poker type game like we sadly used to have on PS3. If ANY BODY with any pull of power reads this for petes sake A/V online multiplayer poker/casino. ( not ps home type ).
This game is a work of art. Truly beautiful even after all of these years.
http://videogameobsession.com/videogame/wallpapers/VGO-OOTW_1680x1050-01-vgo.png
Will they allow the switching between the original and newly remastered graphics like on the PC and Android versions?
@ friskytiger :
I’m going to pretend you didn’t just call one of the most influential games from the 90’s “a goofy title”…
It’s clear you may be too young to understand the execution of cam in. You should really check out the roots of your hobby. There are a lot of wonderful video games from the old days that still blow away New AAA titles IMO.
I fail to understand how some people cannot understand that a system CAN have released for it these types of smaller/Indie/classic remake type of games ALONG WITH your usual AAA type games. It’s not like it’s just one or the other. Here’s a thought… If you don’t like them, don’t buy them. Beyond that, what the hell is wrong with getting these types of games in between the larger ones?!?! People need to start thinking long term and comprehend that the reason there aren’t hundreds & hundreds of 10/10 AAA games that exist in the PS4 library as of yet is because they take time… it always, in all of gaming history, has taken a good 2 solid years before any console builds up a high quantity of high quality games.
^^^^continued^^^^
Besides, about all of these “goofy” titles that are being released on the PSN come from a very unique & creative community of developers who simply weren’t part of the home console picture just 10 years ago… and I’m glad they are now. These “goofy” titles are regularly among some of the top-rated games that come out every year. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m fine with regularly getting such highly rated/high quality games (usually from $5-15) that are also far FAR more creative & fresh than 3/4 of all the other so-called “AAA” CoD yearly rehashes that can often plague the industry. If it was JUST up to the big name developers, I’d be missing out on games like Another World, Guacamelee, Child of Light, Spelunky, SteamWorld Dig, 1001 Spikes, Journey, all of the PixelJunk games, Outland, Dead Nation, Super Stardust series, Resogun (I can go on for days)… and all of the other upcoming “Indie” titles (on both the PS4 & XB1) that FOR SURE will equal or surpass what we’ve seen thus far.
Omg!! A dream come true! I loved this game so much when it first came out! Best platformer of the early 90’s. I still remember the Christmas morning when I got it :)
I had this game back in the day on my SNES and I loved it then. I just hope this isn’t botched like Flashback was.
Man, I must have played Another World over 100 times on my Genesis. It was so different and revolutionary for it’s time.
ohhh man an “Out of this World” Remake, this is incredible. i will be picking this up when it releases. I miss this game.
Games like this never had strategy guides or codes to progress, you had to sit there and think about how you were going to progress. please do Flashback next.
Gah! Meant to say “Out of this World.”
Flashback on the Genesis was one of my favorite games as a young teen. Based on that, I’ve always wanted to play Out of This World (Another World), as well, but I never had the chance. I’ll definitely be picking this up!
Hated this game as a kid because of it’s sluggish, “pre load heavy” controls. Love it as an adult (20 something, whatever) because of the art, story and deliberate pace. But I already played this 20th Anniversary version via GOG, so I’m good. I hope any new gamers take the chance on it; it’s a very unique experience! And man, I’d LOVE to see a new game adopt this rotoscoped/flat-shaded poly art style. It would look amazing in 60fps+! “Sky rogue” is a game on PC that purposefully evokes the flat-shaded polys of early 3D space shooters like Star Fox, Star Wars Arcade 32X, and Namco’s Starblade or Cyber-Sled. We need new games to utilize this kind of style! Make another platformer, Eric Chahi!
Wooooo! New old shizzz!
Im not much of a gamer, but i love reading these comments. :) you guys are funny…
9.99$????? Lo va comprar su MADRE! lol
That’s weird, it looks exactly like a game called OUT OF THIS WORLD, never heard of “another world”.
Another World was the name of the game in Europe & rest of the World. Only in the US, Interplay named it Out Of This World for copyright problems ;) we prefer to keep the brand Another World for the 20th Anniversary