Phil Fish on how Ico shaped Fez

Fez designer Phil Fish spoke this afternoon of how Fumito Ueda’s design philosophy on classic PS2 adventure Ico helped shape the final form of his revered XBLA puzzle-platformer.
Speaking at Nordic Game in Malmo this afternoon, Fish praised the people who inspired his approach to making games – naming Braun’s Dieter Rams as “maybe my favourite designer of all time”. A mark of good taste indeed.
But it was a 2004 GDC talk, during which Ueda coined the phrase ‘subtractive design’, that helped him get Fez, which was in development for over five years, shipped.
“In earler versions, [Ico] was much busier,” Fish explained. “It had villages, with villagers and shops. There were robots with lasers coming out of their eyes; human enemies too, instead of the dark shadows. They were all fully integrated, playable working features.
“Eventually he realised it was becoming unfocused. He chose to focus instead on the most important aspects of the game, reducing friction between the player and the game world.
“In the end, all that was left was a boy, a girl, and a castle, and it ended up being one of the best games of all time.”
Fish came to a similar point with Fez: feature creep was becoming a problem. There was a health system, with players collecting pieces of hearts, which Fish admits was due to him being “attached to the iconography” of a row of hearts at the top of the screen, an obvious nod to Zelda.
The game also required players to use water to fill vases to activate pressure-sensitive switches; there was another character who left the village and went on an adventure of his own, sending you messages as he went – recalling Luigi’s missives in Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. All were “completely unnecessary and detracted from what we thought made the game.”
Instead, the game was really about rotation. “Pretty much everything in that game is a pivot, a valve, something you turn,” he said. “Things that had nothing to do with that core thing that you’re doing every two seconds in the game got cut.”
It harks back to Rams, who “boiled down objects to their absolute, essential forms.” But it comes at a cost, of course: in order to take things out you first have to add them in, and Fish was honest enough to say he doesn’t want to spend five years on a single game ever again.
Fish admitted that what he learned isn't universal, though. After praising Mass Effect 2 for stripping away the original's RPG elements, and Halo’s two-weapon limit and rechargeable health, Fish's attention turned to Max Payne 3 – health is fixed, with players topping up with the painkillers to which the protagonist is so addicted.
“It reinforces the idea that he’s a pill-popping junkie,” he said. “It puts the player in his shoes, makes them feel his addiction. You can’t just remove everything – in this case, it ties very closely with the story.”
Ico, of course, was also in development for five years, beginning life as a PS1 game. While Fumito Ueda famously takes as long as he needs – a philosophy that means The Last Guardian won’t be seen on PS3 until next year - if at all – Fez was made by a two-man team: Fish and programmer Renaud Bédard. The game had to ship, despite the limits of manpower, funding and Fish’s own sanity. Indeed, without the arrival of Trapdoor, which provided much-needed business support, Fish admitted Fez might never have come out.
“I could have kept working on this game forever,” he said. “But you work on something for so long, you have to tell yourself this game is done. It could have had more stuff, but we said, ‘let’s call it a day there’.”
One recurring theme in Fish’s talk was his obvious reverence for Japanese games – so clearly a source of inspiration for much ofFez, but which its designer apparently hates. Fish was devastated by the fallout from his GDC comments, by the reaction to a four-word quote presented in isolation that spread round the world. In the Q&A that followed his talk, of course the subject came up.
Understandably, he didn’t want to talk about it, but did admit that GDC – when Indie Game: The Movie was shown to great acclaim, and when his game was on the cusp of shipping and won the IGF Grand Prize – “should have been the best week of my life.” It turned out to be anything but.

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