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If you wish to experience the macrocosm of the Big Bang within the microcosm of lovers and a gunshot played out through noir-themed canvases, then Feral Cat Den's 2021 game Genesis Noir is your cup of tea.
In Genesis Noir, players step into the shoes of No Man, a 1940s detective, who attempts to save his love while the cosmic event of Big Bang plays out as a metaphor. The story of Genesis Noir is carefully weaved through startlingly distinct visual frames accompanied by jazz noir - making the whole experience an utter treat for the players.
In an exclusive interview with Angshuman Dutta of Sportskeeda Esports, the Creative Director, Evan Anthony, discusses the inspirations behind the game and how it came to be.
In conversation with Evan Anthony, Creative Director of Feral Cat Dens, about the cosmic visuals and the jazz noir of Genesis Noir
The conversation ranges from the process of creating the game to how different levels came together to make this an ethereal experience. Evan tells me about how Italo Calvino's Cosmocomics and Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville became inspirations for Genesis Noir esthetics.
Here's an excerpt of the conversation.
1 - As far as I know, Genesis Noir had an interesting history from how it was conceived all those years back in 2013 to where it is now. Can you elaborate on that?
Evan - We conceived of Genesis Noir in 2013 while we were freelancing at various design studios in NYC. In between jobs, we would take time off to develop the idea. Jeremy and I would sketch on giant newsprints, make little animated prototypes, etc. over several years. We created a proof of concept to test the black and white linework, impressionistic space, and use of hand drawn animation.
We posted our work to TIGsource.com and got great feedback from other game developers. This gives us the confidence to make a vertical slice (a 15 minute experience that demonstrates the systems and story of the game) in 2016. We showed this demo to publishers in 2017. We partnered with Fellow Traveller.
In 2018 we launched a Kickstarter to help us assess the scope of the game that our audience would be interested in. We successfully funded the game and we decided to pursue the full vision of the game! Finally we released Genesis Noir in March 2021.
2 - Genesis Noir weaves an interesting story - bringing the Big Bang to the story of the protagonist - in a way, the universal or the macro being brought to the individual and the micro. What inspired you to make it this way? What influenced your imagination?
Evan - Genesis Noir is primarily inspired by Italo Calvino’s Cosmocomics, a collection of short stories that each begins with a scientific theory that Calvino uses as a foundation to tell deeply human yet cosmic stories. I read this book and shared it with Jeremy, and we both loved the mix of fiction and non-fiction, the spanning of space and time, the lightheartedness combined with heavy themes.
I reflected on this book while looking at the NYC skyline and had the thought that the Big Bang would be an interesting Cosmic-comic story to tell, particularly since it sounded like a classic film noir title.
The other primary influence for Genesis Noir was a science fiction film noir called Alphaville by Jean-Luc Godard. While science fiction, the film does not use any outlandish props. It was shot in 60s Paris and used modernist architecture to imply a science fiction setting. The visuals that the viewer sees are not the actual setting or plot, which allows Godard to be economical, conceptual, and silly - all valuable qualities for an indie movie or game!
3 - Genesis Noir has an excellent visual tapestry - I mean I spent quite some time just marvelling at how each element on the screen looked and took a bucket-load of screenshots. What made you decide on using noir?
Evan - Thank you! The noir visuals initially came from the realization that “The Big Bang” sounded like a classic film noir, but we also realized the constraint of black and white would be very helpful for a small team. Since we didn’t have to worry about color, lighting, etc., we could focus our efforts on layout and graphic design.
The settings of film noir also tend to be murky desolate cities that leave much to the viewer's imagination, and creating a visual language that is abstract or impressionistic is ideal for an indie studio.
4 - Each level of Genesis Noir feels intriguing and unique. Can you shed a light on what went behind designing these levels? What were your inspirations to create these like that and if any of the levels are your personal favorite?
Evan - Since Genesis Noir takes place over the entire lifespan of the universe, our goal was to space out the levels to capture different times. We wanted some early cosmic origins, human history, and the science fiction future. In the human era, we split the levels into hunter-gatherer, feudal era, early 1900s jazz age, and a near future space age.
The specifics of what happened during any of these settings was largely dictated by our interests rather than a grand narrative design. We were interested in wabi-sabi, so the feudal era became set in Japan.
As we explored these ideas, we nudged them towards the central themes of the game. We really didn’t know how everything would fit together in the beginning, but over time connections between these wide ranging settings became clear to us.
My personal favorite level is the “Improvisations” level set in jazz age New York City.
5 - I read that you guys had a problem with Unity while developing Genesis Noir and had to switch engines to Unreal during the development. What was the issue? How was the experience with Unreal?
Evan - We made our initial prototype in Unity, a game engine that our technical lead Jeremy was familiar with. We found that importing animations was very finicky though. Sometimes the animation would be imported and the characters arms would be stretched or legs rotated. Since our ambitions were to utilize our experience as animators, this was really worrying.
Unreal is nice since you have access to the engine. If there’s a bug or technical issue, we can go directly into the source and fix it ourselves. With Unity, you have to hope that the developers will fix it for you.
Learning Unreal was a real challenge, but we grew to love it. It’s an incredibly deep and powerful tool, but once we became familiar with the interface, it enabled us to experiment and make an ambitious project.
6 - Since Feral Cat Den is a small group of artists, how was the experience of developing Genesis Noir while being a small indie team?
Evan - It was a tremendous joy collaborating with a small team. We didn’t have a clear vision of how we’d bring all the disparate settings and concepts together, but through the collaborative process the game came together seemingly out of the void. Creating Genesis Noir was a deeply spiritual experience for me to work with my collaborators, but also to be inspired by artists and thinkers throughout history.
7 - Given that Genesis Noir is heavy on allegory and the puzzles are at times pretty difficult, were you surprised by the success of the game - liked both by critics and fans?
Evan - We got feedback on the project along every step, from the initial prototype, to vertical slice, running a Kickstarter campaign, etc. so we knew that there was an audience and interest in Genesis Noir. We were confident that we could utilize our background from outside of the games industry to make something unique and thought that people would respond to it.
During the course of development, however, our creative confidence would certainly waiver. Transitioning from a concept to a buggy work-in-progress tests your faith that you’ll get to a fully polished build.
Much of the joy in Genesis Noir is being surprised by where the game takes you, so after playtesting a scene thousands of times, it’s hard to assess if the game is indeed surprising and interesting. As a developer, we will never experience the game as a first time player.
We have also grown tremendously by creating Genesis Noir. Our skills have matured, our knowledge has increased, etc. so we become less impressed by the work we did four years ago. We know we can create something even more beautiful and engaging.
Getting praise for a work whose imperfections you are intimately aware of is a strange experience but ultimately we’re extremely grateful that people can take a chance on our idiosyncratic game and are so happy that our work has resonated with critics and fans.
8 - The protagonist of Genesis Noir is No Man. Will you explain to our readers why that is? When I was playing it reminded me of a medieval morality play where the protagonist was called Everyman. But I digress.
Evan - Everyman is a great name for a character!
The characters in Genesis Noir are representative of universal constants, and the main character is the embodiment of time. The name No Man is a reference to the phrase “time waits for no man.” We liked this name too because it very directly states that the character is not a human, only visually taking the form of a detective archetype.
9 - I have one last question to wrap this up - what is Feral Cat Den up to next? Is there anything after Genesis Noir in the pipeline already for you guys?
Evan - We’ll be releasing some additional content for Genesis Noir soon and we’ve started working on our next game (though it's too early to talk about anything specific).
