TurnOn is a great electricity-based platformer where you control an alien orb who’s trying to restore power to the city. Recently the developers behind the game, Brainy Studios, sat down with us to discuss their game. They talked about the process behind making TurnOn as well as what got them into developing such experiences in the first place. The interview serves as a great way to understand how independent developers think and the challenges that go into designing compelling titles.
What got you into gaming? What are some of your memorable experiences?
We’re sure that games were a big part of our lives from early childhood. Plenty of us had our own gaming consoles: Dendi, Sega, PlayStation and Xbox, PC and etc. And we were not an exclusion, the only one thing that made us different than others—we decided to create our own games. So we tried to express ourselves at the current moment with our debut game TurnOn for Xbox One and Steam. Hope you appreciate it and enjoy the game.
What exactly inspired you to start making games?
The games themselves. When you’re playing the really good games, you start to think that it would be great to work in this industry and create something as good as you play.
What were the challenges you went through as a studio of only four people to make a larger title like TurnOn?
The greatest challenge for us was to figure out could we create a decent quality game despite having such limited resources, because first of all players usually do not care who is behind a particular game and how it was created. They look on some games, Ori and the Blind Forest and TurnOn (why not?), and compare them. And it’s not so important in what conditions the game was made, they only want to choose the best. And of course it’s normal. So the question was to try to stand in one line with such cool projects and to be on their level.
Most platformers can be quite infuriating but TurnOn naturally feels fun and never too taxing. Is that what you were going for? How did you implement such balanced increases to difficulty as to not overwhelm the player?
From personal experience, when I’m playing AAA projects and it makes me infuriated because of the difficulty, it is normal. But sometimes it is necessary to relax from it. We began to notice for ourselves, that we only like those indie games that allow us to relax in the break between hardcore AAA projects—play, get satisfaction from the game process and the fact that I still get it right.
TurnOn provided a great and sometimes emotional story without any dialog. Was that a challenge to accomplish? What techniques did the studio use to achieve that?
There was no special technique. Just when the task was to show a particular situation in the game, we decided to do it without dialogue, to be able to make this scene clear to all members of the language groups.
What gave you the idea to incorporate a mobile-like scoring system into the game?
Since we have a large part of the game that is designed for exploration, we wanted to make the game such to show at the end of the level what the player has done. Good job, but you missed something, you didn’t find something interesting in the game, and you have an incentive to return to this level and see where you missed something important.
What gave you the idea to mix normal platforming levels, rhythm-based levels and boss fights all into one game? TurnOn accomplishes this in a smooth fashion where other titles sometimes feel disjointed with abrupt transitions.
Rayman Legends. We wanted to diversify the core gameplay. Now we have got a lot of reviews and it turned out that the music in the release version doesn’t vary with the peaks of difficulty for some players. But now with the new patch, we have corrected most of the problems with these levels and it became a more smooth transition for players from district to district.
What can we expect from Brainy Studios in the future? Any upcoming games for Xbox One or Windows 10?
This will depend on whether players are enjoying the game or not. But clearly we can say that our next project will be more difficult and cooler.
What surprised you most about the interview? For me it would have to be how commercial concerns and comparisons with other games is a real issue. To elevate your game you have to either perfect established mechanics or capture the audience’s imagination through new scenarios. I think TurnOn does both and that’s why it’s a successful exercise in the art of game design. Have you played it? Let us know what you think.
Asher is a games journalist, former News Writer (Gaming) at Windows Central. They contributed 1110 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: wrote over 1,100 ICXM pieces on Xbox news, hardware reviews, and platform commentary before joining Future plc’s Windows Central in 2017.