Hey everyone, and welcome, to the first ever Torn Away development log!
With each passing day our enthusiasm about Torn Away grows, and sometimes, we have to let some of it out, before the developer team explodes!
This is our way of showing that enthusiasm - a devlog about Asya, the main protagonist of our game, Torn Away. Hopefully after reading this piece, you’ll have a deeper understanding of some of our design choices while developing a relatable and empathetic protagonist, and their way of coping with situations no-one should ever experience.
So, Asya.
At first, Asya can seem like a stereotypical schoolgirl, however reality is anything but. While well-mannered and enthusiastic, Asya has an extremely complicated personal life. She has no close friends and her home life is definitely not perfect — her father went to the Front to fight for his country and family, and her mother has to work for two, and hardly ever sees her daughter. As constant loneliness takes over Asya, she becomes more anxious and withdrawn, while still fighting back against it all in her own ways. A significant part of the game is devoted to how Asya copes with loneliness. One such tool is a personal diary.
At the start of the development process, we poured over a ton of material we could use to bring our idea to reality. One of the main examples we used was the widely known Anne Frank’s diary, but as we kept doing our research, we found out that there were many children who kept diaries as they also went through the war. While working on this idea, we found a huge source of inspiration - a book with notes from diaries of Soviet children written during the second World War. Some of the stories we found there shook us to our core. One of these notes mentioned them surviving the blockade of Leningrad, and finding themselves in the middle of a hostile territory. Events like these become ingrained in you, and keeping a detailed diary is one of the more effective ways to comprehend the incredibly intense situations you were placed in, and help you remain sane in the face of adversity on this scale.
We thought about taking a person from the diaries and trying our best to tell their story in the game, but quickly realised this was a very wrong idea. There were many hoops to jump through, from getting permission, to the immense weight of responsibility of telling the story right, and respecting the victims. Looking at these and many more factors, we decided to use the diaries as an inspiration for an fictional, yet original and authentic story that both respects the history and it’s victims, and serves as an experience players like you would want to try.
And all of this leads back to Asya.
We decided to design Asya not as a specific hero, but a collective image, an amalgam of what we thought the children that wrote the diaries we talked about earlier looked like. At first, the girl did not have a name, her age was constantly changing during the development and writing of the script. We experimented, drew different variations, argued, looked at a ton of references, and started all over again. There were an incredible amount of iterations, but if you looked closer for a second, you’d see that Asya did not change that drastically with each version, it was more like we were taking tiny steps to our final destination, it being the Asya you can see in the trailers now.
It's hard to believe now, but we got to the final image only after six months of work. We worked around the clock to make sure Asya is as fleshed out as possible, as well as able to connect with a player on an emotional level not only through her emotions, but her appearance as well.
As your journey with Asya goes on, she will not only change as a person, but her changes will also be reflected in her appearance as well. This is a tough task for our artists and animators, but we feel that focusing on following Asya’s journey through her appearance will allow us to tell the story on multiple different levels, and add the level of detail that most of you (we hope) will enjoy.
A separate challenge for us was to create not only a stylized character for the game scenes, but also to achieve a strong image in the animated cutscenes that will feature at the end of each chapter. We simply cannot wait for you to see them in all of their beauty.
This marks the end of our devlog. We want you to know that we really really appreciate the love you guys have been showing Asya on our social media. It warms our hearts to know that what we do is meaningful, and evokes the most positive of emotions from players all around the world.
Thank you again and we hope to see you when we release more content like this in the future! <3