Koira's Creative Director On Balancing Puppy Cuteness With Mystery & Working With Don't Nod (2024)

Koira is a unique upcoming narrative adventure that will take players through a dangerous forest with a canine companion. It's the debut release from indie developer Studio Tolima, which has partnered with Don't Nod - the company behind games like the Life is Strange series - to serve as publisher. The musically-driven title blends cuteness and darkness in a hand-drawn art style, showcasing an adorable friendship filled with peril between the protagonist and the adorable in-game puppy.

Koira marks Don't Nod's second foray into pure publishing, following 2022's Gerda: A Flame in Winter, and it certainly continues the company's tradition of pursuing games with creative storytelling methods. Koira is a completely wordless title, instead being told entirely through music and animation. Players will assume the role of a magical forest spirit who comes across a dog in the woods, awakening their powers as they help the dog to escape pursuers while forming a heartwarming friendship with the creature.

Screen Rant interviewed Ben Laga, the creative director at Studio Tolima, to discuss the game's inception, the company's partnership with Don't Nod, and what players can expect from Koira.

How Koira's Story First Began

Constructing A Narrative, Gameplay Goals, & Partnership With Don't Nod

Screen Rant: First, I'd love to hear a little bit about what it's been like developing a game that has no text in it. Do you find that makes the narrative harder to express or easier?

Ben Lega: Well, it has been quite a challenge with something that was really a design intent from the start. Personally, I really like the games that are able to translate a lot of emotions, with the base tool of the audiovisual things that games and movies can provide. Journey's a big inspiration that comes in mind. Especially in those games, they can have more abstract stories and so often they rely more on just a lot of music and animation to convey the core emotions. With Koira, one of the goals was to really tap into that kind of cinematographic quality that a lot of these games have, but to be able to do that with a proper story and to obviously try to be as immersive as possible and to avoid having a lot of moments that would be cutscenes and such.

I think it really allows us to create something very unique as an experience, but it has been quite challenging because we really pushed the challenge to really have no text at all, not only in the narration or in the dialogues, also in the whole game design and the whole, so both in terms of introducing the character, what's happening on the screen, but also the gameplay, the tutorials, et cetera. There was a lot of importance in the staging, so we work a lot with making sure that the lightning and the things in the scene convey the right emotions and really point the player in the right direction.

It has been a lot of trials and errors. Mostly we have been just iterating a lot, just putting the game in people's hands. Because the thing is that, us as designers and people that make the game, it's always very obvious what the intent is behind it, but when people play it, we often have different responses both in terms of emotion or operation of the mechanics. It has been a lot of very early on just trying things out and iterating on that, which means that even in more the blocking phase and the gray box phase, we directly tried to have as less text as possible.

Sometimes what we did was trying really to be as clear as possible, to put it really clear, "This is what should be happening," with the camera showing the things. Then once it was very clear, to try to tone it down from there and try to find the right middle ground so that we could leave the control of the player as much as possible to point them in the right direction, without it being too much in your face.

I know a lot of the storytelling is also inextricably linked to the soundtrack of the game and that's doing a lot of the storytelling as well. Can you talk a little bit about the kind of music players can expect and what the composing process has been like from a behind-the-scenes perspective?

Ben Lega: Absolutely. Basically, the project started some time ago. Initially, it was just myself and the first person that joined the project was Réginald Nowe, the composer. We really started the two together initially very early on, wrote some compositions, and at the time the story of the game was still being elaborated. The main theme and mood of the game was still being found, and very early on, this kind of composition really inspired the game and the story. It was really a design ping pong where he would send the composition, it would inspire me also moments of story. For example, I remember very early on he sent me a track, and I was listening to it and I could see the characters in the storm and struggling. These are moments that really made it in the final version of the game.

The music is very melodic, but also very melancholic, so it has a strong use of piano and violin. It's a bit inspired by artists like Max Richter or Yann Tiersen if you might know them. It's these waltz kind of moments, so it's very musical, but at the same time it always has a small melancholic nostalgia aspect to it, which really fits into the Koira mood and vibe of the game. It's both very wholesome - the story of the two characters, there's a cute little puppy and they're playing in the snow, in the forest. There's a lot of moments where they can just make a snowman, they can throw a stick, play fetch, et cetera. There's a lot of moments that is just part of the bonding between the two, but it's also a game that has a darker vibe, and you see it also in the art style where it can be very contrasted. It tells a tale that's also about mystery and danger.

Very early on the music was linked to these main themes, and it's something that we really all throughout the game really kept in mind is this musical aspect. Because like I was saying, in these games that don't have texts, the narration really goes full in the animation and the music. Our character design has these big eyes, big expressive face, so we are able to do a lot of acting with the characters to show the different emotion, what they think, et cetera. The music is also helping a lot, and it's often there that it underlines the main emotions. It was interesting, even very early on in the development process, sometimes we had very simple scenes where they would just walk together and there would be some color change or something and we would just add specific music to that and it would already create very strong emotions when we were play testing it, so we knew we were going to the right direction.

It's funny, you brought up something that I had a question about, which is the way that this art style balances darkness and cuteness, I find it so interesting. What has that balancing process been like, and did you always know from the beginning what you wanted the aesthetic of this game to be, or did that develop over time?

Ben Lega: It developed over time. Initially, the first step when I started developing the game is I wanted to find a very striking art style, because I believe in today's industry there's a lot of games that come out, it's very hard to stand out even on social media. I wanted to have a style that when people scroll, they stop and say, "Oh, this is different. I haven't seen really something like that." At the time, I was creating a lot of different mock-ups of trying to find a nice art style for the game, and I came with the idea of trying to find something with a very strong contrast so it would really attract the eye lot.

Initially, I was working with these flat-shaded characters. I was working with either flat white or flat black characters, and the character just in black had this look that was already ambiguous with these cat eyes where you don't know if it's more friendly or dangerous. It was already an interesting twist in the main character, and I just placed him on a white background because it was just what I had in my drawing tool, and it felt like it really didn't belong that much. It was just the character alone, so I just erased the bottom of his feet, and suddenly it was blending and it felt like it was in a big snowy plane, and so suddenly there was a character in the world. I started to add some bushes, some trees, and very naturally it felt like he was just alone in this cold, snowy landscape with a few trees and bushes.

Because it felt really cold and lonely, that was the first feeling. It felt like there needed to be something to counterbalance it, so I added this small cute dog that was just with the player and you could just walk around, and I just animated the two characters in this big plane and already a lot was happening. There was this sense of cuteness between the two characters. They could already look at each other, play. You could pet the dog.

The first thing that I implemented was a stick that you could throw and they would bring it back, but there was already this tension of this dog that is very cute, but you don't really know what he's doing there in this desolate area. There was already a question and a contrast between the two, and at that moment that the first composition of Régie [Nowe] came, and directly there was this nostalgic, melancholic mood. We knew we wanted to create a story that was more than just happy moments and bonding and bliss moments between the two. We wanted to have that, but to counterbalance it and directly in that snowy environment, there was the mix between the two.

Can you talk a little bit about how Studio Tolima came to work with Don't Nod? What has that partnership been like for you guys?

Ben Lega: It's been working super well now. I think it's a bit more than two years that we've worked together. I started, like I told you, on the project by myself with Reginald, and at the start, the idea was to really create a very tiny project. Just exploring what the game could be, what the mood was, and we were really trying to focus on creating these emotional moments and trying to link them together in a story. We created the first little demo that we showed in Brussels where we are based, where we are doing the development, and there is this weekly meetup with developers that are called the BROTARU, and people can just come and show the games around, so we are going at a lot of these venues to share the game, show the progress and hear people's feedback.

Once a year they do what they call the Big BROTARU, so it's their once a year big event. What they do is that they rent a whole cinema in Brussels, and all the people who are making games in Brussels and in Belgium as a whole gather and they have five minutes to show their game on the big screen. You have a lot of people in the room, they also invite a lot of people that come from politics or in the investors. For us it was amazing, because the game obviously has this very important focus on the look and on the audio, so to be able to show even the small demo at the time on a big screen of a cinema was a very incredible moment. Don't Nod was in the room at that time, because they are not really far away, they are from Paris.

After that we directly started to have discussions, they were interested in the project, and basically I think roughly four months after we decided to work together in a partnership. We are in a co-production together, so we are in charge of all the development of the game and the design of the game. They're in charge as a publisher for the marketing, the QA, but they have the advantage compared to what you could expect from more traditional publishers that they're also a very big studio of game development themselves, so they have a lot of in-house knowledge about how to make games, et cetera. Especially they have a strong focus on narrative games, so it really clicks naturally between us and them, and they are able to give a lot of very valuable feedback. Every three, four months, we have a lot of people internally that can bounce back ideas.

They're always supporting, trying to ask questions more than provide answers, so they're really questioning what they're playing, pushing the design to be clear and more efficient. Also, because they have a lot of employees, one of the things they do every three, four months is that they run big play sessions with a lot of people internally, which is also super a huge value when you do a game like this, especially like I told you, we had a lot of things to validate due to the fact that there was no text.

Being able to have 20 people play testing the game, people that are in the game industry, so that have a very good grasp with games, especially with narrative games was super valuable. That has been ongoing since two years. After signing the publishing deal with Don't Nod, we actually created the company at that moment. It was really the start of the company was that start of the partnership. Since then, we hired more people in the company, and now we are seven, eight people in the studio working on the game. It's been a very exciting journey and we are really happy with how it's been going so far.

Koira's Past, Present, & Future

The Title's Evolution, Gameplay, & Biggest Inspirations

The description of the game mentions discovering your inner power, and I'm curious if you could tell me a little bit more about that aspect of the gameplay in the game.

Ben Lega: Typically, the story is so that you are this main character that's a bit mysterious. You are this forest spirit and you wake up in this forest and you meet a little dog that's trapped. You save him and together you set out towards a distant house, and along the way they overcome obstacles, they befriend other animals, they play together with things. In the forest there are some hunters that are tracking them now, and they seem to have a particular interest in the puppy.

Along the way, the forest is also filled with magical artifacts and statues that they can sing to activate them, and there they can gather some powers and activate them with their songs, and it allows the main character to find more powers to protect the puppy from the different dangers that are in the forest. That's how all the story evolved from there.

I'm curious what media, whether it's other games or other things entirely, that you found yourself taking the most inspiration from for this project?

Ben Lega: I think Disney's Fantasia was a big inspiration in the way that there's a lot presented in cinematography with the music, and a lot of the characters will not directly speak, but they will also have their own instruments, so it feels a bit like the musical Peter And The Wolf, where each character's different instruments. We really like that aspect. Typically, in the game you control these characters and you can sing, so you have no text, no dialogues, but the characters can talk to each other. Each character is voiced by a different instrument, so the hunters have their instruments, the boar, the birds, and it allows for them to talk and sing together and mixes nicely with the music to create this more orchestral vibe together. Definitely on the music aspects and the cinematographic aspects, it was a big inspiration.

I already mentioned Journey, which was a big one. And I think typically we wanted to take the strengths that Journey had into telling the story with the mechanics and the cinematographic aspect to it, but to plug a more structured story to it with more clear story beats. To do that, we wanted to avoid having something that would repeat a gameplay too often, where you might see the game aspect and maybe just see that itI's a bunch of puzzles repeating and becoming more and more complex. To tell this kind of story, another big inspiration was the game Florence that you might have played, which I really like. It has these strengths that basically each part of the story is being told through different mechanics. The gameplay evolves to match the current story beat.

In our story where there's lonesome moments, moments of danger, moments of mystery, moments where we get the powers, it was important that we could switch the gameplay dynamically. The gameplay has a lot of these small puzzles throughout the game, but they are very varied and they depend on what moment of the story you are in. Typically, you can have moments where it's more mini-games, moments where you use your powers, or things that it's more environmental puzzles that you have to solve. The aspect of switching and telling a story true to the progression of the mechanics was something that we really like in these games also.

I think another inspiration is Princess Mononoke of Miyazaki for really this mysterious and ambiguous vibe of the forest, where there's this magic and you never know actually what is right, what is wrong, what are the motives of the characters. You discover the story as the viewer, as you follow the characters and things are evolving and progressing and suddenly you understand more the motives of the character, and you see that actually the conflict and the clash in the story is not often because there's a good guy or bad guy, but more about how each character views the world.

You touched on this a little bit, but you mentioned how the game has gone through a lot of different iterations as you were first coming up with it. What would you say the biggest ways this game has changed since you first started on the project?

Ben Lega: I don't think it has changed that much, because when you look really at the base of the story and where we're going, there was a lot of things that were already in place that are still in place in the game at the very end product. I think it's mostly there was challenges in terms of how the gameplay fits in certain areas, how we are going to represent some things. There's a lot of moments that we tweaked or changed that have the same intent in the story or same emotional value, but we tweak them to match better how the game was being materialized, or to match better also for production reasons. We had at some point these huge cutscenes with very impressive things and we were using them to really showcase particular emotional moments, so we adapted them, but they weren't really huge adaptations.

I think one of the biggest adaptations that was really at the very start of the game, was that initially the game was more of a small open world, the very first builds that we made. The idea was that you would explore this world freely with the dog, and you didn't really have a goal, you would just wander around and progressively the story would unfold after you had done X activities, a story beat would happen, et cetera. What we ended up with is more of a linear structure for the story, so you don't have any branching in the story, so you literally go from one step to the other and you have a clearer objective that is, as I mentioned, to reach this house towards the ending. It allowed us to have a more clear way of telling the story, while the first iteration was way more confusing also when we made it to play test by the players. I think it's really made us rethink a lot of the level design and story structure, but it's a change that we really made quite early on.