Season: A Letter to the Futureis an all-senses experience that whisks players off into a mysterious world with the goal of capturing and preserving the end of an era for future generations to behold. In Scavengers Studio’s stylishindie game, players can brave hills on their bicycles and trod through grassy fields snapping photos of the scenery and recording sound clips for their journals. Though, the major task the main character takes upon herself is to speak with the natives to document a piece of their lives as they brave the end of the current season.
Game Rant spoke with creative director Kevin Sullivan aboutSeason: A Letter to the Future’splayer-first approach to narrative design and creating a world imbued with wonder where the characters don’t give the quests—they are the quests.The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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GR: Well, thank you so much for making the time for me. Why don’t you start off by giving me a little bit of an introduction about who you are and what you do?
Sullivan: I’m Kevin. I was the narrative and creative director onSeason. I was brought on board from somewhat outside the industry by the art director who was a friend and artist that I’d worked with on comics and other forms of media. We really liked working together and they needed someone for the project, so I came in. It really evolved over the years and changed until, well, here we are.
GR: And maybe just for anyone who’s going to be reading who doesn’t know necessarily what a narrative or creative director does, can you talk a little bit about what the main tasks of your job are and what your day-to-day looks like?
Sullivan: Yeah, so on the narrative side, it was writing the script and overseeing the story with our narrative designers Jane and Megan. Sort of looking at the story of the world, the story of the characters, and the whole narrative aspect, and just making sure that that’s orchestrated through every element of the game.
Then the sort of creative direction side was, for a game like this, really trying to make sure that we maintain the tone and the emotion. When we had figured out what we wanted it to feel like, we made sure that flowed through all the mechanics, and I worked with all the other directors to keep everything feeling unified.
GR: I’m actually a little bit curious about Scavengers’ previous gameDarwin Project.I looked a little into it beforehand, and it looks likeSeasonis a total 180 in terms of mechanics. What inspired you guys to go in such a different direction on the next project?
Sullivan: I think it just comes out of the process of that the starting point forSeasonwas reallythe artwork and the art style of the art director, and then I came on to help that project. I didn’t really work much onDarwin Project,so I had a very different starting point and guess we had the latitude to follow the project where it seemed to want to go even if it was somewhere that was super different from the previous project. But also the company is changing; almost everybody now who works there came to work onSeason. So it’s just the nature of it, maybe the size of the company, or it being new, it’s changing a lot over time. People come and go and stuff, so we’ll see if what we do next will be as different.
GR: Out of curiosity, how many people were working onSeasonin total?
Sullivan:Oh boy, I mean that’s a great question. That’s a great question because we have so many partners and so much support from so many different people. I mean in the sense that it’s like, if you were to say on the immediate dev team, I feel like we started off probably more like nine maybe, and then by the end of the production we were probably in the thirties. But that’s just the immediate development team; we had partners and supporters, supporters in the sense of our outsourcers and people like that.
If you really think about it, all these people took time out of their lives to work on this and to put some of their soul into it. I mean you can see it in the credits, but it’s a pretty astounding number of people from, you know, the people who worked on QA to cinematic artists and layout artists. We had the localization of the game into Japanese and then to French. We had people translating the script, so it’s really, really important to think about how many people really took time out of their day or weeks or however long they worked on it to help get it to the end. And while we think of ourselves as a small team, which we are relatively, it still was a big effort from so many people to help, so I’m just super grateful for that. It’s pretty surreal to think about.
GR: That’s awesome! I’m curious if you can tell me a little bit about the history ofSeasonnow.Where did the idea come from, and how long has the project been going on for?
Sullivan:It came out of nowhere, and it wasn’t expected. We had a long pre-production time when I was sort of halfway working on it. We had this very, very nice sort of couple of years of just thinking about what it could be. I think that the first thing we figured out was the idea of making a game that was about traveling and drawing on our own experiences. I mean literally when I first started working on it, I was in the middle of a big trip that I was doing.
Once we had that piece, I think we had some sense of what it was going to be, but still, I didn’t know it would be so much about memory, you know, like a lot of it came intuitively as we were just building out the world and the story. I think the initial impulse to do this was the unfamiliar world that you’re trying to understand. It was definitely the first kind of concrete thing that we figured out. Before that, we had a lot of completely different ideas that were not similar at all to what we ended up with.
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GR: In the game, season is used to describe these eras throughout history, so I’m curious why go with the word “season” and not with something more conventional like “era”?
Sullivan:Well oddly, the title was actually what came before almost everything else. Even before we knew it was a road trip game or anything like that, we had the titleSeasonalmost immediately. I don’t know how much it may have influenced the themes of the game instead of being an expression of the themes of the world itself.
I mean, I think with traveling and all that, we had a sense of transience—a soft sense of transience—it’s not super melodramatic, but it’s about the impermanence of all things and the cycle of change. All that sort ofstarted to go into the story and into the ideas. The way that they use seasons in the game is, like a lot of stuff, just trying to have a concept that’s fairly easy to understand, but this world has a different way of articulating those feelings. And I find it interesting that it’s just like how we will divide history into eras that feel almost like seasons and some of them are kind of funny.
Like there’s one in US history called the Era of Good Feeling, which I always thought was funny. That’s the real name of a historical time period. But yeah, I guess their culture just has a different way of articulating things that we can relate to, and that sort of difference and familiarity is, I guess, what we were always trying to do in building the world.
GR: I am curious, talking about The Season of Good Feeling, would you say you did a lot of research into world history that influenced the world of the game?
Sullivan:Definitely. There was a writer named Robert Cara that I named a village in the game after because I had been reading his pretty massive books about the life of Lyndon Johnson, and that idea of hanging out in the past is really interesting. Something that’s, like, it just makes you think, “what did it feel like to be alive at that time?” And then the mission of the game that the character undertakes ended up really being like trying to communicate that to the future, not just facts, but how you’re thinking of this time period. I was just gobbling up random bits of history from a lot of film and art. That sort of thing gets in there, too, so you’re kind of getting it secondhand.
When I’ve had interviews or when I’ve talked to people from other countries, it’s always really interesting, too. I feel like there are always at least a few bits of their history that they can see. Like I was talking to somebody in Germany, and they were drawing historical bits out of it that weren’t exactly things I was thinking about in German history, but there were also other bits of German history in there that I had been thinking about.
There was also a certain amount of generalizing bits of history or combining bits of history, like the plot line in the game about the dam being taken down. That was most specifically influenced by fairly recent Chinese history and also of history the Soviet Union, but not one thing specifically.
So it’s kind of an amalgamation, and the idea was that if it was too close to any one existing history then it would become kind of an allegory or something. But we wanted it to be like wherever you are in the world, you can have parts of it that resonate and that are familiar, while other parts are a bit stranger.
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GR: Something I did want to talk about was the way that the main character does go and actually documents the world in their journal. Where did the idea for that come from, and why was it important to have it be something the player themselves fills out rather than having a sort of travel log that automatically populates as the player explores?
Sullivan: When we were thinking about the story, we were talking early on a lot about the idea that you’re put in a position of sort of having to decide what you think is important in the world or what you’re drawn to. We always try to design things the way where it begins with the player being interested in something that they see in the world, and then that can lead to something else. We didn’t want it to feel too much like a job or like a task where we’re saying like, “oh this region has this number of birds. Go take a picture of five birds because the game says that’s important.”
Rather, we put the player in the position of expressing themselves, and it is one of the most interesting things. I always think for a game that is, to a certain extent, story-driven it’s always interesting to watch other people play, and I think the journal is one of the areas where, once the game came out, we started seeing people do pretty fantastic things with it that we’ve never seen before. That was when we realized how personalized it could be because you see some extreme challenges where people went wild with it, but it’s definitely within the philosophy of putting possibilities before the player and letting them go toward them instead of feeling like they’re obliged to check things off a list.
GR: I want to talk a little bit about some of the characters in the game, too. There’s a handful of people to meet with really rich backstories, so how did you manage to write these really grounded characters? What was your inspiration for crafting their stories?
Sullivan: Well, I think one thing that helped a lot was just that we had this very soft context that, like, well I remember at some point one of the designers said “the characters don’t give you the quest—the characters are the quest.” And the fact that the character is there, like the player is there, in a way that makes it a little easier to add humanity, to spend time with them, and to develop their personality because they’re there to do that more than to fulfill a gameplay thing.
Butit really depends on the characters and just looking at the situations of their lives, trying to think about it, and drawing on real experiences. The world is defamiliarized, and I think almost everything in it is real or based on something real in some way, or from some memory.
A lot of the memories or dreams or things like that in the game are real, so you hope that that comes across, but you’re also trying to find what’s particular about their situation since we based them on composites of different people. I think that kind of ran through the whole process of writing drafts, and then, you know, working on it with the actors also having it, again, reinterpreted and influenced. I think I go through periods where there’d be someone on my mind, or I guess it’s all in service of trying to find what the voice of the characters is, and then the more you’re in that the more fun you can have.
Actually, some of my favorite writing I did in the game is in a weird spot where there’s a feature whereyou can show your photos that you take to Matyora, the artist in the woods, and I think that was probably the last stuff that I wrote for her. Really by that point, it was super easy, and I wasn’t thinking about anything except for her and just having her say things. I think when you’re trying to build the character, you’re pulling from all kinds of directions, and then they do start to feel like they’re just waiting to say stuff.
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GR: This is just more of a general question now. In terms of the production of the game, what were some of the big challenges that you guys faced?
Sullivan:Well, I think the thing you learn is the way that the interdependency of everything is just a very complicated dance, and I think any game developer listening to this is about to hear the most basic description of how a game is made possible. But it is really interesting because everything is waiting for everything else and things are also progressing, so you do a tremendous amount of retro-engineering, reusing, retooling, and shifting around. Sometimes that can be super beautiful.
What is, in some ways, one of the climactic scenes in the game with the monk was the first scene we made in the game. And it had none of, or very little of, the context or the meaning that it had when we did it in the demo. But we were able to rewrite and rewrite the dialogue to recontextualize the scene and add all this into it which made it pull all these story threads together.
So much of the detail we had, it already pretty much existed like in the animation and the scripting; it was all there and so that exercise of working with everything you have and everything that’s been done and retooling the surrounding story without being able to go back to the blank page is something that kind of touches on every department. And when you can figure out stuff like that, it’s super satisfying and makes the game better, but it’s an interesting thing to try to learn how to do because everyone’s work is super interconnected.
And in interviews, trying to explain this stuff, it’s hard to get across the way that meaning is emergent. I mean especially if you’re working on something that has something poetic or intuitive or personal about it, it’s often the last thing to come in, which can be almost spooky, you know, because you’re like, “oh, I wasn’t even aware of these themes.”
Like I can’t tell you how much there was this theme in the game of the five senses, which is a theme that once you notice it or think about it, it’s all over the game, and I didn’t realize I didn’t notice that until pretty deep in. I was like, “whoa, we’ve been thinking about this whole time without realizing,” but it feels like a very lucky thing to be able to work off of a certain amount of intuition and then have time to organize it and think about it towards the end, but it’s definitely almost backward from how you might think of it being.
GR: Obviously this is a huge achievement; it’s really awesome that you guys have this game, and it’s out there, so I just want to know what would you say is your personal proudest achievement from developing and releasingSeasoninto the world?
Sullivan:I mean I think one is definitely when the game resonates with people in different parts of the world in ways that feel personal to them or like I was saying when they kind of can see bits of their history or other things in the game. I’ve been Google translating things like reviews from people in China that are talking both in a personal and in a social way about the anxieties of being alive right now. It can kind of, I mean not for everybody, but it can kind of cross these cultural barriers. It can travel and be a thing that’s both personal and situated in certain social-political anxieties. That’s just really beautiful to me and was not something that I would necessarily think would work.
Or the idea of, like I was saying, trying to make a world that is both familiar and strange to anyone. I don’t think we did it perfectly at all, but it’s something that’s super gratifying to hear those people’s interpretations sometimes be totally correct but maybe not necessarily exactly how we had sort of formulated it ourselves. That was definitely like, “wow, okay, that was something we were aiming for and not necessarily expecting it to work.”
There are also YouTube video essays from people who really took the time and made connections that I hadn’t heard anyone make yet because they were kind of on a deeper level or were more time intensive to figure out. It was just super satisfying because sometimes you put stuff like that in kind of for those people or just to be like, “I know this isn’t going to pop out to everybody but somebody will make this connection or figure this out,” and, yeah, that’s just been really gratifying. And really the story did such a fantastic job of, I think, adding depth, but also you can play through it on a more surface-level way, and it still makes sense.
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GR: Yeah, and it’s funny you mentioned world-building. There are a ton of different notes, items, and other discoverables for the player to find. Would you mind talking about their importance and how they contributed to the richness of the world?
Sullivan: Yeah, I mean, I guess the idea is that you figure out what’s behind the curtain as much as you possibly can and then every little bit like that is sort of a glimpse. You’re never sure if you’re being too obvious or too subtle or at what point someone’s going to kind of tile these things together. Because there’s definitely stuff where you kind of have to replay it to see the significance of it or what it is. That’s always fun to hear about, too, but I really feel like it’s the sense of, like, there is like an underlying logic to stuff, and ideally you can feel it even if you can’t exactly put it together; nothing there is random.
What gets interesting is that if you’re in a strange world where their world has certain assumptions or certain factors, nobody’s going to just come out and say it, but those assumptions are built through everything that the world is telling you. There are certain things the world is telling you non-stop in the game that you don’t know, and we never know exactly when somebody is going to hear what that thing is because the character’s not an alien. A character is not going to just explain basic things about the world to you or make this deductionfor you—that’s something you have to do on your own if you pick up all that stuff.
But also, I feel like that stuff was sometimes just fun to make. I feel like some of that stuff is almost sillier because it’s so optional. Whensomething is off the beaten path in a way where you have to do a few things to get to it, you try to make it more memorable, interesting, weird, funny, or something because you’re kind of almost in a more intimate dialogue with the player.
Like, okay, you found the phone number of the daytime visions hotline on the board, and you called that. I’m going to try to make this funny or whatever, but it can be kind of refreshing to have a tonal shift. Like the great hand radio show or doing the writing for the zero video sing-along song, recording that with my friends was super fun and just whoever sees it, I hope you enjoy it.
GR: Before we wrap up for the end of this I wanted to ask whatSeasonmeans to you and your team, and how you feel like it connects to your own experiences?
Sullivan:Well, I mean, like I said I just have absolute gratitude that it even happened or survived and got made. It was such an effort from so many people and not always in the best circumstances, so it really brought out the best in us. I feel like I’ve met just unbelievably talented, nice, and great people who jumped on board at whatever point and were like, “okay let’s actually do this” because it absolutely wouldn’t have gotten finished otherwise.
It wouldn’t have come together, and I’ve told this to the team before of course, but I thought for years what we were doing was trying to make this game or create this experience that we thought would be unique or interesting or valuable in some way. Really, we were assembling a team. That was the more foundational work that we were doing because when we began we had very little knowledge of how to do something like this and not that much of a team to do it. So that process of building the team is definitely the thing that I’m the proudest of and grateful for.
And looking forward is like, how do we now use that or do what we want to do next, and is it going to be as different fromSeasonasSeasonwas fromDarwin,or somewhere between? We’re open to a lot, I think, and the players who likeSeasonare a very particular type of player, but I also think as gamers, we’re all interested in lots of different types of experiences and games, so it’s fun to be in that realm of possibility.
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Season: A Letter to the Futureis available to play now on Epic Games Store, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Steam. It is currently 20% off on Steam, PS4, and PS5.
