When We Made: How Shedworks went from a North London shed to the stunning dunes of Sable

The open world genre, particularly the triple-A titles that dominate the space, often feel like celebrations of excess.

Now that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. As much as the ‘500 hour video game’ might be maligned in certain Twitter circles, these titles have their place and there’s clearly a market that’s hungry to get the most bang for their buck – a game that will keep them going until the next year’s instalment.

With that said, it’s always refreshing to find titles that take a different approach. Games that present you with beautiful open worlds, with maps unblemished by a sea of minigames and side activities, and instead invite you to explore at your own pace – and to end your journey whenever you please.

One such game is the gorgeous Sable, from developer Shedworks. While the player does work within a specific narrative framework – stepping into the shoes of the eponymous protagonist as she sets out on a journey to find her place in the world – their adventures are their own to direct. Once Sable climbs onto her hoverbike, the world is hers to explore she pleases. And when the player feels their journey is complete, whenever that might be, they simply need to return back to their home camp and let the end credits roll.

The result is a game centred around a genuine thrill of exploration. Not visiting far-flung corners of the map because a waypoint pushed you towards it, but out of a genuine desire to discover more of this world. Sable’s world is a lonely, sparse one – and yet often feels more welcoming and alive than many of its triple-A counterparts.

PASSION PROJECT

It’s a remarkable achievement for any studio, no less than for a small team who, as their name might suggest, first began in a garden shed in North London. Founded by Daniel Fineberg and Gregorios Kythreotis, Shedworks initially began life working on mobile titles and on contract work, but the pair soon found a passion project that was too tempting to resist.

“Our first inspiration was The Force Awakens,” notes Kythreotis. “We were looking at that and thinking, what if we made a game where you’re not the hero? You don’t leave this desert planet, you’re just scavenging from these ships and learning more about the world. It just kind of developed from there.

“We started playing with a prototype in 2016, which was just a two kilometre by two kilometre box of sand, a literal sandbox with some dunes, and we got a hoverbike from the asset store for like, €5 or something. We put this cube on one side, about half a kilometre in size, and you could just drive across to it. That was the whole experience, it took us two hours to put together.

“We slapped some visual filters over it, and then took that to the London indies pub night in Angel. We just put it on a table whilst we were having a drink, and people were really interested. We’ve taken projects there before, but you definitely knew people were playing out of kindness rather than actual interest. This was the first time we’ve taken something where people were like ‘oh, this is this is actually really cool!’ – but it was nothing! It was nothing really in terms of a game. It was just… you can drive to the cube.

“But the core idea of seeing something in the distance and journeying out to it, and the dunes acting as this nice, natural environment that was sparsely populated, but also created these nice moments of travel as you journey across… They kind of like obfuscate things and reveal things as you journey. That was where it started, we had a concept.

“But we didn’t think it was gonna make us money, we just thought it was a passion project. We more or less shelved it for about a year. But then we kind of got to the point where we’d been working on mobile games and doing things that we thought would make us money – doing contract work and trying to survive, basically. But we turned to each other and said: ‘What’s this all for, if we’re not doing something that we want to do?’”

As the pair got to work, they started sharing GIFs of their new project online, and things snowballed from there. In particular, once Sable had attracted publisher attention, Shedworks were able to work on the game in earnest, without having to worry about keeping the lights on. A later showing at E3 in 2018 gave Sable a further boost, allowing them to realise their ambition in ways that their initial budget would never have allowed for.

And of course, it was easier to pitch the idea behind Sable once a certain other open world game had hit the market…

“Within a year of making that initial concept, Breath of the Wild had come out. That was really a key marker for us, there was a lot to learn from it. We knew we wanted to make an exploration game, we knew we wanted it to be very freeform, and we had some idea about the structure. Breath of the Wild gave us a lens to communicate what the game was to people, which I think was really helpful in terms of securing funding and getting support for the project. It was just something we could point to and be like, ‘this could work, and be interesting!’ Because prior to that, open world games were just very formulaic.”

WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW

In a bid to differentiate themselves from the more routine open world games of the time, the pair decided to take advantage of being a small team. Instead of trying to mirror the efforts of the bigger boys in the sandbox, they instead brought their own experience and interests to the project.

This, perhaps unexpectedly, resulted in one of the strongest elements of Sable’s world – the absence of any combat whatsoever. While there’s certainly some large creepy crawlies if you know where to look, the creatures of this world are content to leave you be, and be left alone in turn. In a market that sometimes feels that murder is mandatory, fans have really responded to being allowed to explore undisturbed.

“We planned the game around our strengths as a team – and as a team, we were just two people! We knew that if we wanted to do combat we’d have to do it right, and we didn’t think we could with such a small team. So we played to our strengths, and our strengths were the assets we had available to us.

“So we knew we wanted to make an exploration game, and it should have a narrative and architectural focus. Daniel studied comparative literature, and I studied architecture, so those were things that we had interest in and knew about.

“So narrative, spatial design and exploration were core to the original concept. We wanted characters in the game as well, but we maybe didn’t anticipate the scale that it would end up being in that regard. We didn’t think we could do the animation work for [combat], we didn’t think we could do the design work for it… We hadn’t had experience doing it, it was a big unknown, and the best way to mitigate that was just not to do it.

“I think it’s a risk,” admits Kythreotis, “because it’s what people expect from these games. It was a big question that people asked early on was like, ‘where’s the peril?’ And our answer was always well, the narrative! The stakes are in the narrative, they’re emotional stakes.”

It isn’t just the lack of combat either. One of the central elements of Sable’s narrative are the masks that every character wears, dictating their place in society. It’s why Sable goes on her pilgrimage (known as the Gliding): in order to decide what mask, what role in society is right for her. And it was all born because the team didn’t want to animate faces.

“And that was core to the development of Sable in general. So, for example, the masks. I find that faces are probably one of the hardest things to do on a character, in terms of making someone believable. We knew we wanted to populate the world with a few characters. We’d have to do individual faces, animate them, make them believable… or could we just give every character a mask, and turn it into world-building strength. And it became the core conceit of the game by the end.

“Actually, by the midpoint, the masks ended up being a lot of work. But I think that limitation became a strength for us. It became something we embraced and utilised in a way that, I think, is kind of interesting. And that was just generally the philosophy of development throughout, because we were such a small team. The team size fluctuated between six and 10 people throughout development. Even at our biggest, even 10 people making an open world game on the scale that we’ve made is not a trivial task. We just had to make the most of our resources.”

FREEDOM TO NOT EXPLORE

Not all of Sable’s creative decisions were born out of sheer practicality, of course. As mentioned before, what many have found attractive about the game is that Sable’s Gliding can end whenever she feels ready. There’s no main quest to finish, no final boss to vanquish. Just point your bike towards home when you feel you’ve had enough. This philosophy was an important one to
the team.

“The other key decision we made early on was the structure of the game being so free-form, being so open. You can finish the game now, or you could not. That was a structure that we wanted from the get go for players, because choosing to finish the game is a really nice thing to have. We tried to be respectful of people’s time.

“But the other thing that allowed us to do is be freeform with our development. Sable is a series of short stories, every quest is a side quest. The only things you have to do are the beginning and the end of the game, and we’re quite clear about what those actually are in terms of narrative. Doing that meant that the middle bit could be really loose. It meant that we could plan for double the content and cut half of it out, and it would have no real impact in terms of production.

“Whereas if all those pieces were interlinked, it would have been very difficult on a number of levels to just take anything out. You know, let’s say [in the narrative] you had to go to a certain town before you went to the camp or whatever. Not only do we have to design those limitations in the game, but if we wanted to change that up, if we couldn’t afford to make the town, we’d then have to go back and redesign that whole sequence. So being able to be flexible in that regard allowed us to finish the game I should say. Because I feel like it would have been very easy to spend years and years longer on it and never get out the door. And that was something that we really didn’t want to fall into.”

Thankfully, Sable avoided development hell. After four years of full-time development, the game released in September 2021 to strong reviews. As well as the spirit of freedom at the heart of the game, the game’s art and animation style drew significant praise – with Sable’s world inspired by artists such as Jean Giraud, and by the works of Studio Ghibli. Their influence over the game’s world is clear, but what is arguably more interesting is how they influenced Sable’s animation itself. As the player moves through the world, they’ll immediately notice that her walking animation is somewhat jerky, running at a visibly lower FPS than the game around her. This, Kythreotis explains, was the team’s desire to intentionally pursue imperfection.

“We wanted to make a 3D open world game, but we wanted the style to feel as two dimensional as possible. Part of that was just introducing a sort of imperfection into the art of the game. So for limited frame animation, we could smooth that out and make it look really perfectly animated. But when you look at how artists actually animate in 2D, they have to do it per frame and you get those jumps.

“It’s a style we embraced, and tried to introduce that level of imperfection into the textures. More or less all of the textures are hand drawn. We tried to make sure that we left a little bit of roughness to it, a feeling that, ‘yeah, this was made by hand.’ And the same is true even for the geometry, we tried to kind of wobble the lines a little bit and make it look like someone had  kind of drawn them by hand without a ruler. Because computers are really good at making perfect lines, and you can duplicate that million times. And usually when you make something by hand, you always want to be as perfect as possible, because you’ll always naturally create the imperfection yourself. Whereas when you make something on a computer, I think you’re actually doing the opposite. A lot of the time, you’re trying to introduce the human touch, we wanted everything to feel like it had our fingerprints on it.”

KEEPING THE LIGHTS ON

Building a game without combat and with intentionally jerky animations is certainly a risk. It’s not the kind of game you can make without support. Kythreotis praises publisher Raw Fury for their support of the project and their faith in the team, though their support wasn’t the only one helping to keep the Shedworks lights on – as the team landed a deal that saw Sable launching day one on Game Pass.

“We were de-risked throughout development on the financial side, just because of the Game Pass we had. Once we knew we had that deal in, we knew more or less what our budget was for production. And that was incredibly reassuring. I don’t know what impact that has in terms of sales and stuff like that, but in terms of development it just gave us that assurance. It just means that anything else is a bonus.”

Thankfully, these risks paid off – Sable has attracted some devoted fans, and even nabbed a few award nominations already. Not too bad for a shelved passion project.

“It went really positively, for the most part. We knew there would be people who didn’t get on with the experience, and we were fine with that. We stand by pretty much every creative decision we made on the project. And I think the people that it hit, and people who got what we were going for with the narrative, it seems to have really gone down well. When you’re a smaller team, you’re never going to please everyone. But If we can please the people that we were targeting with this, people like ourselves in a lot of senses, then we’re happy. And I think we achieved that”