THE MAKING OF...
UNSIGHTED
How a Disney SNES game inspired this tale of robots running out of time
By Niall O’Donoghue
Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Developer Studio Pixel Punk
Publisher Humble Games
Origin Brazil
Release 2021
Playing Unsighted, a host of influences jump out at us: our fairy-bot companion Iris, one “Hey, listen” away from spirit-channelling Navi; the ‘Drifter Chip’, a tip of the hat to Heart Machine’s top-down dystopia; mecha bosses that wouldn’t look out of place in Mega Man. But we’ll admit to being blindsided by one of the games co-creators Tiani Pixel and Fernanda Dias cite as an inspiration: Goof Troop, Capcom’s adaptation of the Disney animated sitcom and one of the first games designed by Shinji Mikami. Safe to say, it’s not one of his best remembered works – at least, not for most people.
“Here in Brazil, we didn’t have much of an official videogames market until relatively recently, so we had a lot of imported videogame consoles and a lot of pirated games,” Dias explains. “When you’re buying a game and you don’t speak English, for example, a game in English and a game in Japanese are kind of the same, because you’re going to have to guess at the text.” The game was also easy to pirate, Pixel adds, before explaining for the uninitiated what made this such a seminal text: “It was like a multiplayer Zelda, with a lot of puzzles and items that you had to find. It’s funny, because a lot of times I say that Unsighted is inspired by Zelda, just so people can understand what I’m talking about – but honestly, it was much more inspired by Goof Troop.”
Pixel’s very first memory is of the day her family bought a SNES, and soon afterwards she started drawing her own Mario and Zelda levels on paper. “I’ve always wanted to make games, since those times,” she says. Nevertheless, although she dabbled with RPG Maker, game development was something Pixel thought of as a hobby rather than a potential career, particularly growing up in Brazil. “When I was younger, there was no market for game devs here,” she says. “I didn’t even know the phrase ‘game dev’.”
Instead, Pixel studied architecture, an experience she describes as “really bad”. Inspired by other Brazilian independent developers, as well as Indie Game: The Movie, Pixel dropped out to learn Unity for a year, before joining a game development college around 2014. This led to a two-year stint working on mobile and adware games for small firms, which wasn’t much better. “It was kind of killing my passion for games,” she recalls. “I had a really bad salary, worked with a lot of people that I really didn’t like.” Seeking a way out, she decided to focus on developing her own games, and returned to some old prototypes. The most promising of these was a combatfocused take on the Zelda formula – or rather the Goof Troop formula – with a 3D physics system. Pixel began sharing her development processes online, which was when a Facebook friend suggestion caught her eye: Fernanda Dias.