Developer Interview: Póntica — Plus Ultra: Legado

We are Póntica, an indie videogame developer based in Madrid, Spain. We're a diverse group of young people of several nationalities who wanted to work in the videogame industry. We had a good vision of what an indie studio needed, and we also knew what a good game is and how it should behave and look like.

We wanted to do something new and viable at the same time. You might do a Tetris clone, that's easy, but it's anything but a new experience for gamers. Similarly, you can conceive a game that is disruptive, but its production might become unlikely to finish for a small team. Therefore, we started to think about the metroidvania genre. However, many Metroid-like titles are being released every month on Steam, so we knew we needed to give it some gimmicks, some quirks, some particular characteristics that made our game unique.

On the one hand, as I said, we wanted to give the game unique elements to convince the audience this is not yet another metroidvania. The comic aesthetics and gameplay elements are quite important, of course, but so is the setting. Nobody ever tried to develop a metroidvania title about a specific historical setting.

Also, there is a personal story here. Most of the team is Hispanic. My brother, with whom I started Póntica, is actually Mexican. We realise the contact between [Spanish] and Mesoamerican peoples is one of the most important and iconic moments in human history, but at the same time, almost no games talk about it. So let's do it!

We did quite a big research job, so we were sure we were representing history in the best way possible. That led us to discover different points of view, the real motivations of some of the characters, the tremendous diversity — and rivalry — among Mesoamerican peoples…

We also realised both Renaissance Spaniards and Mesoamericans had amazing pieces of art and architecture that somehow started to blendin order to create what we now call Mexico.

At first, everything was a bit blurry. I felt pretty ignorant on the matter, so I tried to read as much as I could from different authors. Eventually, I developed a sense of smell about what happened in 1519-1521 in those lands. Was it a conquest? Or rather a rebellion of those peoples subjugated by the Mexicas? Maybe it was just another power struggle between the Mexicas and their eternal enemies, the Tlaxcaltecs?

All of these statements are correct, yet those cannot be presented isolated from one another. This led me to understand that there was a huge complexity in the background. But, at the same time, the more I knew about the actual history, the more I realised how cool it would be to tell this through a videogame.

Actually, like many other things during game development, it happened by accident. We were clear that if you want to publish an indie game, it has to be visually pleasing. We tried different ideas, [but] none of them were satisfying. Eventually, I went to a bookstore to buy a present — [I] can't remember for whom, [or] what I bought. There, I saw a European-style comic book called El Otro Mar ("The Other Sea") that told [about] the discovery of the Pacific Ocean by Núñez de Balboa in current-day Panama. The thing is that [the] historical event was in 1519 in a place relatively close to Mesoamerica, with both Spaniards and Indigenous peoples, so I immediately bought it. The team loved it. We knew the comic style would become our thing.

Of course. We wanted ultimately to dedicate ourselves to our true passions: videogames and history. In other words, we wanted to show that videogames are a way to tell complex stories that speak about [real-world] problems. Also, we are convinced stories in videogames do not need to make it less of a game and more of a movie/book. Gameplay has its own storytelling rules. We wanted to exploit them.

You do not have to be a huge history fan to enjoy Plus Ultra: Legado. If you like 2D platforming and exploration videogames, you'll have quite a nice experience. Our open storytelling system allows the game to explain itself without interrupting gameplay, so players can actually enjoy the game from start to finish. That way, the story is something complementary to gameplay instead of a mode that pops up and interrupts you.

Think of a typical JRPG. You have two kinds of players: those who love text boxes and those who consider them too intrusive because they just want to play around, kill monsters, etc. And they are somehow right since when a textbox pops up, you can no longer move, and instead of jumping and smashing, you can only pass text. With our system, you can jump, move, and hit when a speech bubble pops up. Do you want to go to the next line? Smash that bubble! You just want to skip? Leave! You are always in charge.

Thank you very much! We are really surprised, and we are honoured to be a successful metroidvania. We worked pretty hard to achieve this. The keys to this success [have] been, first of all, offering a good product. That attracted many people from different groups. Also, having cool transmedia elements, such as figurines, graphic novels, handcrafts, [etc.]… made people value Plus Ultra as an IP. And, of course, the fact that this is a cultural product that has something to offer beyond pure interactive entertainment made many people pledge in order to put videogames where they deserve.

The cool thing about the comicvania is that it's not just an [art style]. This aesthetic is intertwined with gameplay. Therefore, when you trespass a door, instead of a fade-to-black sequence, you move into a different comic panel. Many of your actions make a closeup or an onomatopoeia pop. But apart from that, we're talking about the very first metroidvania in which the map has not only internal, level design logic (lots of connections, different areas, savepoints, warps…) but also real-world cohesion. After all, it's based on real locations, so we added a layer of complexity in order to make sure that you felt like you [were] actually exploring Mesoamerica and not just a fictional world. And it looks quite cool, to be honest!

That is such an interesting question. Right now, we're committed to offering a good product with our first game, so I shouldn't talk about other projects. However, I would love to see a historical comicvania set in a different historical and geographical context. Think about the Byzantine Empire, Medieval China, or 19th-century India. Those are historical events that are crucial to understanding who we are and how we got here… Yet almost no film is talking about this.

I would say Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is my favourite one. It showed not only how to express ideas through comics but something deeper. It demonstrated comics are not only stories, you can actually make an essay about philosophy of arts through a comic book. And it's so imaginative.