Game Rant spoke with Anthony, lead artist and creative designer on Valley of Shadow, about their unique development challenges, gameplay, and the importance of this autobiographical title. Interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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Q: Can you introduce yourself and share your favorite narrative puzzle game?

A: My name is Anthony Vaccaro. I am the lead creative developer at Synersteel studio, which is co-owned with my brother, Nicholas, and we are developing Valley of Shadow which is an autobiographical puzzle game. My favorite narrative puzzle game is Gone Home.

Q: Describe Valley of Shadow, for those who are unfamiliar with the game in a couple sentences.

A: Valley of Shadow is an autobiographical narrative puzzle game about mortality, grief, and healing from a traumatic family event. You traverse temples of life, which are intrinsic to us as actual individuals, as family members, and you go through the house we grew up in, and you learn to heal through an artist’s rendition of cognitive behavioral therapy.

Q: Can you tell us a bit about the traumatic experiences that inspired Valley of Shadow without giving away too much of the story?

A: There was… I want to say a death in the family several years ago while we were working on other games, which inspired my own personal journey through the healing of that event. Essentially navigating the stages of grief, and finding solace in community and family and therapy. The event rocked our entire family, and caused several of us kind of search through the wreckage of it, so to speak.

Q: Valley of Shadow’s Steam page describes it as an experience about healing, among other things, which is an extremely complex concept to capture with mechanics. How did you approach that challenge?

A: It basically arose slowly from the ground up. We began building a game in 2018. Forgive me if I go a little off topic; the development process both creatively and technically, is just a spiderweb of experiences. We began in late-2017, early-2018, and we just wanted to build a game that was kind-of open-world, kind-of colorful, and had puzzle mechanics, and etcetera. We wanted to build an open world RPG. And we were building this world with spell casting mechanics - because we’ve been enthralled with those since our youth, since Morrowind and Fable, and all those other games.

I began as the creative designer, but I didn’t realize I was grieving the family trauma, until well into the development process of this open world title. But everything I was putting into this creatively, artistically, and narratively, was going into this other direction that was darker, and deeper, and more real than that colorful, open-world game. At the same time, Nicholas - he’s the mechanical developer, the technical lead really - he was pushing me in the direction of adding spells to the game. And he’s a huge puzzle gamer who wanted to develop puzzles.

So over time we began whittling down this massive open-world game into a more realistic, deeper, and more internal look at what games can even do. But how do I do that? How do I creatively build a world that is looking internally? So, I decided to start with a hub.

What do players do outside of the hub? Well, they go into the world to solve puzzles. Then they come back. What do they do there? They solve puzzles. The next question is “what is the hub world?” I decided to just build out our old childhood home - which no longer exists. So, you’re bringing back things to the hub world, and over time those things became real artifacts. Photographs, and VHSs, and snippets of memories, and childhood trophies, the things that are supposed to go in a home. So it very much adheres to the tropes of video game mechanics, but in a very real scenario.

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Q: Many games feature narratives that tackle serious, real-world issues, but relatively few are based on real experiences. Do you think that there should be more autobiographical games, and why are there so few?

A: Yes. I think that there should be more. We’ve gone to several conventions; our first was Awesome Con in 2019. We didn’t know if this would even resonate with anybody. We had kind of an old version of the demo, and it wasn’t yet a therapy session, but people were able to navigate this dark world, the Valley of Shadow, seeing these photographs and VHSs of our life from when we were kids. We didn’t realize how many people would resonate with a lot of these themes; the pain, the darkness, the internal process of moving on. So many people resonated with it. People who had fought cancer successfully, people who had lost family members.

And yes, in video games, we have not really been able to see that this is a plausible, marketable thing. And I don’t want to use the word “marketable;” I’m a cynic when it comes to economics, but I really want to see more art and more soul - as much as possible - in video games. But there is a market reality to it. Is this sellable? Do people want to buy it? And surprisingly, the answer is yes. This is my selfish desire, but I want to see stories from all walks of life.

However, the other side of that coin, is that this is the hardest thing that I and my brother have ever had to do. We’re constantly re-living the grief to tell the story of that trauma, so I can see why it’s not more common. I always think back to the Ernest Hemingway quote “there’s nothing to writing. All I have to do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” And that’s exactly what it’s like trying to make this project. Who wants to be doing this? Nobody. That’s not to say there are lighter topics based on real life that could be made, but in the case of Valley of Shadow we have to constantly relive that experience to tell our story.

Q: Players will encounter a number of artifacts in the game, from real VHS footage, to floppy discs, and other period-appropriate items. Roughly how many of these artifacts will players find? Do you have any personal favorites you can share?

A: My personal favorites are the VHSs. They are so phenomenal; they are so fantastic. As an aside, one of our family members was giving us all our photo family albums and VHS tapes. So we’re sifting through them, asking “How can we turn this into a narrative experience that other people will understand?” So yes, my favorites are the VHSs. They are fun to edit; they are amazing to watch and experience.

To answer your first question… hundreds. Hundreds of photographs. I don’t have an exact number just yet - we are still populating the fourth out of four temples. But the photographs date all the way back to our parents first dating in the 70s, leading up to the most recent photograph in 2006. And all of our VHSs are from the 80s and 90s.

There are two worlds. So there is the valley, which is cold and dark, and the house - while lonely and melancholy - is a safe space. There are twelve to sixteen VHS tapes, running from twelve-second snippets to about a minute. The floppy discs are interesting. They don’t have anything on them, but they do unlock something else later on in the game.

Q: Are there characters in Valley of Shadow’s story apart from those who appear or are referenced in the artifacts?

A: There is one. There is the character of Emma. She is the therapist. So, you are playing as me going through my personal experiences, which is called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Plus (CBT+) treatment. I won’t get too much into that - I am not a professional - but the only other character not referenced in the artifact is Emma. You hear her voice through my ears. And Emma is helping me through the process. And her voiceover is actually played by our sister, Maria. So it’s a whole family event behind the scenes.

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Q: How did you settle on a fantasy setting for a game based on real-life experiences? What went into developing the game’s graphical aesthetic?

A: Fantasy tropes were huge for us growing up. Everything in the game is familiar to myself, Nicholas, and the players that play the game. The spells, and tropes, and themes are things that millions of gamers experienced growing up or as young adults. Again, Fable, Morrowind, and… God, so many games. Basically, pick a game, and its tropes are in there. Nicholas in particular has always loved spellcasting. If there is a fantasy game and a sci-fi game side by side, and the only thing different between them is the aesthetic, he will choose fantasy over sci-fi all day every day. So we married this to a fantasy aesthetic; broken down castles, fields of wheat, and farmlands.

In terms of the graphical development, back in 2018, I was still learning high fidelity art and HD texturing. And I wasn’t sure how to market this at first, so I streamed the early development process on Twitch - I don’t stream anymore - but I remember, in the chat an anonymous viewer asked a question: “Why does the game look so bad?” and I said “What do you mean?” and they said “Well, the graphics just aren’t very good.” So that was kind of a kick in the butt, like “how do I get good at this?” and I started looking into what professional 3D artists use. And they use 3DS Max. I currently use Blender, I’ve been using Blendre for 10 years. And then I found Substance Painter, which is now adobe. So I started dabbling in high fidelity graphics, but the question was: what should I practice on? And that was when I decided to model our childhood home, as a means of practice on the side. Again, this is back in mid-2018, when I am working with the castle and fantasy world stuff.

Over a couple of months I trained myself how to do high fidelity graphics while developing our childhood home. And I was like “wow, this looks really good,” and I was showing it to Nick, and we were talking and I asked “Can we just… put this in the game?” So then everything started coming together. You were going out into dungeons, casting light spells, and force missile, and so on. We didn’t have any hardcore mechanics, or hardcore puzzles at this time, but that’s when it started coming together.

It was a very long and complicated process, but the canvas I was learning on eventually became part of the game itself.

Q: How many total spells will players have access to in Valley of Shadow?

A: We have light, force missile, fireball, chain lightning - which we might to change to something else - so four. We had five in the beginning, we wanted a nice round number, but we eventually trimmed it down due to time and scope.

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Q: What other mechanics will players encounter?

A: So you have the spellcasting. The force missile mechanic was inspired by Panzer Dragoon; you paint targets and release all the shots at one time. Fireball is exactly what it sounds like. You shot out a fireball that erupts and is capable of melting ice and burning wood. Chain lightning is our fourth mechanic, but we are thinking of changing that to something else so I won’t detail that too much.

You can also find magic crystals in the environment and you can put spells into them, which complicates puzzles further. They are attached to chains, hanging in puzzle rooms, and you can put magic into the crystal for another mechanic.

We also have jumping and activation; like opening doors, moving crystals. For example, you can put the light spell into a crystal to have it steadily emit light in a radius, and then you can move that crystal to light certain censors. So yeah, four spells, four additional crystal mechanics, running, jumping, and activation.

Q: Roughly how long will a playthrough of Valley of Shadow last?

A: Right now, we’re looking at about ten hours. It could probably be anywhere from ten to twenty hours depending on their proclivity for puzzle games. We have about an hour-long demo. Some people zoom through in about twenty minutes. And other people take up to an hour and twenty minutes, exploring the world, looking at artifacts. So ten hours is a rough liberal estimate.

Q: What can you tell us about Valley of Shadow’s music and sound effects?

A: Oh, those are fun. I licensed the music from a company called WOW Sound. They basically make game music packs, and ambient music packs and they are very, very good. We don’t work with them directly; we just purchase them online. And the thing about those are, back in 2018, I was basically sitting around, feeling sad, and I’m building this colorful world with these dark dungeons, and searching for what suits this feeling inside of me. So I looked through GameDev Market, the music fit perfectly, and we put it in Valley of Shadow. These music packs became the soundtrack to this trauma. A lot of people will play it and say “Wow, who did you hire to do the music?” and we’re like “yeah, it’s just a music pack.” But it fit the despair I was feeling at the time as the resident artist.

The majority fo the Sound effects are from FreeSound.org. We have hundreds of links and licenses that we brought into Audacity - a freeware music editing software - and just edited them however we needed them. And we have everything in a spreadsheet online. There are hundreds of sound effects that I’ve ripped and edited. So that’s the music and editing in a nutshell. I wish we had a dedicated sound editor, but everything is being done in-house by the two of us.

Q: Game development is already an extremely challenging endeavor. Do you think the personal nature of Valley of Shadow’s subject matter made it more difficult to create than a more fictionalized or abstract title?

A: A big one that comes to mind is marketing. Game design and game development is a difficult undertaking; but less difficult if you are just doing it yourself and trying to make a living off it. Most of us are fighting against the currents of real-world economics. Everything is quote-unquote “political.” But there are not a lot of social safety nets in the United States if you are trying to make a living off this rather than just doing it on the side. The point I’m getting at is: there’s nothing to base it on.

For example, if you are trying to make a roguelike, that is not based on personal trauma - you can go online and see what the genre is like. You know that the genre is marketable. Our game is autobiographical, and while that uniqueness is one of its selling points, we don’t really have a proof of marketable concept to base it off of, even though there are a couple of other autobiographical games out there. So that kind of trailblazing added an extra level of difficulty.

The trauma of it is hard. I can only do it for so long before I have to recharge my batteries. So I have to carve out time to take care of myself. I just spent a month writing about death, grappling with why this important to me, and creating this therapy session. So I realized I needed to take a step back from this and take some time.

Luckily, Nicholas has been fantastic. To go back to an earlier question, one of the reasons this is not done a lot indie development is done solo. And I could not do this by myself. One thousand percent; I could not do this without the fantastic support network of my family, and people who care about me. And lots of people don’t have that. A lot of people are just coding and using programmer art, and I really feel for the individual trying to make a game without a support network. That support system is what makes things easier, but also more difficult than traditional, non-autobiographical game design.

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Q: What other titles influenced the development of Valley of Shadows? And what other games are you currently enjoying?

A: Gone Home let us know early on this can be done. “Walking simulators” can do this, that genre works. What Remains of Edith Finch was a tail-end influenced that proved a house can work. Actually, one of the 2D artists of What Remains of Edith Finch, Holly Rothrock, did our capsule art on steam; shout out to her, she’s fantastic.

Stanley Parable was a huge inspiration, ironically, for the narrative stuff. So the fusion of narrative and puzzles on Nicholas’ end; both The Witness and The Talos Principle, were huge inspirations for Valley of Shadow in particular. Atmospherically, they showed us what to shoot for. And of course, there are lots of inspirations from childhood. To name them would be to undersell them to us, and to all people who experienced them.

As for what we are playing currently; ironically, not 3D puzzle games. We’ve been playing a lot of 7 Days to Die. We’re now starting to play V Rising, which is new. Games in that vein. Just a lot of getting away from this narrative puzzle space to recharge our batteries, so to speak.

Q: Is there anything else you would like readers to know?

A: There’s a lot that goes into that question. Please look up Valley of Shadow on Steam, and play the demo. Get it out to your family and friends. And that leads me to… It’s okay to heal. It’s okay to learn how to talk to yourself. A lot of Valley of Shadow is learning how to be open and vulnerable. We want to de-stigmatize therapy. Now, you cannot depoliticize anything. I like to refer to Valley of Shadow as an artist’s rendition of therapy, but it is not 1:1 to my own experiences, and again, therapy is political. In real life, therapy can be expensive and everybody can afford it. I wish everyone who needed that support could get it, but socially, we aren’t there yet. We are hoping that Valley of Shadow can kind of open that door, and start a broader conversation about healing.

[END]

Valley of Shadow is currently scheduled for release on Steam in 2023.

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