17 facts about the making of Tearaway that will blow your mind
06/10/2015
We ask the team to reveal their hidden secrets behind the making of Tearaway and Tearaway Unfolded.
During the making of any game, there’s always a great wealth of fascinating facts and figures about the project that never usually see the light of day. Well, we’ve decided to dust off our memories and take a look back at the development of Tearaway on the PS Vita and Tearaway Unfolded on the PS4 to share some of our most secret squirrels with you all!
Here are 17 facts about the making of Tearaway that will blow your mind!
1. We used 280,918 sheets of paper to make Tearaway, and we needed to make 647,708 folds!
2. The original version of Tearaway was called ‘Sandpit’, and lots of the code (especially in the PS Vita version) still refers to ‘Sandpit’ instead of Tearaway.
3. When Tearaway was a free roaming game way back in the early stages of development, we used real global locations and you could walk from the very South of England to Scotland in 46 minutes and 12 seconds.
A colourful, papery Stonehenge!
4. There are 29097 words in the game in 21 languages, which gives us a grand total of 611,037 words in all the different languages! This is (roughly!) equal to about 2 Game of Thrones novels.
5. Thanks to our bespoke editor, every object in the game could theoretically be made from real paper.
6. The PS4 version has procedural 'thick edges' that get added automagically to non-ripped paper edges, making the paper even more realistic!
7. And all the edging used in Tearaway Unfolded is actual 3D edging, they’re not textures.
OOLA, an early concept for iota.
8. The original name for iota was OOLA and his appearance was quite different to how he looks today!
9. The Squirrels are referred to as Monkeys in the development environment, Scraps are referred to as Grunts (sometimes even Cyclops), and Elks are referred to as Elephants!
10. The Paper Plane was originally madefor Tearaway on the PS Vita, however we didn’t feel it was quite right at that time, which is why we were even more excited to introduce it in Tearaway Unfolded!
11. Confetti is also known as Fluff.
12. The game editor continues using the LBP "-inator"-suffix, such as the Fluffinator and Dependinator.
13. The Game Menu is built using the same level editor as the game is.
14. There was a physical paper prototype built for the in-game menu
A real-life paper prototype we built to test the in-game menu.
15. The Tripod is the ultimate tool to take selfies in crazy situations! Did you know you can take photos whilst riding the Pig and even the Paper Plane (but at your own risk)!
16. Scraps fart!
17. No Baby Wendigos were injured during the making of this game <3
What a wonderful collection of facts! Did any surprise or astound you? Let us know in the comments below! And if you haven’t picked up your copy of Tearaway Unfolded yet, visit the PlayStation Store to begin your papery adventure now!