Polygon’s look behind the scenes, at the making of Tearaway

The folks from Polygon followed us around for a while, and put together their various findings into this huge making of Tearaway article. It’s a story about the history of the game, and how it grew from the splendidly weird thing that it used to be, to the splendidly weird thing it is today!

Crowle, using his ability for describing things simply, summarizes Tearaway’s development in three acts.

Act 1, he says, was a mix between a dungeon crawler where players attack enemies and loot their remains, and the classic arcade game Qix where players cut out sections of the floor. In practice, that meant players used their fingers to cut out Sandpit’s ground, with Vita’s camera showing a real world video feed below it. So players would cut out the ground around an enemy, and the enemy would “fall out of the game,” at which point players would “unlock” them and be able to make them in papercraft form outside the game.

The project’s second act, says Crowle, came with two big ideas: The team added a character in the world who could run around the player’s fingertips, and gave the game a new open world role-playing structure. For much of this period, the game took on the name “Uncovery.”

Crowle, always looking for visual ways to explain things, wrote and animated a comic book showing how it would work. An “adventurer” with a boxy look and a camera around his neck would explore the world, find animals to ride, take photographs of the world and earn experience by snapping shots of specific items.

Read the full article over on Polygon