Ps3 Remote Control

How An iPhone Developer Moved To PS3, The Story Behind Okabu

Simon Oliver, Founder: Yeah, sure! I don’t know if you’ve seen a show called Planet Earth, it’s a natural history program, and there was an episode of that where they went to the Okavango Delta in Botswana. They showed this footage of going into this area, which starts out at the beginning of the season as very dry. When the water arrives, the waves created a spread of a life. Plants sprout and when the seeds come in, birds arrive. You start getting mammals arriving. There is just this beautiful idea of the power of nature and how it creates this life force that makes the world grow. That’s where we took the name from, the Okavango Delta, which is obviously a bit of a mouthful. We wanted to do something a little simpler and cut it down to Okabu , a little easier to say.

We wanted to do something based on nature and the biggest opposition to nature is industrialization. In this case, we wanted to create an enemy, so we split the people in the world into two different tribes. We have the Yorubo, there this nature loving tribe. They’re farmers and live in harmony with nature. On the other side, we have the Doza. Many, many generations ago they split into two. The Doza pursue this industrialized existence where they build machines, they cut down forests, they dig into the land to extract metal. They’ve consumed all of their stuff and now they’ve come back to pursue the Yorubo’s land.

Why did you want to make a cloud the player character?

We were thinking of something that would really work and be quite flexible, something you can adapt into various shapes and forms. The cloud seemed like a natural choice because it can pick up various liquids, it can rain, steam, there are all kinds of other bits and pieces. It can suck up stuff, like in the biblical plagues where they sucked up frogs and it rained frogs. There’s a lot you can do with a cloud. Also, they are an indicator of when there is pollution where you get acid rain. We thought it was kind of a nice way to star off as a symbol of nature.

The second inspiration, I don’t know if you’ve seen this show called Monkey Magic, which is this imported show that was on British TV. It was about the Monkey King, it was based on Journey to the West. You know the Monkey King rides on clouds, yeah so we were like we got to do something with this. What happens if we had some guys that jumped on their backs and did various things? By swapping between heroes we could keep the controls very simple. We didn’t have a button that does this, a button that does this, and this. Whoever’s on their back, it becomes contextual. That means for younger players that might want to play with their parents the controls are designed to be simple and our goal was to keep the game quite accessible.