How was the development of The Crown of Wu, a game that emerged from a drawing

This morning has been presented The Crown of Wua game of puzzles, platforms and action, at the Strokes School, with which the title has a strong relationship. Its visual appearance is reminiscent of the legend of the monkey king. To know the reason for having this artistic design, you have to go back to 2018, when Eduardo Fernndez, a professor of Trazos recently deceased, commented to another, José Carlos Montero, the idea that the students of the digital art center participate in the development of a video game. Montero had a company, TRT Labs, where he could develop the project and he began to look for some inspiring concept.

Looking at the students’ drawings, Montero found one that represented Sun Wukong and decided to take this inspiration to create a story in which King Wu awakens from a very long sleep in which he was plunged because the crown he was wearing was cursed and had corrupted him. Someone has stolen the crown and Wu must try to get it back.

A development made difficult by the covid

The path that development has followed has been complicated. In 2018 Montero worked on the desEsports Extras“In a bit of an experimental way, We were not clear where it was going to go”, he said in the presentation. In 2019 he began working with him at TRT Labs with Ignacio Pérez as producer and went on to form part of the PlayStation Talents program to promote USAdevelopment. When The Crown of Wu It was beginning to pick up pace, in 2020, the confinement due to Covid-19 arrived and with it the cancellation of the projects in which the company was working, which were mainly virtual reality, partly with simulation at events. He had to close the company and put the game on hold for a few months, until at the end of that same year he created Red Mountainwhere they entered the programmers Asier Cabrera and Alejandro Royo, as well as several artists who had passed through the Strokes classrooms. During this time, the school has given study a space to develop The Crown of Wu.

Montero explains that it is a modest game but, he adds, “quite consistent and good. Everyone has their opinion of whether they like a combat system more or less, but We are a very small team that has fought against all odds to achieve a result that I think is very good, it will have its defects, but also its virtues. I think it is a game that can be enjoyed, although it makes you suffer a bit because there are certain parts that are a challenge, that is part of the design, because maybe we are very old school and we like that touch of challenge. We have managed to have very immersive worlds and has strong points, such as puzzles, designed in such a way that it is very enjoyable to solve them.

An incidental soundtrack

The presentation was also attended by those responsible for the soundtrack of The Crown of Wu, Wildcat Records, composed of Sergio Villar Camino and Alex Elsegui. The latter has explained that they composed soundtracks for independent films and decided to branch out into the world of video games. At the 2019 Fun & Serious Games Festival they met Montero and he asked them for a sample of what they could do. “We sent it to him in January 2020 and we didn’t hear from him throughout the year. In January 2021 we contacted him again and He directly told us to make the music for the game.”

The approach they took at Wildcat Records was to give priority to what happens on the screen and that the music “was incidental and not protagonist, with short melodies, except in the bosses They have their own melody. Wu also has his own melody that changes as the character develops,” said Elsegui.

Villar Camino has explained that they did not create very powerful themes since the game has both puzzles and combat or platforming and a high difficulty, “we knew that it is difficult and it is going to die, we knew that the music was going to be playing for a long time”. What they have done is introduce some reasons with instruments that accompany the development of the story, “I invite you to you listen to those little details that are out there. When the occasion calls for it, as in the bosses if we gave it a little more prominence, without going overboard”, the composer has pointed out.

The Crown of Wu goes on sale tomorrow in digital format on PC (Steam), PS4 and PS5 published by Meridiem Games, which also releases a physical edition for PS5.