David Mervik
speaker
115 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
David Mervik’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
How hard can it be? You know, and so we weren't worrying about like what people would think or anything. We just kept applying for money and then we started getting it. Um, and it was like, oh, we're gonna have to make a game now. You know, we got some money from creative Europe.
We got some money from Nordic game and they were like, well, what we need for you to get this money is, uh, like a design document. And we're like, well, we just got an idea at the moment. It's about a kid.
and in a bad place you know and now we had to figure out what that meant and so we were just brain poor everything was coming out of us you know like oh what are these these sketches are cool this camera's cool and i'm like oh what can it be about uh you know and all this and then suddenly things started to coalesce and so it was always there even in in those days and but the thing that was cool that we got from little big planet was that physicality that really had a
I found influence on the way Little Nightmares played, the interactivity, the tactility. Tactile was the watchword throughout the germination of that first game. and how everything felt very physical. It was really important.
Let's just keep going. We'll do this for another 40 minutes and see how people go.
More after this break.
No, no. No, I mean, once we'd done the design documents, we did two. We did one that needed... It was about... We did, like, a one-pager to get them interested and then a ten-pager to get some money. And then this other foundation needed, like, a 35-page design document. So when you're forced to do that, you're forced to kind of solidify your ideas.
But, yeah, in the very beginning, it was kind of like... I... I was still desperate to make Metronome. I was just in love with what Metronome was in my head. And I think for each person in Tarsier who was around then, their idea of what Metronome is is probably a bit different. It's very personal. What is Metronome? It's very much in your head.
But I've been already toying around with that in my free time. What could it be if we turn it into something now, all these years later? So I had some ideas already and that's where the name Six had come in because I had created these characters and I was like, oh, I love this. That's a nice name, you know, because it was so androgynous. It was so mysterious and all of this.
And so that just, I think it was a boy in the beginning and then it became a girl and then it became kind of irrelevant whether it was a boy or a girl because it was more interesting that she was Raincoat and who is this person, you know. So it was all the way back then. So when these things need to be done, I'm like, oh, I've got this stuff that I've been working on. That could be quite nice.
But where can it take place? Oh, well, we've got this sketch of something which looks like a big kind of maggot that walks the sea. What do you think about that? All right, yeah. You know, and it is literally that. And so we didn't have a big plan. But what we always have is ideas. And it might be an idea that we'd had ages ago. Hang on, that might be nice here.
You know, we just bring it in and it's just... I like working that way. It's nice not having to... It's stressful.
core draw and experience and you probably just added elements to it until you had this more crystalline sort of concept of of little nightmares come out of it yeah it could like uh dennis the guy i work with he he he put the word on it perfectly it was just quite chaotic in that way you know and it's like you just have to embrace it in the end and just go yeah that's the way we make stuff we kind of feel it out you know you play a segment and then you go
missing something what do we need you know and it's like that you kind of taste in the soup all the time instead of going no this is it which is how we used to work on the lego games it was all pre-approved and we would make it to spec so you you know you have to really kind of beg to kind of change things when they've been pre-approved whereas here it's like you just keep tasting it then i sometimes it's too much and sometimes it's not enough and you just have to wait until you get the right
Hmm. That's a good question. Um, did you guys have any like specific, not what we're doing now? Um, I think I can't wait to hear a lot about that. A big influence on those games was like the Ghibli, the Ghibli style and very specifically spirited away. Um, it's the best one.
And you, you kind of see that balance there as well with, you know, between this kind of horrifying, uh, imagery and this very kind of charming, hopeful, yeah. Whimsical that you say, um,
aspect you know and it's that balance that kids bring when putting these these uh very very alien places and it was just something that worked for that world we were creating and it's not something we slavishly stick to it it's always at the needs of the game dictate um and the way we felt with little nightmares was i think one of our pillars was um it's a child's perspective.
Always think about it in terms of a child's perspective and very much in terms of like rememberings, if you like, you know, like I remember I used to, the best way I could describe it was like if a kid wakes up from a dream or a nightmare and you can't, you say, what was it about? Everything's writ large, everything's more exaggerated.
Or even if, you know, they've been to the doctors in real life and you come back, it's like, yeah, but he had like really big hands. Because that's how they felt. They felt like these hands were so big. And so that felt really kind of pivotal to us as to like, let's reflect that in the world. That this is how kids feel in a world that wasn't made for them, you know.
And I think that's where that balance comes from in those games.
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