Unpack how Amanita Design created an entire game out of cardboard, paper and 3D programmes

The puzzle adventure game surrounds the character of Felix, a young rubbish collector who lives in the titular Phonopolis, a city gripped within the iron fist of a fascistic leader who sonically controls society through amplions (no doubt inspired by the classic and obscure 1920s loudspeakers of the same name). After Felix finds a pair of headphones which suppress the manipulative amplions, he sets off on a journey to thwart the city’s oppressors in a rollercoaster story.

The concept for the game began in 2014 when Petr Filipovic, Eva Markova and Oto Dostal were fresh animation graduates and wanted to create something that felt authentic, auteur and fresh in its approach. As animators, the trio had experimented with different ways to animate with 3D graphics and unique perspectives, not to mention a plethora of different materials, so it was inevitable that they would end up landing on an animated video game made out of cardboard and paper. “The reason we chose paper was because we felt we wanted to work with a material that can be touched, to enjoy its texture and literally experience the whole process first-hand,” says Eva. “Working with paper often provides an irreplaceable quality, but in today’s fast-paced era, it’s quite a luxurious choice. Yet, cardboard is a great, beautiful, cheap and accessible material. It has a suitable volume and a nice colour.”

Inspired by the avant-garde movements of the interwar period such as Russian constructivism and futurism, early 20th century propaganda, as well as the novels of Karel Čapek or the novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Phonopolis is undeniably Czechoslovakian. The team aimed for a “greater degree of exaggeration worthy of an animated film,” says Petr, and incorporated much of their childhoods and historical experiences of Central Europe into the game. “As children, we experienced the end of communism and certain formalised behaviours stuck in our memories,” says Petr. “The effort to erase the past in favor of innovative revolutionary ideas, to abandon human sensitivity in favour of the power of the masses, is a chillingly inspiring period,” adds Eva. The game has the same kooky, endearing and exciting organic personality that is so signature to many brilliant Czech films, like Jan Švankmajer’s Alice and the films of Jiří Trnka – the ‘Walt Disney of Eastern Europe.’ When playing the game, you get a brilliant sense of something really working-class through the sheer wealth of familiar materials on-screen – as the player interacts and transforms the world in order to gain autonomy and free his community, they must confront tactility at every turn; the importance of touch and feel in an increasing digital video game landscape (and our reality!)

Phonopolis’ aesthetic is one of ultimate playfulness, experimenting with the graphic nature of clean lines, flat colour blocks, three-dimensionality and lighting. “It is a kind of balancing act between graphics, legibility and composition – the materials, contrast in lighting and a sort of believability that we are looking at a paper model,” says Petr. The game originally used photographed sets in the game, but to focus on the crucial interactivity of the game, the team transferred the sets into a 3D engine, where the individual interactive elements could function freely and responsively. “At the beginning, a sort of simplicity and even childish playfulness was important to us. The cardboard models were a big challenge, we didn’t want to just make a ‘paper game,’” says Eva. For the game’s textures, the team scuffed surfaces with sandpaper, bent it, gave it patinas then mapped it into the game’s 3D space using the programme 3D Studio. One shudders to think of all of the paper-cuts and eye-strain involved in making this cardboard-opus.