Shane Yach - Explorer in The Surreal Horror Worlds
Game Designer who creates magic by mixing sound design, old-school shaders and horror atmosphere into a cocktail that excites your mind.
My name's Shane Yach and I'm currently in Minnesota.
We have seen your work. Do we understand correctly that in addition to development, you are also engaged in sound design? So from the very beginning you got into game development from the sound experience? Is that true?
Yeah, I'm game developer and music/sound designer. I don't think I necessarily got into game development through sound design, but I definitely started learning music composition a lot earlier than I started learning games, mainly because I had been in band classes throughout my youth and because I had access to Garageband. There were just more music making tools available to me at the time. Something like the Unity game engine was still only available as a trial or something and I didn't know anything about programming. Game development seemed like this far out endeavor until it came time to choose a college.
So, you chose an education that helped you develop games on your own. Apparently a college with programming? That helped? Or did self-education provide more knowledge?
I would say it helped me develop games on my own. It was a programming degree and a game programming degree. I definitely acquired a lot of programming knowledge from college, but largely, even during college, a lot of gamedev-specific programming, like learning how to work with Unity, was learned through self-education and collaboration.
A lot of college was actually the encouragement from other students and friends who were so passionate about games. It really grew my interest in the field.
I want to ask you about your author's style. One of your first public works was a Dream Catcher game made during a jam. And with each new project, your author's style begins to manifest itself. Why did you go to an arthouse with compressed pixelated textures and acid colors? Do you just like this kind of visual or is it a trend and fashion among indie developers?
A lot of my earlier games on Itch.io are collabs with a bunch of other devs, so it would have been more of a collective author's style for those. After college, though, is when I started dabbling more into solo development and got introduced through Twitter to this fledgling lofi pixelated art style in indie games. I found tutorials from 98Demake and the renowned dsoft20 PSX shaders and played around with the aesthetic, using the parts of the shaders that I liked. I think I gravitated to the style because I wasn't very good at art, but decent at design, and I preferred 3D game spaces over 2D, so it was the best option. As for the colors, I just like vibrant colors and color schemes are hard, so a bunch of my stuff sticks to a single color or some complementary colors. I feel like a minimal color palette can more easily make a game more cohesive.
"I'd just call myself a gamedev."
Also, I do very much enjoy the 3D lofi pixelated look. And it's certainly been a trend in the past few years. 98Demake, HauntedPS1, and DreadX have definitely helped it along. I also just think the aesthetic/style was inevitable just like pixel art was. Console limitations breed a certain aesthetic. That aesthetic is later abandoned when fancier consoles come along. We later miss that aesthetic and realize it had certain qualities that made it great. For lofi pixelated graphics, for instance, it works great for horror.
Most of your work has demons or horror energy. If any artist has something to say to the world, what is your art trying to say to the players through the prism of dark forces? Also, i want to ask: you're game designer or media artist mostly, how do you think?
I just like surreal horror. I find it comforting in its oppressive atmosphere and I want to create those types of spaces for others to enjoy as well as myself.
I'd just call myself a gamedev. I like to do a little of everything, at least in my solo work. It's fun for me to be able to craft every bit of an experience, to an extent at least. I especially love just making 3D environments with little sounds and ambience everywhere.
I want to ask you about shaders. Do you work at Unity and code them yourself, or do you use ShaderGraph? And also are you using a blender for 3D modeling?
I do work pretty much completely with Unity. I haven't done anything with ShaderGraph, but I'd maybe like to try and learn how it works at some point. I don't code any of my shaders. I get them all from the Unity Asset Store and Github thanks to some amazing developers making them available. I use Unity's ProBuilder for all my modeling. I'd like to use Blender more, though, so I can have more control over textures and because it has a nicer interface. I just need to learn how to do some things like UV mapping.
Do you have your own list of favorites game designers and media artists who are making equal stuff or maybe different but still interesting?
I don't have a list, but some cool people that come to mind that directly inspire me are Tobias Mihura, colorfiction, Moshe Linke, Jessica Harvey, nonoise, and Kitty Horror Show. I also think Nathalie Lawhead, droqen, and Ian MacLarty do a lot of interesting stuff. I take inspiration from a lot of different people, whether or not they match the kind of style that I like in my games.
"I don't code any of my shaders. I get them all from the Unity Asset Store and Github."
Is game design an evolution of cinematography or a completely separate branch? And what drives us as game designers to create new worlds? Why is the real world not enough for us?
I think they're separate things. Though, cinematography is definitely very useful in games since most games represent things on a 2D plane (your screen). Game designers create new worlds for so many different reasons. To imagine something better. To craft a cautionary tale. To just make something that looks aesthetically pleasing or triggers some kind of emotional response. Maybe we just like being gods over our own little worlds. Personally, there's just something special about creating a unique world to explore. It feels like decorating a room in your house but much more involved. It's a space you create and then invite others in to look around and admire.
The thing about the real world is that we can't possibly see all of it - only if we devote our whole lives to it. Video game worlds are less a replacement to the real world, and more of an extension of it based on our collective cultures and experiences. We play video games to get transported somewhere else that can make us appreciate the real world more.
Shane Yach's games: https://tipsheda.itch.io/
Shane Yach's twitter: https://twitter.com/tipsheda
