Istanbul is not only a city of expats, but a city of expats to be. For many, Istanbul is a gateway to a wider world. The feeling of detachment and wanderlust, so typical of the expat experience, is a familiar feeling for many of the soulful or just curious who have called this city home.
Talha Kaya is a curious young Istanbullu I met not long before he started his own expat life. Talha is, among many things, a developer of games. That is what brought us together on that day and in that context we exchanged our stories. If there is an example of “expat life in a nutshell”, then surely two strangers going in different directions having a brief chat over coffee about a subject of mutual interest is that nutshelled example. The expat experience is often less about your story than it is about the stories of people you meet along your way.
When we met, Talha was working to bring to life a vision for a game centered on discovery and exploration. Independently published, Soul Searching is, in its way, a game about travel, discovery, and encounters. While not the first game to focus on these objectives, nor is it for that matter a game intended to make a game of “expatting” it up, it’s striking how much it reflects the life of the expat and that sense of subdued wonder that hides beneath the unimpressed veneer the most jaded of us possess.
Talha is a co-founder of Kayabros, an indie game studio, and now resides and works on mobile games in Barcelona. He recently sat down with Yabangee to talk a bit about his life and his work.
What were your first experiences with gaming?
I grew up in Istanbul, where we had a computer from an early age. I watched my older brother play lots of games, but I was kind of scared to play them myself. At some point I got into Fifa 99, and I loved playing it. From then on games were not as scary and mysterious, and I started getting into games for what they actually are, playful experiences, rather than something scary and judgmental.
What inspired you to start your own studio, Kayabros?
Me and my brother Tarık were always creative. When you’re a child it’s natural. You create stories, you make up game rules, you improvise all kinds of things just to have a little bit more fun. I think that kind of playful approach is in every kid, but I feel like we never lost that connection. We just went on to create more elegant and complicated things as we grew up. We made our own card games inspired by the Pokemon card game. We learned programming and we started making video games. So at some point it only felt natural to start putting the Kayabros logo at the opening of our projects.
What were some of the most difficult challenges you’ve faced along this career path?
The challenges are basically things, like our day jobs in a rapidly changing, mostly failing industry; sometimes health problems in the family; sometimes depression; the usual stuff. One reason we wanted to leave Turkey for a while was that it was getting more and more depressing to live there. There was the reborn terror problem around the time we were preparing to leave, and right after we left there was a coup attempt in Turkey which made things worse. We are trying to be hopeful, and looking forward to a day Turkey will be peaceful again. We have our parents and lots of loved ones in Turkey, so it only makes sense that we want to go back to our homeland at some point.
You’ve left Istanbul and now live in Barcelona. Your most recent game is entitled “Soul Searching” and is about sailing away from your homeland on a raft. Can you share a bit about how the premise of the game developed?
Soul Searching has two big inspirations for its main theme. The biggest one is The Earthsea series, especially the first book, The Wizard of Earthsea. The challenging journey on sea, the magic, the dragons, all sorts of world building ideas came from there. The other big inspiration is Life of Pi. The movie had stunning visuals and also very fitting themes for what I wanted to do. After I watched the movie, something clicked that I really wanted to make a game about leaving where your parents live to go out and explore. If you stay in one place, you are less likely to grow up as a person. There is something about going from island to island on your own that clicks with people, who are rarely happy about where they are in life. So Soul Searching started as a project about growing up, and more literally, leaving your parents’ home to start your own life. Then my life took a funny turn and I actually left my homeland, albeit not with a raft, but with a plane where peanuts were very expensive.
Soul Searching seems like a rather personal project. How autobiographical is it?
I try not to make things too autobiographical, not because I like to hide, but because if I made a game that was literally about my life, it would be quite boring. I live a normal life; I’m married; I live in an apartment; I have a university degree; I have a full time job at a game company. Can you imagine playing a game where you wake up and fry some eggs for your wife and pet your cat and write code? That said, I don’t like to hold back on autobiographical themes in my games. When you try to create an honest art piece, a lot of your personality and your taste and your life experience sweeps into what you are making. That’s what makes it honest. That’s what motivates me to continue working on a project. The fact that it is so “me” makes me feel like I have to finish it and in good condition. It becomes a personal burden. So I put a lot of my own thoughts and feelings and unique tastes into my games, so that it will be worth my time to make it, and hopefully a player’s time if they want to get to know me.
That’s a general answer, but pretty much applicable to Soul Searching. In Soul Searching, in order to keep the project interesting for me to work on, I let myself loose on the narrative. I filled the world with little people talking about their irrelevant daily troubles. It would be late at night and I’d be pissed about something and I’d begin writing about whatever is in my mind in a way that could hide in the game world. In a way, the game felt like a journal where I could put any thought I have. That is why the narrative in Soul Searching kind of feels chaotic. It’s because my process was chaotic. There were no plans. I didn’t know what to do with the ending until a few weeks before actually implementing the ending. I’d have main story points and I’d just go from there. That is just how I like to work, and at that time, the only way I could work. I was graduating from university, finding a job, buying a house, getting married, and all in chaotic and confusing but beautiful Istanbul, moving to a new country, fitting into a full time job. All of these happened while I was in the process of making Soul Searching. And I believe you can feel it all in the game.
What do you think Soul Searching offers players? Was there a particular audience you had in mind when you were designing it?
I didn’t really have an audience in mind. I made the game for myself. It offers honesty to players. It offers my process of creating it, and my taste in music, in various things. It offers the feeling of loneliness out in a vast sea. It offers NPCs with their own stories instead of them trying to be a part of your story. It offers a magical world where you can interact with dragons. But it’s all made in a humble setting where you cause no violence, but just try to survive through challenges.
Do you think being an expat or being someone who’s never left their native country changes the way players experience a game about leaving one’s homeland and going out into the unknown?
I am not sure. As of now most players who played the game are Turkish, so I believe it’s offered something valuable to them. I designed the game to be a personal journey rather than a political or a geographical one, so I was very glad to see, in various Youtube comment sections, that people from all over the world could connect with the game. I felt like I did something good, you know? I don’t know why I feel that way though.
I developed the game in both Turkish and English, so it was easy for Turkish people to get into the game, and I guess it was exciting for some Turkish people to experience a game where the developer was trying to create a personal connection, in their own language. That’s kind of rare.
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For more information, be sure to keep up with Kayabros.
Images courtesy of Talha.
