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Following the success of Journey, much speculation has surrounded thatgamecompany's next project. Speaking to FamilyGamerTV the firm's Jenova Chen offered a few clues.
"The next game after Journey is like, ok we've done it with strangers on the internet, can this also happen among people who know each other? It's a natural evolution of everything we are doing," said Chen. "Our next game is going to be something that will relate to a wide audience on a human level. It is very exciting to see my own maturing and the team's maturing and I'm curious to see what this next game could be.
"Our goal is always to make games that can move people, that are designed for everybody so the whole family should be able to play it together and that bring people together and really move them," he said. "It feels like the history of the studio and everything we do is slowly heading towards that direction."
Since Journey was released in early 2012, thatgamecompany has been rebuilding its team; many staffers were laid off immediately following the game's completion due to cash-flow issues. But Journey's success has given the company the funds to invest in its next project.
Journey as well as the company's previous games Flow and Flower were all released under contract for PlayStation 3, with the latter coming to Vita via work from Bluepoint Games. But thatgamecompany is now free to develop for multiple platforms.
"It's been almost a year now and we are still in a very pre, pre-production mode," said Chen, who is a co-founder of the developer. "It's always been the pattern of thatgamecompany that we spent 75 percent of time doing R&D and a smaller portion of time on production. When we go for a particular goal we have to do a lot of trial and error. It can feel like you are reaching out in the fog trying to find something."
