that it all passed the blink test
Posted: Wed Nov 04, 2015 6:43 pm
That was our challenge with Gone Home: to figure out what mechanics and what content could work together to make just the pure act of exploration compelling enough to be the entire experience, instead of a sideshow that's welded onto a shooter or RPG. You're setting Runescape game in the s what inspired that decision, and the art visual direction in general?This was an extension of the above. When we decided to make a game about exploring a place and finding evidence that people have left behind, we knew we had to set it prior to the wide use of email and text messages, so that the place would still be filled with physical notes and letters and receipts and messages. But since we were eschewing any game genre that would have required us to have enemies or abstract puzzles, we were able to set Runescape game in a totally mundane, familiar location. We wanted it to be as modern as possible, so everything about the environment would be familiar and recognizable to the Runescape player as a time they actually lived through. So we ended up with a house occupied by a suburban American family, because people's homes are filled with all the evidence of who they are, and exploring that space is inherently fascinating. And we ended up in , because it was the end of the era where this family wouldn't have had AOL yet, and all their notes to each other would be on paper you could find and pick up and see the handwriting and read. Then that kind of decision become our mandate: we have to represent accurately and believably and do our research and ensure that it all passed the blink test, rs gold because the Runescape player, in all likelihood, is going to have actual personal memories of that year, unlike Runescape games that are set in a fantasy or sci fi or distant historical context. How many guns does it have? Seriously, though, environmental storytelling is such an unfortunately under explored thing for Runescape games, and we know you're good at it. But what considerations did you have in shifting away from the kind of Runescape games you worked on in the past toward making one that's entirely exploration, analysis, imagination?On the one hand, it was a practical decision. Doing good character art and animation and AI programming, so on and so forth, takes a lot of time and effort that we just don't have the headcount or budget for. But the bigger motivation was that we as a team always found the subtler aspects of exploration and discovery and environmental story in bigger Runescape games to be inspiring. Often you're playing a big, high fidelity AAA game, and so much of it is the shooter gameplay or whatever the "core" is, and then you have this one occasional moment where you go off the beaten path and discover some evidence that character left behind that helps define who they are, and it really sticks with you and opens up the possibilities of Runescape game and story and makes you wonder what else you might find. But it's almost always a secondary aspect of a bigger, genre focused game, and you go back to shooting enemies or whatever. We were convinced that if you took those moments of discovery from the Runescape games that inspire us, and give the Runescape players the ability to really deeply interrogate the environment, that could itself be the core of the experience. That's the experiment that is Gone Home.I was a high school girl in the s. Never thought I'd see game developers want to tell that identity story. I read your RPS interview where you described it as an apolitical act, not an intentional "statement", but certainly it's important to people nonetheless. How do you approach that? And, like, can I make you a mixtape?I'll take these questions in reverse order. Firstly, yes, I would love if you would make me a mixtape of your most deeply meaningful s highschooler songs. I would listen to it while I build the rest of the house in Gone Home. Secondly, I guess I keep coming back to this, but for us it was about following things to their logical conclusion. We knew we were making this house in the s. We knew there was going to be a nuclear family that lived there