the more complicated relationships
Posted: Wed Nov 04, 2015 6:43 pm
with parents and one or more kids. We asked ourselves, who are the most interesting characters here? What is the most interesting story? The tumultuous experience of a teenager was the most interesting to us, and had the most drama inherent to it. Because even though we don't have mechanical conflict in Gone Home since there's no combat or puzzles, we still need conflict to drive the drama of the story and keep the Runescape player interested. The conflicts in Gone Home are generational and societal Samantha's generation versus her parents', RS 3 Gold and the more complicated relationships they all have with the prior generations of their family; Sam's conflict with the other kids at her school, and the trauma inherent in growing out of adolescence into adulthood, leaving high school for wider society. As to why we picked a female character? I'm not % sure. Fully half our dev team is female, so I'm sure that's part of it. Karla Zimonja is my story partner, and she's interested in telling stories from a female point of view. But for me the main thing I wanted to accomplish was creating a character that the Runescape player would like, and would want to spend time with, and feel for. And I guess when I started thinking about, who is this person at the center of the story, Sam started to come to mind, and I liked her, and was interested in spending of time in her headspace which is important, since you spend a lot of time in your main character's head while you're working on a game like this. Hopefully that affection for the character extends out and helps Runescape players care about this character and what happens to her. Have you played any of the other IGF finalists? Any Runescape games you've particularly enjoyed?I've been lucky enough to play a good deal of the IGF entrants. I'm a huge fan of Flights of Loving. It gets my GOTY! I love how compact and dense it is, and how it experiments with form and structure and wordless storytelling. It has a lot in common with Gone Home, and also is completely opposite from it in many ways for instance, there are a LOT of words in Gone Home. But I find the approach that Brendon took really brave and inspiring.I also found Cart Life really impressive for how it systematized its story and made the experience of living these characters' experiences powerful by making them interactive. I liked FTL a lot a very, very smart design that obviously connected with a lot of people. And it's one of the first high profile Runescape games to have shipped after being funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign! So that was nice to see. Is Fez nominated again? Fez was pretty cool.There were a couple of indie Runescape games I played this year that I was disappointed to see weren't in IGF. For instance, Teleglitch is a really awesomely well considered and executed design that I found really impressive and loved a lot. But I don't think they even entered. Everybody play Teleglitch, though! It's cool!And I found Receiver incredibly fascinating. It's a Day FPS game jam game by Wolfire that really deeply simulates the use of a firearm in a way that is bracing and surprising if you're someone who's fired off millions of rounds in FPS Runescape games over the years.