freesphere

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We think it's about time we introduced everyone to our new project, Necropolis Suite, set in 1886 London.

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Letting Go Of Tether

After 4 years of burnouts, failed funding attempts, re-designs & thousands of man-hours across two different development teams, its time to put Tether to the back of my mind.

Ultimately when I started out on this journey with a group of friends to make the game a reality I had an idea on how to execute elements of the game, but not the whole project. This in hindsight was a terrible decision - to start making the game before I could envision gameplay & narrative working in unison.

One thing I have personally wrestled with was the theme of the game, motherhood and the effects of leaving a child to do a long-distance job. Obviously, I am not a female or a Mother and have only recently become a parent for the first time. All of these elements put me at an instant disadvantage to truly understand what that feeling must be like especially when your child is having problems of there own. I am not afraid to admit I got stuck inside my own head for far too long with these elements and trying to find ways for them all to fit together. 

Even though all my conversations with team members throughout the years, I was never truly happy with what I was producing and I never felt like I was doing the characters or the themes the justice they deserved.

I mentioned previously about gameplay and narrative working in unison complementing each other being a core goal - it likely is for most teams in 2020, nothing new here. In the search for how to compliment the narrative we went from first-person horror to immersive sim and ended on a Death Stranding style game making your away across Mars surface, and we still never found a formula I was 100% happy with. 

We did this all this based on feedback (mostly from publishers) from our previous prototype, rather than drilling down into the feedback and refining our design, I ripped it up, took elements that did work & redesigned the core experience. This was dumb of me. It put incredible strain on my friends and myself as we crunched away for 9 months build something new from the ground up to be ready for the next pitching event.

The truth is we were much closer to our goals with the original version we prototyped in 2017 - hindsight is a wonderful thing.  

The multiple burnouts along the way also played into the mind fuck I got myself into with the project. Working a day job then working till 1-2 am then getting up at work for 7 am put my body under incredible strain. It's only recently I have learnt the importance of self-preservation and a healthy working balance after taking myself to the brink. When you're incredibly passionate and attached to a project it’s absurd the lengths we'll put ourselves through to see it succeed.

Learning to let go of something you love has been a truly insightful process, one that I wouldn't change because of the life lessons I have learnt, the friends, people it has introduced me too and finally the opportunities it has afforded me.

If there is a message to other inexperienced indies behind this rambling blog post (ironic really) it's to trust your instincts, listen to your team and ignore external influences from the realms of Twitter about what’s hip to put in your game.

For anyone interested you can download the first prototype that we pitched to publishers in 2018 from Itch in the link below.

https://freesphere.itch.io/tether-prototype-01

To all the team members over the years that read this, thank you for all your efforts over the years, your friendship to me (and each other) & dedication to the project are testaments to what amazing people you all are.

- Mark Gregory (@markgregory_)

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The Difference Between A Jump Scare And Crafting Dread.

As a developer with a passion for horror I have been wanting to make a blog post series talking about my personal game-design philosophy. In this post I will discuss the difference between a jump scare and creating dread.

So, let’s start out with a definition of both the terms that are important here:

Scare: To frighten, to strike with sudden fear, to alarm.

Dread: Anticipate with great apprehension or fear.

Looking at both of those definitions, we can say that a scare is a temporary feeling when you are made aware of something unexpected. Let’s take a look into some games of the past to get a good feeling of what has been scary.

One of my favorite examples is the famous dog scene in Resident Evil. When the player reached the hallway on the ground floor, a dog jumps through a window in front of the camera, something that startled most players.

Why did the player get startled when this happened? Because up until this point the player has never encountered a dog. Sure the player saw them earlier in the game through a cinematic, but the player knew they would not be interacting with the dog at that moment. However, when the dog jumps through the window, the intent is for the player to panic. No other windows had been broken until this point, and in all likeliness this thought had never really entered the player’s head. The camera placement here and the lack of control for that half a second really amplify’s the scare. Add all this together and this scene broke all the rules that had been subconsciously established in the player’s head up until this point.

If the player feels comfortable, then break what they ‘know’ about the game.

However, if you keep breaking the rules and re-use a jump scare too often, you risk losing the tension you have created. As a result, players will learn what the triggers are and when to expect the next scare – ‘earn your jump scares‘. It’s interesting to see that in the remastering of Resident Evil, the dog scene was removed as players knew when to expect it, this created a sense of tension as every corridor you went down you expected it to happen – it never did.

Let’s open the door into another game, a more recent one, Soma. This game is masterful in its execution of building dread. While this game does not have much use for jump scares, it uses tension which levers anxiety and this builds into creating dread within the player.

Your imagination is a more powerful tool than anything any developer can use. This is what makes Soma so impactful and what makes it so widely talked about as one of the scariest games of all time.

Frictional Games uses a mixtures sounds, musical and visual distortions to build anxiety within the player without being over the top. It’s not until a good hour into the game that you even encounter something that can harm you. The player does not know what an enemy looks like, when it’s going to show up, or what it does but they do know what it sounds like and the after effects of a confrontation with it. The later only amplifies the tension thus creating dread. If you only give the player limited information about a monster and let there minds fill in the blanks this will be 100% more terrifying to the player.

So, the longer we don’t show an enemy, the more time it gives the player to ‘create’ their own enemy from the depths of their imagination, which believe me, can often be more horrifying than any creature made by developers. The idea of this technique being that the player will begin to ‘see‘ things in the darkness and build up that ever important tension themselves.

Will players remember a game strictly consisting of just jump scares? Probably not. After-all it’s pretty simple to get a cheap scare out of players when they don’t know what’s around the corner or behind the next door, but, does for me that doesn’t leave a lasting impression on the player.

What does interest me is if we can build up fear and tension using a range of techniques (audio is king here) then the scare has more of a lasting impact. If we can create lasting moments of tension we can let the players imagination do a lot of the heavy lifting for us and we as developers can fill in the edges of that. When the imagination takes over the possibilities are limitless.

- Mark Gregory (@markgregory_)

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My Thoughts About; Florence.

Florence, is an interesting game because of many reasons, but what’s impressed me the most is that it has managed to reach the holy grail of game design - letting your game mechanics tell the story.

I first heard of Florence on the Games Industry dot biz podcast, on the show they were discussing how mobile games should be looking into narrative experiences more thoughtfully and discussing whether Florence, is even a video game at all. In my opinion, it is very much a video game, as it requires the player to input into the mobile device too progress the story, therefore it’s a game. We’re at the point now with so many different platforms we can afford to take risks to stand out, and Florence, very much does that.

The game itself is very short, in fact, I think I finished it in around 25 minutes but that doesn’t detract from the experience and I believe the price point is fair for an experience of this quality. When a game connects with you on an emotional level in my eyes it moves beyond the realms of being a game, it becomes an experience like The Last of Us or Spec Ops: The Line.

We meet Florence in a difficult period in her life, she is bored, craving adventure and bursting with suppressed creativity. The mechanics & pacing in the opening chapter translate this perfectly having you solve simple puzzles to show mundane her day job is, the awkward conversations with overzealous parents who always think they know what you need, when you need it and how you need it – sometimes they can be right, and always only want what’s best for you. I think I am suppressing some things here myself. 

Naturally, Florence meets a man (Krish) who she falls head over heels for, this is the part that really got me. At first the conversation puzzles were longer and more drawn out to signify how awkward it is on a first date but as we grow into conversations and we let down our barriers once we know we like someone conversation just flows, the game shows us this by making the conversation puzzles easier, in turn, speeds up the conversation. It’s mechanical perfection.

We don’t know that this is Florence’s first time loving someone, but from the brief backstory we got in the first chapter, we can assume it is. I think it’s very rare in life that you stay with your first love forever, the game shows that as Florence’s relationship deteriorates by changing up the visuals and colours to indicate this.

One particular puzzle stands out that I actually had to have my wife do for me as I couldn’t find the patience to finish it, it was a picture of Florence & Krish arms wrapped around each other with expressions of anguish etched across their faces.

In this puzzle mechanically the game is testing you and your patience as when you place a picture piece in place it pulls apart. On a personal level, this really stuck with me after being in a 7-year relationship that ultimately went nowhere but we were both too scared to end as we still cared for each other. Maybe subconsciously I knew what was coming so I refused to partake in it OR I am just crap at puzzles!

Overall Florence is the perfect short form narratively driven mobile experience of which I hope to see lots more of in the future.

- Mark Gregory (@markgregory_)