The Game Thing
I mentioned in a previous missive that I spent the majority of my time in 2022 working with Superbrothers A/V on the Given Time expansion for their game JETT: The Far Shore.
Well, today is launch day, seeing the game debuting on Steam, and updating the base game to include the expansion on the Playstation and Epic Games stores respectively. So there’s no better time than now to talk a little about the things that I helped out with on the game. I’ll probably get the chronology all muddled up and entirely overlook a bunch of stuff. It’s been fairly full-on, so some things are likely to fall between the floorboards of my brain in places.
I started out giving playtest notes around a year ago, playing an early build of the game. This by itself was 12 year old Dan’s dream job. That turned relatively quickly into giving notes on narrative. I love talking about stories, just love it. The way they’re structured, the way you can place small elements that build a richer version of the story that exists only inside someone’s head. Love it.
The challenge with arriving mid-way through a story and trying to help steer it in satisfying directions is that there’s a bunch of stuff you can’t do for fear of undermining the story so far, or setting it off in directions that don’t maintain the flavour or intent of what already exists.
Games, it turns out are particularly interesting and challenging. Not only are there limits set on what I already mentioned, but on how much effort, time and resources would go into practically putting any changes into action: Scope. A lot of stuff I got enthusiastic about early on, it turns out was ‘outside of scope’ meaning “yes, Dan, that’s practically possible if we hire extra people, add months to the deadline and sacrifice a bunch of progress that’s already been made.” So, basically “No”.
Keeping changes inside scope meant working with a light touch and attention to detail paid to things that were relatively low-cost in terms of effort. (effort here refers to time, money, brain-space, existing workload and overall benefit to the project)
One of the questions that I asked early on, and ask myself constantly while working on stories was ‘what noise do you want people to make at the end’. I think this is a neat way of trying to remember the humanity in a story. There are good noises a person can make; laughing, sobbing, sighing etc and there are also bad noises that a person can make; confusingly, also laughing, sobbing, sighing etc. The trick is to try and anticipate this and build towards the good kind of noise. There’s a noise that I made while playing the original game that I thought was great.
Once we had the story structure nailed in place, we had to turn our attention to how to make that practically arrive in the player’s brain. This, it turns out was achieved by a combination of dialogue/acting, environmental design, sound design and a layer of atmospheric music that helped flavour everything. In the game, I’ve also got a couple of bits of artwork, alongside a wealth of awesome pieces by the esteemed Dustin Harbin, who has been on board with the game for a long time.
I think my role shifted a little at this point. We needed the sound of a door slamming definitively at one stage that we didn’t have in our audio library. I MacGyver-d together the sound of my garage door (which has an excellent creak), my kitchen door (which is very heavy and shuts with a satisfying clunk) and a big slab of wood falling from height onto my living room carpet (that I very nearly dropped on my feet and my audio recorder).
This little audio adventure led me to working up a bunch of little audio snippets that appear in the game. That led to me helping decide what tracks by scntfc, the game’s excellent composer would go where, how they might need to be adjusted and/or implemented. Incidentally, the soundtrack will be out soon and even though I’ve listened to those tracks almost every day for a year, I’m still not sick of it. High praise.
We also figured out that by sitting on a video call with Craig D (Mr. Superbrother) Adams, we could essentially increase our collective mental capacity, using my brain as a spare brain to assist with decision-making, morale and diverse perspectives. This was simultaneously incredibly fun and incredibly exhausting at times.
As the project and my familiarity with it progressed, there was a period of a couple of weeks while Craig was away that I sat in the driving seat. Nothing went wrong! That was a relief.
The majority of my time in recent months has been spent editing trailers, learning about the back-end intricacies of game publishing platforms and dealing with the slow tumbling to dust of social media as we know it.
It’s been a blast. I’m really proud of what we put together and although it’s a cliche, the real treasure really were the friends we made along the way.
On one of our recent calls, we got sidetracked into speculating about the riotous lives of the foley artists who made the original Scooby Doo cartoon. Why? Who knows, but it was a fun chat. The next day, I quickly made the following, one of the stupidest things I’ve ever made.
Apologies for the bad accents.
So anyway, being a games creative-producer-type has been a lot of fun, and I’d like to do more of it.