One of the greatest things about the indie gaming scene is that so many great ideas are given life. Broken Window Studios, developer of the upcoming title Grave are presenting a surreal world where nightfall brings terror. We at Throwing Digital Sheep caught up with Tristan Moore to speak about the game as well as his experience at being a developer.
1. How did you get into game development? How did the team come together?
I wanted to be a game dev since I was a really young kid, about 11 years old when I played Silent Hill and Metal Gear Solid. I actually didn’t do much with it until I was in college, when I found a community college that was instructing 3D graphics. I ended up going to a school dedicated to game programs. I learned a good set of skills for 3D modelling and animation, which allowed me to get a few contract jobs and eventually a job in test.
From there, I went to working as a designer for Redacted Studios, working on Afro Samurai 2. I worked my way up quickly and taught myself programming, and I was starting to feel the urge to work on my own projects, since that was what I wanted to since I was little. I got married to my wife Aby in 2013 and we had worked on a small game project together with a few friends, which was called Stygian Shade. I’d always wanted to see if there was a way we could do something bigger with it, so in my spare time I decided to polish up the game. We put out every version of the game to play for free, and what really spurred me on was the fact that people were recording YouTube videos and really getting freaked out while playing it. I spent several months planning what we would do to set up crowd funding and in March 2014 we pulled the trigger.
2. Can you give our readers who are not in the know, a brief overview of Grave?
Grave is an open world surrealist horror game where light is your only weapon, set in a constantly changing world. The game begins with your death in a home invasion, and you follow your killer into a strange wasteland from which it may not be possible to escape. You have to use light based weapons to survive, which can be challenging because not every creature reacts to light the same way. When we say a “constantly change world,” we mean that world composition shifts and changes during gameplay, allowing levels to change during play, reshaping the landscape. The game is coming out on Steam, PC, Mac, Linux, PS4 and Xbox One and is currently slated for release in 2016.
3. What do you think are the main benefits of being an indie developer over working at with a larger organisation?
Really, it comes down to creative control. At a large company, you’re almost never going to be able to propose a game concept and build it the way you see fit; there’s just too much money involved. A handful of people at the top make those kinds of decisions, and sometimes they aren’t very good at their jobs. Large companies make you pay your dues for a really long time, and it usually isn’t possible to work your way up to that position. That’s why a lot of key people at big studios go and start their own companies before they really get to do what they want. Indie development is kind of a short cut to that step. The upside is you can make your own decisions and build the game you want. The downside is that you have to do it with very few resources, and nobody is there to catch you if you fall.
4. With Grave, what was your process? What inspired you?
I think there’s a lot of inspirations that come about for things like this, because it’s large collection of ideas that gestate of a long period of time. I’d been reading the Dark Tower series of games by Stephen King and was really impressed with the dramatic sense of loneliness. When I actually came up with the core idea for the game, I was standing on the roof of the Culver City hotel during a games event, and I was thinking about how big professional events can seem really isolating, even when you’re surrounded by people you respect. I had this idea of a game where you are on a journey through a strange wasteland, where you feel totally alone but as night starts to creep in you’re surrounded by creatures with ambiguous intentions.
I took this really vague idea of the game about a lonely, threatening journey, and we made a prototype of it that eventually turned into Grave. The original game was just moving through a creepy western environment with very little happening, except that at night it gets dark and these weird monsters come out. We made 5 complete versions nearly from scratch, improving the idea each time and exploring what could push it in different directions. It took us a solid year of workshopping before we found the right thing for the Kickstarter. What ultimately made us decide to do it “for real” was we put all of our experiments online for people to play, and saw that it was actually really working on quite a few people. I don’t think the versions are around anymore, but you can find some videos of them by looking for Stygian shade and Grave videos from 2013.
5. If you could only play one game for the rest of your life, what would it be?
To be honest, I’d want a copy of Unity or Unreal rather than a game if I had to choose. I’m a designer/artist/programmer, so if I was stranded on a proverbial “desert island” with a PC I’d like to make my own game and play THAT for the rest of my life. Hopefully, someone would be able to play it before I die!
6. Being a Kickstarter campaign, would you advise budding developers to go
down the same route?
A few people have asked me in the past if they should go the Kickstarter route, and I have to say it depends. Kickstarter comes with it a lot of risk before, and a lot of responsibility after. We went with Kickstarter because we make 3D games with good production value, and that’s just not easy to do by one person working in a basement. We needed to be able to kick off production with a good number of people working in tandem; if you don’t need a lot of resources, it’s not going to be as crucial.
You also have to be willing to recognize your strengths and weaknesses. If you’re making a small mobile game, it’s probably not going to do well on Kickstarter. If nobody knows about or cares about your game before it launches on Kickstarter, you’re going to have a VERY hard time, and even if you do have a following, you will still have to push yourself harder than you thought possible to get the exposure you need. If you’re a small group or one person, that may be daunting.
7. How does it feel seeing world renown gamers such as PewDiePie play Grave?
This is going to sound awful, but the first time PewDiePie played Grave, I didn’t actually know who he was. Someone told us that they’d seen him play the game in a collection of his VR games and I assumed that they were mistaken, because he sounded like he had a lot of followers and I’d never seen anything about it. I looked it up and, sure enough, PewDiePie played one of the earlier versions of Grave when it was super broken and strange. It was actually the moment I realized we should consider doing a Kickstarter; I hadn’t realized the game had gotten that far because I was so unaware of the scene for YouTube and Twitch.
I did a ton of research on people who play games online as we ramped up to the Kickstarter, and it was slow going to attract their attention. When Markiplier played Grave, it was the Thursday before the Kickstarter ended on Sunday and we were about $7,000 short. After he played, a bunch of others started playing too and we surpassed our goal by Friday. It was a
really thrilling experience to see these people throw their big personalities into playing the game and actually say they wanted to play it more. It’s really validating.
8. What would you say is the hardest part of the development process?
For me, it’s probably scheduling. I know I’m not alone in this, but it’s just difficult to know how long something is going to take. Game development is a combination of tons of small tasks that have to be completed before the whole picture starts to appear, and usually experimentation produce better results. I always find that the game is getting better while taking longer. Had I made the game we’d originally intended and released it on schedule, it would be far inferior to what it is going to be now. I guess that’s why so many AAA games get sequels!
9. When developing a game, are you inspired by titles that are already out there? If yes, what?
I’m inspired by everything and I try to play as much as I can. For Grave, I was really inspired by Dear Esther and Slender: The Arrival. I’ve also been inspired by Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Dark Souls, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Outlast, and others, but for different reasons. My usual design process is to look at games that I think are really interesting in some way, but fall short of their potential. I then figure out what it is that I really liked about that experience and how I could take that element and re-purpose it or rearrange it to get a better or more unique result. I think that any game designer worth their salt should have played a little bit of everything. I’ve gotten inspiration from PlantsVs. Zombies, so you never know what might help you solve a problem.
- What do you see as the future for you/indie developers as a whole?
I think that’s a very open question, because there isn’t one type of indie developer. Lots of people have very different goals and that’s how it should be. I think for us and developers like us, we want to grow our development and continue to build more ambitious games. I think a lot of AAA studios started out as “indie” in the way we’d define it, only their success led them to build huge blockbusters. The trick is to be able to do that while maintaining your artistic integrity.
Are you as excited for Grave as we are? Let us know in the comments, at TDSUK_TWEETS or on Facebook.