SH3 skillfully navigated expectations, retained the bleak, atmospheric, stuck-in-a-nightmare quality of the original, and expanded on the lore of the town without taking anything away from it. That’s thanks in no small part to the English text that appears in the game, in the form of both protagonist Heather Mason’s inner thoughts and the puzzles, documents, and poems that appear throughout it.

While Jeremy Blaustein is credited as the English Supervisor/Translator and directed the motion capture and voice recording sessions for Silent Hill 3, Nora Stevens Heath is responsible for the translation of the song lyrics and all the nonvoiced text in the game, like puzzles and poems (despite what the game’s instruction manual and credits say). During the time the game was being localized, she worked for Wordbox Inc., Blaustein’s international translation company that specialized in games.

Silent Hill 3 celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, and we thought that was the perfect excuse to sit down with Ms. Heath to discuss her work on the game as well as a translation career that spans a variety of different mediums, including games, anime, and comics.

ROH: Thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview. It’s such a pleasure to speak with you!

Nora: Likewise! Thanks for inviting me.

ROH: You’ve enjoyed a wide-ranging career that includes working on television shows, comic books, short stories, video games, medical journal articles, and technical documentation, among others. Please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself.

Nora: I’m a full-time freelance Japanese-English translator based in Michigan. After earning my BAs in Japanese and in linguistics from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, I dove right into translation work; though I was in-house at first, I’ve been entirely freelance for twenty years now. These days the bulk of my work is in video games and anime, with the occasional foray into translating product descriptions and the like for a few select clients in the consumer-goods industry. I consider myself one of the luckiest people on earth to be able to do what I love and get paid for it. In my spare time, I read, garden (when the weather allows), dabble in video games, and travel—especially to Japan.

ROH: How did you get into localization?

Nora: I had the first inklings of interest in the field back when I was in the third grade or so, on a visit to the Ontario Science Centre. I picked out a book of origami and was not only intrigued by the strangely translated English, but also curious about what the authors must have meant to say in Japanese. This put me on the road to learning Japanese and, later, becoming a translator. I would watch the credits of my favorite SNES games (Final Fantasy II in particular, translation warts and all) and tell myself, My name will be in there someday.

ROH: How did you get the job doing the translation work for Silent Hill 3?

Nora: I was working as a full-time in-house translator at a brake-pad company and just starting to look into the feasibility of going freelance. Jeremy Blaustein had posted a call for translators on an industry mailing list, to which I responded. After working with him on another title (a soccer game which may never have been released in the States), I completed a trial for SH3 and was given the job on the basis of my puzzle translations. (And I quit my in-house job not long after.)

ROH: Were you familiar with the series or had you played any of the previous games before you began work on SH3?

Nora: You know, I don’t think so. I feel like I got around to playing SH2 around the time I was working on SH3, but I don’t think I was familiar with the series at that time.

ROH: Can you break down what the translation process was like for SH3?

Nora: I would receive Excel spreadsheets with separate columns for the speaker name or label (such as “book” or “letter”), the Japanese text, and the English translation. I was also lucky to have had a ton of comments from the dev team that provided some extra context or background info to help inform my translation choices.

ROH: Heather’s inner monologue is a lot sassier than those featured in the previous two games. Was that just how the Japanese text was written or was some of it the result of your own artistic interpretation?

Nora: I came to this project with a fresh eye/ear, having so little experience with the previous games in the series. That certainly contributed to Heather’s unique voice. Additionally, I was young enough at the time that my own snarky-teen-girl years were still fairly fresh in my memory. Finally, it’s important to me to capture authentic dialogue in my translations, for these characters to say things that actual people would say in natural-sounding ways; I feel like Heather’s English dialogue captures her personality without going overboard (say, into “Valley girl” territory) or straying far from the original Japanese.

ROH: Can you explain the term ‘Flavor text’ and what it’s meant to describe?

Nora: Flavor text is the player’s reward for pressing the Examine button next to all kinds of random stuff. Sometimes it’s as boring as “There’s nothing that looks useful in the cardboard box,” sometimes it’s an intriguing peek into the player character’s thoughts and memories. A lot of times, especially in games like SH3, it provides clues about what to do next. You could probably do without most flavor text (at least the first two varieties), but it really does add flavor to a game.

ROH: What part of the translation process, in general, do you find to be the most challenging, and what part of the SH3 translation was the hardest for you?

Nora: This is less of an issue nowadays, but I’d say having to be mindful of text and dialogue length. Often video games have only so much room for text (especially in on-screen graphics), and it can be a challenge twisting English into that limited space. Video subtitles should be readable in the time it takes for the speaker to finish their line; spoken game text needs to be about the same length in both languages.

My biggest challenge for SH3 in particular was definitely the song lyrics. Though I’d translated plenty of songs for fun before, this was my first time doing so for profit—and they had to be singable, which is an entirely new layer of challenge. I worked really hard on those, tweaking and retweaking them to what was essentially karaoke versions of the songs, and hearing the finished versions performed with proper vocals moved me to tears.

ROH: During the time the game was being localized, you worked for Wordbox Inc., Jeremy Blaustein’s international translation company. Do you have any fun anecdotes of working with him on SH3?

Nora: It was a pretty straightforward process—receive the Japanese, submit the English—without much interaction otherwise. I will say I particularly enjoyed working on the song lyrics, challenging though they were, and all those arcane puzzles.

ROH: In Silent Hill 3, some of the most emotionally compelling text in the game comes from the diary and notebook entries of Harry Mason, the protagonist Heather’s father. These entries only appear as text in the game and are never spoken aloud. Can you talk a bit about what the translation process was like for those?

Nora: Honestly, as someone with no SH1 experience, it was just a straightforward translation of the Japanese. I’m glad it’s considered emotionally compelling, though—that means I did my job.

ROH: We realize it’s been almost 20 years now, but are you able to confirm whether scenario writer Hiroyuki Owaku wrote the original texts for Harry’s diary and notebook or were they written by someone else?

Nora: I have no way of knowing who wrote what text in the script, but considering how careful the writers were to honor continuity and other aspects that were nods to SH1, I wouldn’t be surprised if they earmarked that text to be written with special care.

ROH: Silent Hill 3 will be celebrating its 20th anniversary on August 5th of this year. It’s considered to be one of the best sequels ever and is part of a series that has defined for so many what horror is, not just in video games, but in any medium. Do you have anything you’d like to say to all the fans out there who have enjoyed your work over the years?

Nora: I’m truly honored and deeply grateful. This was my first major game title, and I think at the time I had no idea how big it really was or could wind up being. I’m happy and proud to have contributed in some small way to SH3 in particular and to the Silent Hill series legacy in general, and a little in awe that folks are still interested in hearing about my role all these years later.

ROH: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. It was such a pleasure talking with you!

Nora: The pleasure is mine! Thank you again for the opportunity.

Special thanks to the lovely Nora Stevens Heath for graciously taking the time to be interviewed. You can visit her translation page here.

The post Interview with Silent Hill 3 English Translator Nora Stevens Heath (Exclusive)  appeared first on Rely on Horror.

We recently sat down with Producer Yutaka Fukaya and Director Makoto Shibata to discuss their work on the game, its inspirations in Japanese horror, bringing the game to the west for the first time, and more.

ROH: Hello, Fukaya-san and Shibata-san. Thank you for accepting our request for an interview! For starters, why did you choose to remaster Fatal Frame 4: Mask Of The Lunar Eclipse?

Yutaka Fukaya: When we released the remastered version of FATAL FRAME: Maiden of Black Water in 2021, it thankfully caught the attention of many people and we received a wide range of feedback. From this, we were able to feel that there are people all over the world who would like to see more games in the series released, and we wanted those who first discovered the FATAL FRAME series through “Maiden of Black Water” to further experience the allure of Japanese-style horror. We then decided to remaster “Mask of the Lunar Eclipse,” which received a particularly large number of requests for a remaster.

ROH: As Producer and Director on the remaster, what do you feel the core Fatal Fame experience is, and what elements did you feel were essential to retain when remaking Mask Of The Lunar Eclipse?

Yutaka Fukaya: We felt that having a fear that appeals to the imagination was essential. Ghosts are scarier before they appear rather than after. Creating an atmosphere by various means in which a ghost might appear is a distinctive feature of this title. In the remaster, we kept the same atmosphere but made it more vivid.

ROH: This is the first time that Mask Of The Lunar Eclipse has officially been released in the west. The game was originally released on the Wii in 2008 but never saw a release outside of Japan. Did you take western players into consideration when developing the remaster?

Yutaka Fukaya: Yes, of course. Our desire to bring this game to as many people as possible is reflected in all the regions where it will be released and the variety of platforms it will be available on. We are especially pleased to be able to offer this game to those who did not have the opportunity to play the original version.

ROH: There is a lot more competition in the video game horror genre these days. What separates Fatal Frame from its competitors?

Yutaka Fukaya: I mentioned earlier that this is a horror game that deals with a fear that appeals to the imagination, but I think the camera-based battles sets this series apart from others. The tension of capturing the spirits that appear at the very last possible moment and photographing them is something that is not found in other games.

ROH: What are some of the improvements players can look forward to in the remaster that perhaps haven’t been revealed to the public yet?

Makoto Shibata: An additional element is that the list is filled by photographing the Hozuki dolls hidden in each room, so we made it easier to understand collection elements for the player.

ROH: What does horror mean to you and how can games express horror in a way other mediums cannot?

Makoto Shibata: Horror is, in the extreme sense, thinking about death. It may not be immediate death, but rather the presence of death or the poesie of death. They cannot be seen, but everyone feels them at certain moments. Games are an interactive medium. You have to navigate through the game and experience it for yourself. I think that through graphics, sound, touch, and interaction, you can experience a sense of the unseen signs of death.

ROH: The protagonists in the Fatal Frame games are often young, vulnerable characters with little means of defense. How do you feel these characteristics help elevate horror in the series in general and in Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, specifically?

Makoto Shibata: In a story about ghosts, physical attacks using guns and swords are not effective. In order for the ghost to disappear and for the root cause to be resolved, it is necessary to look closely at the circumstances of the person at the source of the tragedy and sympathize with them. Therefore, in this series, the protagonist is a person who is physically weak and has emotions close to the ghost’s source of tragedy.

In “FATAL FRAME: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse,” the three protagonists are trying to recover their memories of the “lost day” as they approach the source of their tragedy. Each person recalls memories of a different aspect of a single incident. I think players will find that these elements also add to the horror.

ROH: Eastern settings are at the heart of Fatal Frame and each entry in the series focuses on very specific elements of Eastern culture. Why do feel these elements are so important to the series?

Makoto Shibata: This is because I am trying to create what I find most terrifying. Inevitably, there are elements that are familiar and native to Japan. I believe that by going through what I understand through my senses, I can create something that can be sympathized with and reach people from other cultures.

ROH: What are some of your own fears, and have any of them been incorporated into the game?

Makoto Shibata: As for what I find more horrifying, in the series it is incorporated into the circumstances of the final boss and the rituals. For example, in “Fatal Frame III: The Tormented” it was about the pain of surviving the death of a loved one. At its end, there is a message that the dead live on as long as the survivors continue to remember them. In “FATAL FRAME: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse,” the theme was the fear of losing one’s memory and not being able to recall important memories.

ROH: In addition to Mask Of The Lunar Eclipse, last year Koei Tecmo also released a remaster of Fatal Frame: Maiden Of Black Water. Are there any future developments in the series that fans can look forward to?

Yutaka Fukaya: We can’t make any definite promises here about future developments, but if through the release of “Mask of the Lunar Eclipse” we find that many of you are looking forward to more from the series, we may be able to meet that interest. Please pick up and enjoy this game and join us in getting everyone excited about the FATAL FRAME series!

We would like to thank Fukaya-san and Shibata-san for taking the time to let us interview them. In addition to our interview, you can also view a special message from the game’s producer here and listen to developer commentary as they play through part of the “Rogetsu Hall” stage.

Playasia is currently offering pre-orders on physical copies of the game for PS4 and Switch. The site says each version listed under the “ASIA” region “Works on all systems sold worldwide” and that “a correct regional account may be required for online features.” The audio is in Japanese and subtitles are in English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese. A physical edition for PS5 was previously available to preorder through Playasia but has since been canceled, unfortunately.

There’s a comprehensive breakdown of all the different physical versions as well as where to pre-order them on the Fatal Frame subreddit.

Fatal Frame 4: Mask of The Lunar Eclipse will be available digitally for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows PC via Steam worldwide on March 9th, 2023.

The post Fatal Frame 4: Mask Of The Lunar Eclipse – Developer Interview appeared first on Rely on Horror.

In anticipation of the Dead Space remake coming out later this month, we sat down with two of the lead developers on the project to get some insight into what kinds of approaches they took while creating the remake and the future of the franchise going forward.

We chatted with Joel MacMillan, the Realization Director of the game, as well as Jo Berry, the Senior Game Writer for the project at Motive Studio, and had an enlightening discussion with them about the remake and the horror genre in general.

ROH: Hello and thanks for speaking with us about the project! Can you talk about your roles and duties on the Dead Space remake?

Joel: I’m the realization director on Dead Space remake, which is a new title for our studio. My previous experience has been in cinematics, and I previously worked on things like some of the more recent Star Wars games as a cinematic director. The way I’ve approached this project is similar to some of the things I’ve done in the past, except for, as most Dead Space players know, the cinematics are almost all done in-game or in-engine, so my take on the role here is essentially an in-world cinematic director. I work with the VFX, lighting, and other types of artists to put narrative moments together.

Jo: My official role is Senior Game Writer, so I’m responsible for the script. Since Dead Space already has an established story, a lot of what I’m doing is updating the script for Isaac to be a speaking character, including revisions to conversations and scenes as well as updating the audio logs, text logs, journals, item descriptions, and generally anything that involves text.

Joel: She’s also our native expert on Dead Space lore as well. She knows all the details of the stories from every piece of Dead Space media and has it all sorted out and organized in her head, so she’s been a great resource as we’ve worked on this project!

ROH: Can you speak more about being a writer on a remake that already has an existing script? Is it treated like a film script where every shot and action needs to be updated or are the changes on the writing side mostly related to dialogue?

Jo: This is a full revamp of the script, since having Isaac speak changes the dynamic of every scene and conversation that he’s a part of. One of the other goals was to bring in pieces of lore from the surrounding series and make it feel like one consistent piece of storytelling. There’s also a lot of great info in the post-game text logs, and we figured, since we know this info won’t show up in Dead Space 2 or 3, let’s work those into the story now. There were some overall character dynamics that needed to change and what we felt like were some missed opportunities from the original game, meaning things that they just weren’t able to implement into the story or scenes because the game development technology wasn’t quite able to support it back then.

Joel: We also wanted to make sure that the core structure of the game and the story remained intact. Since we’re fans of the original, we were very mindful of not just changing things for the sake of changing things or just to make them different. We had a strict process for determining what would be changed on the basis of making sure it would actually make the experience better than what was done in the original. Early in the development, we had some ambitions of changing some things and thinking we could do them better, but we had to step back on many of them and look at what made that thing work so well in the original and how cleverly implemented some of these things were, and we would be humbled by it and change our minds about making some of these changes. One of our overarching goals was just to update the experience for modern sensibilities since contemporary audiences have a slightly different appreciation for horror and are able to pick up on more of the cliches that were more common back in the time of the original game that aren’t as relevant now, so we wanted to update some of those things to adapt them for modern times.

ROH: What inspired the choice of having Isaac speak more in this remake since he was a silent protagonist in the original game? Was it to fit in more with where the series went with him in Dead Space 2 and 3 or just to fit with more modern game narrative styles?

Jo: Much of that decision came more as a natural change based on the character himself. Since he is an expert, him not being able to speak in the original took away from his agency when all the other characters are telling him what to do and how to do it. We wanted to lean more into the feeling of being a space engineer, and not just in gameplay, but in motivation for the player as well. Now, instead of Hammond telling Isaac what’s wrong with a certain piece of machinery, the other characters will ask him what’s wrong and he’ll explain it. This also has a ripple effect of the character dynamics, since this also lets us focus more on what each character’s different job or role is and gives more characterization to each of them. It inspires what feels more like real teamwork in a survival situation and it brings you more into the scenes and lets you feel more immersion.

ROH: Are any of the wider narrative devices or elements being changed or updated for modern audiences or to fit more with the narrative presentation styles of modern AAA games or movies?

Joel: There are definitely some of those higher-level changes as well, for instance, we have several interesting set pieces that you didn’t really get to explore in the original, or we’re giving a new angle of experiencing them in this remake. We’ve changed a lot of the cinematic presentation of the experience, especially in things like the camera language. The original had a single locked camera perspective that generally never left Isaac’s shoulder, and we wanted to be just as seamless in that respect, but modern expectations of camera movement in games have changed so much since then.

Modern games like the newer God of War for instance, is a personal journey on an epic, grand scale. Dead Space, on the other hand, is a personal journey on an intimate scale, but we still wanted to liberate the camera a little bit from Isaac when we could to adapt to some of these modern sensibilities and de-couple the camera from the shoulder when it suited the narrative presentation. During these processes, we are constantly asking and checking ourselves, ‘Do we need to do it or are we just doing it because we can?’ We had several layers of redundancy to keep us in check and check if it makes sense. However, we still followed some rules to keep the moments authentic and not deviate too much from the original intent of showing everything from Isaac’s perspective.

Jo: For many sequences, we kept going back and asking ‘Why did they do this in the original?’ to make sure that we kept a lot of that intact. For instance, when some events happen behind glass, we looked for opportunities to make the glass a part of the scene as opposed to just being a simple physical block of where the player could move during that scene.

Joel: The technical capabilities for lighting and visual design has advanced so much, and it’s allowed us to build an even stronger atmosphere, which is obviously one of the biggest key elements to horror in any medium. Atmosphere in horror goes far beyond the typical tropes like the spooky castle in the moonlight, and there are so many other ways to present other environments with just as much effect but with more uniqueness. Obviously, Dead Space makes the cold, mechanical elements of a spaceship into a terrifying horror environment, much like one of its biggest influences, the first Alien film, which did such a great job at establishing that type of environment with horror. Alien showed scenes like the one with Brett in the mechanical chamber looking for the cat, and it all works to build up the tension. We worked hard in this remake to push beyond what was able to be done in the original game to bring those establishing environmental elements forward using the technology that we have now.

ROH: We’ve heard you’ll be changing some elements of the story or fleshing out other side stories with this remake, and we were wondering if maybe you’d be adding some additional lore from Extraction, Ignition, the Severed DLC, or any of the films or books?

Jo: Yes, in fairly small ways that just help to flesh out all the various events that were going on surrounding the story of Dead Space 1.  Things like, we know who the chief of security was, but she’s not around anymore, we know that Gabe Weller was doing things on the planet during this time and we know what Eckhardt was doing in Extraction, etc. This doesn’t mean you’ll be playing as these characters during this remake or anything, but I have updated the writing to include little tidbits from the other various lore.

There are even some Dead Space 3 references hidden as well, for the very observant player who recognizes them (laughs). Any references to the other media also need to be more than just fanservice nods or ‘Hey, remember this?’ They actually need to fit into and contribute to the story and be in its rightful place. Another example is that we know because of Extraction that there’s an entire water system on the Ishimura, and even though Isaac doesn’t go there, we can have a little nod as to why he doesn’t go there without hitting the player in the face with a deadpan lore explanation from another game. It’s been really fun to try working in all these other elements and we can’t wait for fans of the series to experience them when the game is out.

ROH: After playing the original game recently, I noticed some of the dialogue is a bit dry or slightly outdated by modern writing or speaking standards since the game is almost 15 years old now. Can you talk about how you’ve updated some of those older exchanges?

Joel: One of the biggest focuses for us is making sure the characters resonated and felt relatable to a modern audience since they are the window to what we experience as players. We paid attention to this on every level, including Jo’s script and the performances. We wanted it to feel genuine and contemporary and made sure to stay away from some of the types of lines or dialogues that fell into cliché in the last 15 years.

Jo: In the original game, some of the character dynamics were meant to give a sense of paranoia and mistrust, similar to something like John Carpenter’s The Thing, but they were handled in ways that escalated far too quickly and didn’t feel natural or real.  With the remake, we wanted to make sure everything mattered, including the two characters Isaac was close with at the start of the game. They died very quickly and were never really mentioned again, even though it seems likely that Isaac was very close with them and knew them quite well. We wanted to see how we could bring all of these characters’ stories forward, make them matter, and have them be impactful to the world.

We wanted Isaac to feel like a full-fledged human being with emotions and thoughts and wanted him to be a guy who people trusted and wanted to work with again. This was a unique opportunity for the player to see how he relates to everyone around him and we wanted to make sure no opportunities were left on the table, that characters made sense and mattered, and tried to make it so there’s no throw-away characters. It was even interesting that when we were recording the dialogue with Gunner Wright (the voice actor of Isaac in Dead Space 2 and 3, who returned to voice Isaac in this remake) he was mentioning that he wanted to get a lot of the emotional nuance right in his performance, since if he didn’t sound like he was scared, exhausted, or hurt, the player wouldn’t feel that either.

ROH: Will you be updating the music cues to fit better with modern game aesthetics or just re-recording the original score as it is?

Jo: We are still keeping a good amount of Jason Graves’ original score, with Trevor Gureckis coming in to update or add some things to it as well as composing some additional material. So, the original music will be there, but it’s not just transplanted from the original, even though the main themes of Dead Space will be there. Trevor’s new compositions are also great and mesh perfectly with the Dead Space world and Jason’s original score. Several of them have stuck with me during this development and testing process.

Joel: In a general sense, the soundscape is much more tactile in its sound design, where we were able to use so much more of the modern spatial audio techniques that give a great sense of the geography which helps contribute to the horror and immersion as well. Some of this also includes how and when the music cues will be used in certain situations, and we think it works very well for the project.

ROH: Can we expect the game to be about the same length or are there any gameplay segments that will be added in the remake?

Jo: It’s fairly comparable to the original in a general sense, though there are also some extra side quests. One thing that may make the experience longer for more curious players is that you can also just go around and explore any part of the Ishimura at most points, unlike in the original. Instead of each area being clearly separated with getting on the tram and going to a new area, it’s all generally open and you can revisit old rooms or places you couldn’t reach before if you want to.

Joel: Because of this, we also have a new system called the Intensity Director. Since you now have more ability to go revisit different areas of the ship at any point, instead of any areas you’ve already been through being cleared out of necromorphs and threats, we wanted to add more content to the rooms you re-visit. We developed it as a feature that gauges the player’s play style and spawns content dynamically to keep you engaged as you explore. For return players that might know where all the events and scares will come from, this provides a dynamic randomness, with more than 1200 unique events that could come up whenever you enter an area, including spawning new enemies, new scares, new audio elements playing in the distance, etc.

ROH: Are there currently any plans to remake the rest of the series as well or is this just an isolated project for now? Do you know of any potential plans for making a new, original Dead Space game in the future?

Jo: (laughs) This game is currently taking all of our energy, so all of our focus is on getting the game done right now. Maybe after this one is out, we’ll start talking about any other potential future for it, but we’ll need a least a minute to unwind after this!

Joel: Obviously, we would love the opportunity to move forward and do more with the franchise, but there are so many variables that are out of our control with that, so we’ll wait to see the reception of this game first. It’s also great since right now is a huge time for horror, and as a genre, it feels like it’s in a very healthy place with streaming services letting us revisit some of our old favorite horror films with ease, and the audience for it has widened. I’m really happy that it feels like more people than ever have grown to appreciate the cathartic element of horror and to have that release and be scared. Especially after our recent pandemic, it feels like horror has become more of a welcome part of many people’s lives and the release that we can get from consuming horror media feels more relieving than ever.

Jo: Horror games also provide us with yet another unique experience where you’re the one who gets to be in control of the experience where you’re being frightened, but you can walk away when you need to and maintain some sense of control while also being immersed in the horror. That can be a healthy tool for many people for navigating our society right now.

Special thanks to both Joel MacMillan and Jo Berry for taking the time to be interviewed. We had a great time discussing the Dead Space remake and the horror genre with them.

We can’t wait to play Dead Space when it officially launches on January 27, 2023. It’s available now to pre-order on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via the EA App, Steam, and Epic Games Store.

The post EXCLUSIVE: Dead Space Remake Developer Interview appeared first on Rely on Horror.

Walter Woods is an independent game developer and professor at SCAD. He comes from a background in architecture and brings that passion and sensibility into his games. Imperfect will be Walter’s second published title.

ROH: Hi Walter! Thanks for accepting our request for an interview.

Walter Woods: Yeah, thank you!

ROH: First off, please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself.

Walter Woods: I’m from Savannah, Georgia. That’s kind of where I grew up. I was educated in architecture and have a master’s degree in architecture. I practiced architecture in Boston for a number of years. I was always interested in world-building. I think that’s why I got into architecture for the purpose of building worlds, building spaces, and expressing myself through spaces in history, geometry, and light. I really loved that aspect of it. In the practice of architecture, you don’t always get to do that as much.

I was really interested in architectural visualization, which meant that I was using game engines. The new cool thing at that time was to use game engines, like Unreal Engine to visualize your architecture. So, I had a skill set already in the game space. What ended up happening is I met a programmer up in Boston who inspired me and taught me how to code. We started a studio together and just went full-time doing games and VR and all kinds of stuff ever since.

ROH: I always wanted to go to SCAD for traditional 2D animation, but never got the chance. I’m quite jealous. Tell us how you came to be involved with the College.

Walter Woods: It’s a great school. I teach at SCAD now and love it. I’ve always had a studio while teaching, because I just feel like it’s really good for me. I learned so much from development. I bring it to my students. I learn from teaching and bring it to my studio, so it’s a nice reflexive relationship.

ROH: Was SCAD before or after Boston?

Walter Woods: After. I started the studio up in Boston in the early 2010s and went full-time at the studio and started teaching part-time at SCAD. I came back down to Savannah because when you start a company, you want to cut your costs. I did that full-time and was also teaching part-time at SCAD, which snowballed into teaching in the game design department at SCAD, which is what I do now at SCAD. I’ve always kept my studio up. So, it’s been really fun to do both.

ROH: What attracted you to the horror genre?

Walter Woods: I write short stories and I’m also a metalhead. I was in a metal band in college and have written a lot of metal songs. I like to dabble in that arena. From a creative standpoint, I’ve always liked the type of themes that you find in those genres, ones that are a lot more aggressive, angsty, or sad. Things like regret, guilt, shame, and redemption. All those kinds of things I’ve always liked to write about and been interested in. Whether I was writing music or writing short stories, or whatever I was doing, I’ve just always been in the aesthetic of horror. I’ve got all these things posted up around my studio that are kind of in that vein.

My first game wasn’t a horror game, it was actually a tycoon-style game. I think that I fell into horror because I fell in love with the idea of using the art of French artist Gustave Doré as a way to visualize these themes. It became a really cool way to amplify the ideas that I wrote about with someone else’s creative input. Doré was someone who was amazing at visualizing those concepts. Using his art feels like such a natural fit because Doré was so good at illustrating these themes. The books that he illustrated, like The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, have so many of those themes. I think that Doré and I have similar minds in the way that we think and the kind of themes we connect to.

ROH: Has Doré always been in the back of your head to adapt in some way?

Walter Woods: I’ve always liked the idea of adapting an artist and Doré is my favorite artist. The entire aesthetic of metal albums and metal album covers, it’s just completely him. All of the classic metal, like the death metal aesthetic, it’s all Doré. I have always connected to that super deeply. Throughout school and my career, I’ve been fascinated by history and architectural history, art history, and sculpture and mythology. Doré engaged in so much of that, it was just a natural fit for me.

The story I’m telling is a modern story about these old themes of redemption and forgiveness; the same themes that would be in Paradise Lost. Since this is a story that’s told across history, it’s told so many times and by so many different artists for thousands of years, that using their art to amplify my message is a natural fit.

ROH: I saw the videos where you’re using the scans of the original artwork to make high-res textures for the game. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a developer do that. Maybe they do it here and there, but I’ve never seen a developer use a complete art style to texture their game that way.

Walter Woods: I have an illustrated Bible by Gustave Doré from 1880 and I use some scans from it for some of the textures and things in the game.  A lot of the feel and elements come from here. I use other books as inspiration, but this book was my touchstone for like, “Can it feel like it’s in this?” and trying to connect with people on this visceral level. There’s also a completely practical component to it since I’m a solo developer.

Working with Doré art is like working with the best artists you’ve ever worked with. I get to choose from it like a buffet, which is really fun. I’m really careful about choosing things that I understand, not just appropriating his work out of context. Part of my philosophy around the game is to further the idea of the art, rather than just ripping off an aesthetic without understanding it.

Everything I use, from sculptures to antiquity, all shares themes with what’s going on in the game. For example, use a sculpture called Laocoön and His Sons, which is a Greek sculpture showing the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus being attacked by sea serpents. I use the sculpture in the game based on an actual 3D scan of that that exists in the Vatican so that I can express this idea that you’re fighting the serpent at this point in the game. Its inclusion is very relevant. I always try to do that. It’s not just Doré, it’s other artists and sculptors.

ROH: Are there any works by Rodin in your game?

Walter Woods: Not yet. I should get some in there. I use anything that’s appropriate for the theme. I’m not really constrained by the era. If you look at Doré illustrations, especially when he’s illustrating The Divine Comedy, there a lot of historical figures in that book. It’s just a really cool thing to see.

ROH: It’s good to have a strong touchstone like that. I’d imagine it’s a great temptation for a lot of artists to take something because it looks cool, right?

Walter Woods: Right. My students try to do that all the time and it just never works. One of the things I ask them is, “OK, why are we doing this?” Yeah, you’re a great artist and you’re a great mimicker, but are you making something new and recontextualizing? The gameplay mechanic of the frames in Imperfect is literally all about reframing things It’s a fun alignment.

ROH: In one of the making of videos for Imperfect you said you had to tile the artwork in such a way in order to effectively texture map it onto the environments and assets. Can you talk us through that process and the challenge of trying to retain as much of the original artwork as possible while also translating it into a video game aesthetic?

Walter Woods: You can only really pull from one illustration at a time because it’s going to feel like it doesn’t always match. So, for instance, you might have a piece of a brick wall. Typically, any piece of brick that I can find in that illustration, I will try to make that brick wall out of it. Otherwise, I’m just cloned stamping. Sometimes, I’ll very lightly add a little black line to try and fix a seam or something, but I try to use only cloning so that I’m still using all of Doré’s own illustration.

One of the main things that cropped up that I didn’t really think about was the way Doré uses light. When he illustrates something, he’s creating light value across a column, so it’s brighter on one side and darker on another. But in games, I’m relighting everything using the game engine. I can embrace that at times but most of the time, I have to make sure it doesn’t read like his lighting because it’s actually my lighting. That’s one of the things I didn’t expect when I attempted to integrate his artwork into a game, that I would have to neutralize his lighting sometimes but keep it the texture without breaking it. Otherwise, every column is lit from the same direction no matter how it’s turned.

ROH:  So, you have to resolve his baked-in lighting from the image.

Walter Woods: Yeah, exactly. That’s a perfect way to put it. I don’t think I’m always successful. I can get better at it. But that’s just one of the hazards of working with someone else’s art that wasn’t designed to be used in a video game. During the process of wrapping a 2D image around a 3D object, I have to make sure I don’t stretch it or goof it too much so that it still retains some of its quality. That can be a challenging process.

ROH:  Yeah, you certainly had your work cut out for you when you chose that dynamic.

Walter Woods: I would be doing that if I was working with an artist and having them do illustrations. To me, the payoff is worth it. One of the things missing from horror games right now in my opinion is a unique aesthetic. Mundaun has a really beautiful aesthetic. There are a lot of really nice-looking horror games out there. But are they unique? Probably not many.

We have this sort of scourge of PS1-era aesthetic games. I think people love them, and it makes sense. It’s really l cool because it’s ambiguous. But I think people are ready for something that’s a lot more detailed and lush. That’s what Doré’s illustrations feel like. They just have so much detail and that makes things feel pretty strange. You’re inside this super orchestrated world where everything is predetermined, pre-illustrated, and figured out before you and you’re trying to figure out what the plan is.

ROH: That helps it stand out from the crowd, whether it’s in competition with like a AAA game that’s very detailed, but more photo-realistic or another indie game that’s very low poly or is trying to mimic a familiar retro aesthetic that’s been done before, like the PS1.

Walter Woods: I don’t want to be disparaging of those PS1-era games. I think there are a lot of great ones out there. Don’t make me sound like an asshole but, I just think there’s a lot of room in the genre. That’s one of the great things about horror in general, in film and games, is that it’s super open for experimentation, probably more than any other genre. I love that about horror.

That’s probably why I’ll stay in horror for a while. It’s super friendly to people who are learning to make films and games. Look at the whole Backrooms genre, that’s essentially people learning to make games and people are loving it. They are simple games, but they only have to nail what they’re supposed to nail in order to be successful. That’s a cool thing about horror. You couldn’t do that in any other genre, just tell a simple, small thing and do it well.

ROH: You spoke a little about this already, but as an indie developer what do you think of the current indie horror scene, especially in light of things like The Mortuary Assistant being adapted into other media or taking a game and bringing that into a different space?

Walter Woods: I’ve actually had the privilege to get to know the developer of The Mortuary Assistant, Brian (Clarke) a little bit over Twitter. He’s a super nice guy. Super supportive of indies. Anything great that happens for him, he deserves it.

I think the indie horror scene is really vibrant right now. You can see all these big AAA horror games coming down the pipe after a long drought of big AAA horror games. Usually, if the AAA games are coming in to capitalize on this big vibrant want for great horror, you can tell that we’re doing something right. I think it’d be easy for a lot of indie horror developers to feel threatened by that, but I don’t think it’s the same thing. Those games are going to be great in their own right. That’s from the business standpoint.

From a creative standpoint, I just love how open the horror genre is for indies. I’ve always been a little more of a thoughtful horror guy. I don’t really go for the axe murderers or that kind of genre horror stuff. I like more of psychological horror, so it fits for me. There’s so much space within the genre for that and people love to experience it. Within games specifically, too, it’s really cool, because you really can’t get more scared of anything. A game is going to get you the most scared, more than any movie, because you’re participating in your own demise. You just can’t help it, you know? You’re inside it, you know it’s your fault. You know that if you get killed, or get scared, or something happens to you, you have to participate in order to continue. That’s been fun to manage that.

ROH: And then VR takes it one step further, right?

Walter Woods: I would love to make a VR version of Imperfect. That’s an option in the future. It’s not on the table right now, but I would love to do that if it was something that makes sense. The way that the frame mechanic works means that you have to render what’s in the frame, and then render what’s in the world. So right now, until VR gets a little more performance friendly, I don’t think it’ll work. But, hopefully in the near future, maybe with a new Quest or something, it may be possible.

ROH: I played RE7 in VR and that’s still probably my top VR horror game. My friends and I like to joke that you can’t turn away in that game, because you’re just looking somewhere else inside the game.

Walter Woods: Exactly, you can’t look away at all.

ROH: What are your goals with Imperfect? Are there any unique challenges making this game as opposed to your previous title?

Walter Woods: My main goal with Imperfect was to be a kind of a scope monster, something that I could design and build myself. I’ve hired some contractors to help me with animation and really great illustrator has done some of the illustrations for the game, but most of it is me. I do all the code, all the art, adaptation, and stuff like that. I use some assets for some of them are realistic scenes but beyond that, all the stuff you see is made by me. I also do all the sound recording, the soundtrack, write the music. My friend does the voice of the podcaster in the game, and I write and I record all of that. I just do everything myself. It’s great to have that much control over something but that means that every day you don’t do something, nothing happens. So, it’s all on me, which is fine. I enjoy it. I’ve not yet hated this project. Usually, by now I would hate a project but I have not yet hated this project, which is great. It’s gotten a little bit of attention and people have reached out and helped affirm that it was something worth doing.

But the unique challenge of this project is making sure I understand the art that I use, and that I’m furthering its themes and putting them in an intelligent context. That’s something that I really committed to it. The game design challenge is always at the top of something like this, trying to find the right mechanics that elevate it beyond just a jump scare horror game. It’s not going to be a walking simulator where stuff just pops out of the closet.

Everything that happens in Imperfect that is meaningful and fun and scary in the game, you make happen in a realistic way through the mechanics of the game, through the frames. Once I found the frame mechanic, it all started to fall into place. It took a little while, it wasn’t the first thing I figured out, I had a lot of different options of things that I was trying and testing, but when the frame mechanic came through, it just opened up all these possibilities.

It made sense conceptually and mechanically. It’s a fun mechanic to reveal things and make things scarier because everything’s limited. You can put limitations on it, at times, like making them not be able to use a frame, if they’re crawling through a super-tight space. The horror games that I reference are Amnesia, Inside for the lighting style, and Soma – so a lot of Frictional Games. Those games are so fun because you never lose control of your character. You’re always in that world and not thrown into a cutscene. Everything is revealed from your perspective, and that’s a big challenge. You don’t realize how hard that is, until you’re like, “Oh, God, the player has to actually be able to move around during all of this crazy stuff that’s happening, at least move their mouse a little bit.” And the player has to make the decision to do a thing. As a designer, I can’t just make it happen to them all the time. So, I have to bait them a lot.

ROH: Yeah, that reminds me when Valve was developing Half-Life, they talked about how challenging it was to block the characters and have the scene still play out when you’re 10 feet away on the left or if you’re five feet above, etc. because it’s all told from a first-person perspective and it never cuts away from Gordon Freeman’s point of view.

Walter Woods: Exactly. In Amnesia, they had a technique where they would slightly tilt the camera towards something of interest or spook. I actually built a similar system, but some people didn’t love it. So now, during testing, I’ve made a mode called “Dark mode” where you can turn that option mostly off Because of this, now I have to design the game in mind where people might not get hinted that something’s going on over there. I mean, they are opting in, so if they get lost, it’s kind of on them. So, it doesn’t really worry me that much. But also, sometimes I made the camera look at something cool, and as an artist, it makes me sad if somebody doesn’t see a cool thing I made. But it’s cool, that’s games. People are always going to be looking at a wall while you’re cool-ass cutscene is going on.

ROH: There are always going to be a certain percentage of people that just aren’t going to do what you want them to do.

Walter Woods: I’ve watched enough Twitch streams in this game to realize that just aren’t getting it occasionally, and you’re like, “Oh God, do I fix that, or is this person not smart?”

ROH: Another way developers can lead players to where they want them to go is by using lighting. How much does lighting play in guiding the player in Imperfect?

Walter Woods: Lighting is my number one tool. I use blue light to indicate the importance of various things. I have tools to make sure the lighting is visible at certain distances. That’s something that’s super-important is this grayscale world. It’s not truly grayscale, it’s got colored lighting in it, and I’m usually using that or at least brighter white lighting to help guide the player. After basic level design, lighting is my number one tool. That’s Doré’s number one tool, too. So, it works out. If I’m using his stuff, I make this cool scene that has a specific highlight. That was what he did in every illustration.

ROH: What’s next for you? Do you have any follow-up planned for Imperfect yet? Do you have a lot of ideas that maybe didn’t work with this one that you could apply to the next one, potentially?

Walter Woods: Imperfect is part one of a three-part series. Imperfect isn’t done, this is just a demo that’s out now. The game will be out late next year. So, I have to finish Imperfect, which has got another couple of hours of content that’s coming for it, making the final game two to three hours long. I’m looking at potentially partnering with people to help me finish it and I want to release it widely. The goal is to gain some sort of following for the game so that when I make a sequel people are really interested in it.

The game isn’t going to end in an unsatisfying way. It’s not an episodic game, it’s three independent games. So, I don’t want people to get the impression that it’s an episodic series. But I do have a vision for three sections of the game. The first section takes place in these caves and sewers, where you must use your frames to deal with this giant snake as the penultimate battle of the game. It’s very freaky for a giant snake to be slithering around you and you can only see it through a very small frame. It’s a very unsettling feeling. That’s the big lead up with the first game.

In the sequels, I’ve got more frames, more machines that you use to manipulate your environment, more physics puzzle elements, more types of ways to interact with the world, like crawling through these super-tight spaces. It’s its own mechanic in and of itself and works different than any other game. You really feel claustrophobic; you’re just slightly shoving yourself through a small space. That mechanic comes from one of my favorite horror movies, The Descent. It’s all about delivering on that.

ROH: No one knows they’re there, and now they’re getting stuck in holes.

Walter Woods: There are parts of Imperfect, after the demo, where you’re just like crawling through extremely tight spaces with the rock pressing onto you. And, of course, you’re in there with these creatures and that’s not fun. You start to ask yourself, “Why am I going into a hole that is shaped like a snake? That doesn’t seem like what I want to do.” The next space, featured in the second game, is inspired by Doré’s illustration of these mystical, magical haunted forests. The third game is on the waters, on islands, and on the seas.

ROH: Do you plan on having a new mechanic to go along with each installment?

Walter Woods: New frames. The frames don’t always work the same and some frames can reveal different things, like whole other worlds that are parallel to your world, which gets weird. Stuff like that. There’s also a greater variety of machines because you can just have so many different machines that do different mechanical things.

The design philosophy behind Imperfect is always: “All killer, no filler.” That’s the mantra that echoes in my head. I’ll do a cool mechanic, use it a few times, then move on. I continue weaving it throughout the game, but not to the point where it outstays its welcome.

ROH: That’s really key for horror games.

Walter Woods: Because it’s not scary anymore. It’s the least scary thing ever if you’re just using the same thing over and over.

ROH: As soon as I started getting used to an enemy or a mechanic in a horror game, I’m like, “OK, I know how to deal with this. So, I’m outside of the game and just mechanically playing it. I’m not really scared or engaged anymore.

Walter Woods: The reason Imperfect is more like a movie-length is because you in the game, you kick ass for 10-15 minutes, or maybe 5-10 minutes, and then I throw something else at you. Maybe you start to feel a bit empowered, and then I pull the rug out from under you. That’s what the game is all about, trying to make you feel like you don’t quite have it. There’s no fat.  Length is the enemy of fear. If I give the player 20 hours, they’re going to figure out the systems.

ROH: But if you change up the system every four hours or so, you’re essentially making five different games.

Walter Woods: Exactly. I’d rather make three separate games that shift and change. They’ll all have a commonality, and all use the frames, but it’ll be totally new how they’re used.

ROH: Are you using Unreal for this one?

Walter Woods: Yeah, Unreal 5. I originally used unreal 4 and I ported it to 5, because I really love the its nanite system, which allows you to use infinite geometry, basically. I’m in a unique scenario where I can bring in a literal several million-poly 3D scan of an amazing sculpture and drop it in. You couldn’t do that with any other engine, you’d have to re mesh it and do all kinds of stuff. So, I love that about Unreal 5.

ROH: Were there any challenges porting the game from Unreal 4 to 5?

Walter Woods: None, it was perfect. It actually fixed a couple of problems I had.

ROH: Oh, yeah? Like what?

Walter Woods: I don’t know whether it was due to my own coding fails or some way that the system worked, but I would look through the frames, and then I wouldn’t be able to see shadows just because of the way my code worked. I assumed there was something I missed. But when I ported it over to UE5, it fixed it, which was amazing. Developers don’t normally have that kind of luck, but I did. It ended up being just fine.

ROH: What programs do you use for modeling?

Walter Woods: I use Maya. It’s a pretty simple workflow. Maya and Photoshop. I don’t even use Substance or anything like that. I wouldn’t say that I’m exactly a game artist. I’m a generalist. I keep my workflow simple. I don’t use weird plugins that other people wrote or anything like that. I just feel like it gets too complicated for me to manage. I’d rather do things than obsess over my workflow.

ROH: You’re not using things that you don’t understand. A recurring theme.

Walter Woods: Yes, exactly. I don’t like feeling dependent on other people, which is probably why I’m a solo dev.

ROH: I totally get that. Was there anything else you wanted to add?

Walter Woods: I’m looking for feedback. I’d love for people to join my Discord. Anybody who wants to test the newer versions of the game past the demo.

ROH: Thanks so much for taking the time out of your schedule to talk with us! We’re all excited about Imperfect. When I first saw it, I felt that it was different in a thoughtful way. It’s something that really pops. It seems like you have a much different approach than a lot of developers have.

Walter Woods: I wanted to try to have a high-concept idea, but real scares and real gameplay. We’re not just walking by reading plaques about why this is interesting. Because at the end of the day, I love this stuff but I think that things are really cool when they have a deeper meaning. Not everyone’s going to access that meaning when they’re playing the game, so it also has to work on the populist level of, “Holy hell, I’m scared! This is fun!” Then the other deeper stuff is there for people who want to dive in.

I really loved it when ManlyBadassHero played my game and all these people were talking in the comments/ Some people are just like, “Holy shit, that’s sweet!” and then others were like, “Oh, is that an illustration from The Divine Comedy? That has a theme of blah, blah, blah, and I wonder if that means this?” There are people who do that. Yeah. There are the theory crafters out there and then there are people who just like it because it’s cool.

ROH: Well, thanks again so much! We wish you all the luck there. Keep us posted on any new developments.

Walter Woods: Thanks so much!

Special thanks to Walter Woods for taking the time to be interviewed and for providing images from Imperfect for use in this article.

Be sure to add Imperfect to your wishlist on Steam. The demo is available now on both Steam and itch.io. You can also follow the game on Discord, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Imperfect is currently set to release in late 2023.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post EXCLUSIVE: Interview with ‘Imperfect’ Developer Walter Woods appeared first on Rely on Horror.

On February 24th, 2000, the action-adventure horror game Fear Effect was released in North America for the original PlayStation. Developed by Kronos Digital Entertainment and published by Eidos Interactive, the game would go on to become a cult classic, spawning a prequel in 2001, a Kickstarter-backed sequel in 2016, and an upcoming reimagining for modern platforms.

Fear Effect takes place in a dark, futuristic version of Hong Kong. Wee Ming Lam, the daughter of a powerful Triad boss has disappeared, and a team of mercenaries plans to find the girl and hold her for ransom before her father’s men can locate her. What begins as a simple snatch and grab, becomes a mission more important than any of them could have imagined.

Throughout the game’s four discs, players alternate between the three main characters Hana, Glas, and Deke on their mission to retrieve Wee Ming. In addition to taking enemies head-on, players sometimes have the option to sneak up on them for a stealth kill. Players can also interact with a variety of NPCs and solve puzzles logically integrated with the world of the game. The game has a slick anime aesthetic and features cel-shaded characters against looping full-motion video backgrounds, rather than static pre-rendered ones that were the standard at the time.

The game’s title refers to the player’s life bar, a “Fear Meter” that resembles a pulsing EKG. When the player is damaged, the green line of the EKG will pulse faster and turn red. Since there are no health power-ups in the game, players must regain health by performing well in stressful situations, like doing well in gunfights, solving puzzles, or sneak-killing enemies.

Fear Effect recontextualized the traditional action-adventure and survival horror genres by embracing its mature themes and exploiting its unique gameplay and visual style. Its cast of morally grey antiheroes and ultra-violence helped to set it apart from the crowd, even in a landscape where M-Rated games were becoming the norm.

In the twenty-plus years since its release, Fear Effect has lost none of its potency. Its story and gameplay still hold up after multiple playthroughs and the game is just as compelling as when it was first released.

We recently sat down with the writer and director of Fear Effect, John Zuur Platten, to talk about his prolific career, how he came to be involved in the videogame industry, and his role in the development of the genre-bending action-adventure survival horror game.

ROH: Hi John! Thanks for accepting our request for an interview.

JZP: Yeah, my pleasure!

ROH: You’ve enjoyed a twenty-year career in the entertainment industry writing for video games, film, television, digital media, and books. That’s a lot of hats. Please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself.

JZP: My name is John Zuur Platten, but everybody calls me JZP. My background was starting in traditional media. I actually started as a tour guide at Universal and then moved from being a tour guide to being below the line in television and film production. I worked eight years doing production coordinator work and then eventually moved my way up to post-production and associate producer on a few projects.

One of the shows I was working on was a show called Harry and the Hendersons and I thought I could write a script. I had never tried it before, but I’d been internalizing scripts for about six or seven years. Back then we had to Xerox stuff, so every week I was literally running 500 copies of scripts. I had to read them to break them down and send them off to various department heads and that sort of thing. So, I went to one of the producers of the show, and I said, “Hey, can I take a crack at one of these?” and they said, “Oh, OK. Write a spec first and let’s see how you do.”

JZP: So, I ended up writing a fun spec for Seinfeld. George and Jerry go to Atlantic City because Jerry’s performing there. George has seen Jerry’s show so many times he doesn’t want to see it again, so, he’s sitting in the bar. While he’s sitting in the bar waiting for Jerry’s show to be over, this beautiful woman sits down alongside him and takes out a cigarette (this is back when you could put cigarettes on TV), and he doesn’t have a lighter. So, she’s holding it out, waiting for the light. But he notices there’s a Zippo on the bar a few stools over, so he reaches over and grabs the Zippo and he lights her cigarette. While he’s doing this, this really big guy sits back down at the bar and goes, “Where’d my Zippo go?! Who would have the gonads to steal from me?” It turns out he’s a big mafia guy. So, the whole adventure becomes George and Jerry trying to get the cigarette lighter back without the mafia guy knowing.

That script turned out to be really good for me because after that producer read it, he goes, “OK, I’m gonna give me an assignment.” So, I ended up writing three episodes of Harry and the Hendersons. While I was doing that, I went above the line.

While I was producing visual effects for Sega in the early days of the Sega CD they said, “God, we get such great stuff from you guys. It’d be great if you could do a game for us.” Everyone looked at me and said, “John, you know how to write stuff, write a game.” and I was like, “OK!”

I love games and have been a gamer all my life but had never really attempted to design or write one before. But I ended up creating this game called Tomcat Alley, which turned out to be a big success for Sega, and I was on my way. Eighty games later and many years later, I still do it to this day.

My current project is Jurassic World Evolution, 1 and 2. I love the Jurassic Park franchise and I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked on it now for almost five years. We bring in all the original cast for voice performance, so I get to work with Laura Dern, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jeff Goldblum, and Sam Neill. It’s really, really amazing not only getting to write for them but then being in the booth with them and hearing them perform and bring my words to life. I tell everybody, as a writer, you can only ever get it to 80% if you’re writing for film or TV or anything to be performed. You really need the actor to bring all their talents to bear to elevate the work and really take it across the finish line.

ROH: It must be a thrill to hear your lines coming out of their mouths.

JZP: Oh, my god, and to have them say very nice things about me and my work. Now that they’ve worked with me for a number of years, they’re like, “Oh, JZP, great! We know there’s not gonna be any problems.” If I could have told the much younger me that was sitting in the theater watching the original Jurassic Park that one day, I’d be part of the franchise and actually add to the canon, I wouldn’t have believed it.

ROH: That’s a huge franchise.

JZP: I’m so grateful to be a part of it. The team that creates the games at Frontier Developments is great. They’re smart, really talented people, and know the property inside and out. We have about 120 Dinosaurs now. Sometimes, they’ll send me a dinosaur that I have to write and do some research on, which can be challenging, but I can always call them, and they’ll tell me what it looks like, how to pronounce its name, etc. I’m just like, thank God! They’re a really passionate group who turn out really great products. I consider myself fortunate that I get to work with them and the team at Universal. It’s amazing.

I’m also working on A Quiet Place game for Paramount and there are a few unannounced games that are coming soon.

In addition to that, I also write comic books. I have a comic out called St. Mercy and another comic coming out from Image and Top Cow on October 5th called Revolvers. It’s something probably more in line with your fan base. It’s John Wick meets Hellraiser; ghosts with guns. It’s super Grindhouse, it’s super over-the-top, and I think people will really dig it. We’re getting really good early feedback on it.

My biggest real flex of the past few years is that I’ve worked for DC and Marvel. I’ve done Ghostbusters. You name a big franchise, I probably touched it in some way. I was also one of the original people at Niantic, which, for five and a half years did the augmented reality mobile game Ingress.

The guy who started Niantic was a guy named John Hanke. He was the guy that created Google Earth and Google Maps. He also had a company named Keyhole that he sold. Anyway, John comes from this small town in Texas called Cross Plains. I don’t know if that resonates with you, but that’s Robert E. Howard’s hometown, the creator of Conan the Barbarian. His mother actually runs the Robert E. Howard museum which is at Howard’s family house. So, I got up to date on a lot of Conan-related stuff through John.

ROD: Oh, wow!

JZP: Niantic basically built Pokémon GO on top of Ingress, so I was there when the world changed in 2016. That was a real amazing moment of gaming coming together with a social and economic component. There was a worldwide phenomenon that happened there for about six weeks. The game still does very, very well for Niantic. I’m hoping my stock options make for a nice retirement!

ROH: You eventually wound up at Kronos Digital Entertainment, the developer of the Fear Effect series. Take us through the creative process for the original Fear Effect. What were your inspirations for the story and your goals for the game?

JZP: The original Fear Effect was an amazing opportunity. I was in-house at Kronos, which was owned and run by a guy named Stan Liu. Stan was a really creative guy from Hong Kong. Unfortunately, he passed away a couple of years ago from cancer, but he was a phenomenal talent. In addition to being the owner of the company, he was an artist, but he knew he wasn’t a writer, and knew that his design skills were OK. That was an issue for him. So, he sat me down and said, “Look, I have this idea. I want to do this Cyberpunk game and I want to set it in a world similar to a place called Kowloon Walled City.

Stan Liu was the founder of Kronos Digital Entertainment and worked on both Fear Effect and its prequel, Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix. He sadly passed away in 2017.

Kowloon Walled City was a part of Hong Kong before they tore it down. It was a place where lawlessness reigned. If you know anything about Hong Kong, you know it’s a very crowded and expensive city. So, what happened was these people who were disadvantaged in Hong Kong found these two or three city blocks and they just took them over. They started to build an encampment, which grew and grew and grew. Eventually, it became ten or twelve stories high. It was just this makeshift city.

You can see these amazing photos that people took inside of it, where it’s just walls, hallways, and hundreds of extension cords running from one place to the other. Everything is chaos. It was a bit like an ant colony for humans, but completely off the grid, nothing legal. It was visually stunning and had this very dystopian quality that you see in a lot of great science fiction. It was sort of the Asian version of a Blade Runner world. Stan said, “That’s where I want the story to be. You figure it out.”

JZP: At the time we were at Eidos and Lara Croft was obviously their big female star. What we knew going in is we couldn’t create a character that competed in any way with Lara Croft or nothing would move forward. We had to be distinct and unique. I’m a big fan of anime and the cel-shaded look, so I thought, what if we go in an entirely opposite direction? Lara Croft is basically a hero. Let’s create an anti-hero who’s basically a villain but put her in a situation where she’s fighting even darker forces than what she would normally face.

So, I created Hana Tsu-Vachel, who’s a mercenary gun for hire. She works with Royce Glas and a guy named Jakob “Deke” Decourt. I had a trio of characters and I thought wouldn’t it be cool if they were trying to kidnap this young girl and hold her for ransom? But the girl they’re trying to kidnap just happens to be the daughter of the Chinese King of Hell. I thought, OK, now I’ve got something. Let’s run with it and see where it takes us. That was the essence of how Fear Effect came to be.

It ended up being a huge game. It was on four discs, which was unheard of for the PlayStation One, and it tried a lot of different things people hadn’t done before. For me, it was as much an interactive experience as a game experience. It was very much story-driven. We conceded early on that we were going to tell an interactive narrative that was cinematic in nature. You never want to compromise gameplay, you want to make sure people are having fun and playing the game, but when push came to shove, we always pushed towards making the art and story the best they could be. I wouldn’t say we compromised on the game. We did what we could, but our focus was on trying to create something that was unique and different.

ROH: Did you ever get any pushback from Eidos?

JZP: Well, early on they were questioning a lot of what we were doing because we were using three characters, we’re making these massive worlds, and they were very concerned about Hana. They said we got to make sure there’s no conflict with Lara Croft and we want to make sure she fits in our universe.

JZP: We had a couple of amazing artists that worked on the project. One of them was a guy named Pakin Liptawat. Pakin was an amazing environmental artist. I think to this day he still does environmental art for games and TV. You could give him half an hour and he could draw you an amazing cityscape. He had drawn all of these really cool cityscapes of Hong Kong, sort of “New Hong Kong.” We also had a guy named John Paik who designed all the characters. John had given a sort of cel-shaded look to all the characters. But we couldn’t get Eidos to bite. So, I went to both artists and said, give me a poster with John’s characters standing in front of Pakin’s landscapes and let’s see what we get. So, they worked together for about half a day and put it together. When everybody looked at it, we all went, “Holy shit, this looks amazing!”

We took it to a local printer and had 24 x 36 movie posters made with Eidos’ logo and the Fear Effect title in it, so it looked like a movie poster. I think we even put poster credits at the bottom. I had those printed up, put them in a poster tube, and sent it to Eidos. I didn’t tell them it was coming; they’re not expecting it. I just sent it to them. Two days later, the phone rings and it’s the guy who at the time was running Eidos, and he said, “You son of a bitch. This is perfect.” I said, “I know, right?” And he goes, “Yeah, OK, you’re approved. Go, go, go.”

ROH: Awesome! Sometimes you just have to convince them, right?

JZP: Yeah, sometimes that’s what it takes. Everybody who looked at that poster went, “Yeah, that’s the game.” It was Pakin’s genius, it was John’s genius, it was Stan’s support, and it was my devious nature to try to do an end around to unblock things, and it worked. It was a moment that really brought the project to life. I still have one of those posters in my garage.

ROH: Is it true that the game was originally titled Fear Factor?

JZP: Fear Effect was not the original name. It was indeed Fear Factor. However, we changed the name because one of the representatives of the band Fear Factory saw the game at E3 and put us on notice that they thought we were infringing on their name. Rather than fight it, we decided to change it.

ROH: One of the things that stands out about Fear Effect is its eclectic group of characters. There’s a strong sense of each of their personalities and motivations, especially the main characters. Can you speak about the creative process involved in bringing antiheroes Hana, Glas, and Deke to life?

JZP: I wanted to have a diverse cast of characters. I wanted to have people that were varying shades of grey. I didn’t want just good guys and bad guys, I wanted everybody to be a little bit on the evil spectrum in some way or at least on the villain spectrum.

If I had to compare it to something in the present day, it was very much like John Wick. John Wick’s a villain. He really is. He’s an assassin, he’s a murderer and yet in his world, he gets to be the hero because everybody else is some version of him, only worse. That was the way I approached the narrative for Fear Effect. I wanted it to be dark and a little bit edgy. There are a few controversial things we did in there that you probably couldn’t do today but that was where my thinking was, and fortunately, everybody else was on board with it.

ROH: Fear Effect’s world is an evocative fusion of Eastern mysticism and Western Hollywood action sensibilities. What was it about blending these two divergent styles together that appealed to you?

JZP: I was always a fan of Hong Kong action movies. John Woo was a big influence on me, and I was also a big fan of the Wushu films that came out of Hong Kong in the 60s and 70s. You had a lot of really amazing films produced by the Shaw Brothers Studio like The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978), and One-Armed Swordsman (1967).

So, there was an influence sitting within me ready to embrace this. But then on top of that, I wanted to make sure it fit into a traditional Western storytelling structure. I knew that although anime and that more Asian-style storytelling does have a core fanbase if we were going to be able to go wide, it had to appeal to a much larger audience. So, that’s where it came from.

ROH: Well, that kind of nicely dovetails into my next question. Can you talk a little bit about the mature content and themes present in Fear Effect? I remember being pretty shocked by the level of violence in the game when I first played it. Did you and the developers set out to make the game provocative on purpose or was that just a natural outgrowth of the story and themes?

JZP: People have talked to me about this and other projects I’ve done over the years and asked me, “Are you just doing this for the sake of doing it?” No, never. I’m wanting to serve the story. If we’re going to embrace a specific genre, and we’re going to say this is the way we’re going, then I’m not going to half-ass it. I’m going to be committed and deliver what I can for fans that like this kind of entertainment. I’m never afraid to try things and put stuff out there as long as it’s true to what we’re doing story-wise and narrative-wise.

JZP: There’s a big controversy in the one scene where Hana drops her top to distract one of the villains and everyone was like, “You know, maybe we’re going just a little too far.” And I said, “OK, maybe. But maybe not.”

ROH: Maybe that’s when you know you’re onto something, right?

JZP: Right! Maybe what makes logical sense for Hana to do in this situation is to use all of her charms. She needs to distract the guard, and how is she going to distract him? Well, she’s wearing a towel. Why not just drop the towel?

ROH: And it’s consistent with her backstory.

JZP: Right, absolutely. It was consistent with the fact that Hana’s been naked in front of a lot of people, including people she just met. She’s able to use all the skills and tools she has at her disposal. I thought this is going to be controversial, people will talk about it, and it will get noticed. Every review at the time mentioned it, but that’s OK because it was true to her character and what we were creating.

The comic book that I mentioned to you, Revolvers, is really dark. I mean, it’s really dark. It’s an over-the-top, extreme, bloody, violent piece of work. Not because that’s what I set out to do, but because once we decided that we were going into this certain reality, once we said we’re going to do a Hellraiser-like property, you can’t do that at PG-13. You just can’t. You either do it and you honor what you’re creating, or you don’t.

What I tell everybody, is that with everything I create, I honor. If I’m creating a world, I’m going to do all the research I can on that. If I’m creating characters that are of different ethnicities, genders, or religious beliefs, then I spend a lot of time doing research and really diving in, so that when I create that character, I’m not just skimming the surface. I want to make sure that character is real, as real as I can make them. Then I want to make sure that I’m honoring that character. Hana’s not in Fear Effect just because I needed a female lead. Hana’s in there because she made the most logical sense for all of the story beats that were playing out, including the confrontation at the end, which really has a maternal component and a paternal component as an association. That’s why you need this character.

ROH: Well, one of my favorite characters in the game is Jin (AKA Yim Lau Wong). Although he doesn’t have much screen time, he’s a character with a lot of personality who ends up having a big impact on the story. How did you create the character of Jin? Was he inspired by anyone in particular?

JZP: There was a person that worked at Kronos who was slightly older and was an artist. They had an interesting personality trait that I found really unique, which was that they spoke perfect English, but were more comfortable speaking in Mandarin. So, you would get these long, interesting riffs that would be combinations of both. They had a personality that was a little more distant. Not that they weren’t friendly, but they were distinct from everybody else. I thought that’s kind of an interesting character. What if I age them up ten years and use this as the start of something?

I wanted our own kind of joker/trickster character within the story and Jin provided a perfect opportunity to do that. This is one of those characters that you think is a toss-away character when you meet them and then they play a significant role in the story. I didn’t want to shine too much of a spotlight on the character because it was going to be too obvious. If you meet the Joker in scene one, you know you’re going to meet the Joker at the end of the story. So, I needed to make sure that the character felt a little bit like an NPC that may or may not have any big ties. I wanted a little bit of the everyman quality to that character, but I also wanted it to pay off when the reveal happens. It was a bit of a balancing act, but that was the essence of how that character came to be.

ROH: What you set out to do was executed flawlessly.

JZP: Oh, thank you.

ROH: He’s literally a toss-away character, right? He gets shot out the window of a high-rise building, and you think that’s it for this guy.

JZP: I try and do that with characters. It’s setting things up and paying things off and structuring stories in such a way that when you’re doing something interesting on page one, it’s being delivered on in page seventy. That’s the essence of really being a professional. Revolvers is a bit of a murder mystery, as well. I wouldn’t call it a whodunit, but the answer to the mystery is on the first page, yet everybody that gets to the end of that book goes, “Oh, shit, I didn’t see it!” I tell them, “It’s right on page one! Go back and look.” If you can pull that off and do that in an effective way, it usually works out great.

ROH: Nice. So, were you involved in casting the voice actors? And if so, what was the casting process like for the main cast?

JZP: Yeah, all the main cast were either people that I was friends with that were voice actors or were people that were recommended to me. Braeden Marcott (who was Miguel Marcott back then, before he changed his name a few years ago) who voiced Glas, is a longtime associate. In fact, he did some VO work for me about three or four months ago. The actor who did Deke, with an Australian take on his voice (Anthony De Longis), was also the top bullwhip trainer for all of Hollywood. Elyse (Dinh) was recommended to me by Braeden and when I heard her, I said “Yeah, she’s perfect.” Everybody else was either recommended or somebody that I knew.

ROH: Nice. So, were you involved in casting the voice actors? And if so, what was the casting process like for the main cast?

JZP: We did the recording sessions in a studio we had set up inside of Kronos. We did the sessions over I think about two weeks. It was a lot of stuff to record. Then we started putting it together with the voices. Before we had our cast, we did a scratch track, which was basically just people in the office doing it. I think I ended up doing Deke and everybody else was doing various characters. It was just for timing and to help the animators and make sure the scenes were playing out. But once we got the actual performances in, then it really started to jump.

ROH: A prequel for the game was released one year later entitled Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix (written and directed by Stan Liu) but you weren’t involved in that one. Had you already left Kronos by that point or was there another reason you weren’t involved?

JZP: No, I had left Kronos right after Fear Effect 1 was delivered and was already working on another project. I was not involved in Retro Helix. I wasn’t involved in the creation of the Rain character. There were discussions of having Hana have a relationship character, but I was not involved in Rain or any of those elements.

ROH: Do you have any opinions on the second game? Would you say it was faithful to the world that you and Stan created?

JZP: Oh, yeah. I would say it was faithful. I think, back to this idea of pushing the boundaries for the sake of pushing the boundaries, that Retro Helix did that a little more than I would have. If I was there, I would have probably had them dial back on that a bit. But overall, I thought it was true to the property.

ROH: Would you ever consider returning to the series for any potential future entries?

JZP: I love the Fear Effect property. Always have. I have touched it over the years in various fashions. I still to this day love the characters and love the world. I hope something more happens with it.

ROH: I love them, too. I was in college in the early 2000s when they came out and was just at the right age to embrace them. One of the cool things about Fear Effect is that it’s influenced by a lot of things like Hong Kong, Blade Runner, and cyberpunk stuff. But it’s one of those unique combinations where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It’s its own thing at the end of the day, even though it has a lot of familiar elements combined and that was always cool.

JZP: Thank you very much. Fear Effect is not ashamed to wear its influence on its sleeve. I think we created something that was unique and different, certainly, for its time. It was doing things that people hadn’t considered or weren’t trying. It pushed a lot of envelopes. Ultimately, it’s a project for which I’m very, very proud of having been able to have been a part of it.

ROH: You also wrote the story for the incredible The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay game that was released for the PC and the original Xbox in 2004. Since its release, it’s been hailed as one of the best games in its genre. Can you tell us how that project came about? Was it a challenge to try and adapt director David Twohy’s already established world and tone?

JZP: We were brought into it by a guy named Cos Lazouras, who is a longtime friend. I’ve worked with him on a lot of projects over the years. Cos was working with Vin Diesel on all of his game-related stuff. Vin had a company called Tigon Studios and they really wanted to do a great Riddick game.

They had brought on Starbreeze, who had already put together some really amazing gameplay and done some other stuff, but nobody could crack the nut of the story. They said to me and Flint Dille, a longtime collaborator if we could come in and see if we could crack this thing. So, we met with Vin, talked through it with Universal, and saw where they were going.

There was a moment in the second Riddick movie script that had a reference to the Butcher Bay triple-max slam as a one-off sentence. We had this really great producer on the project named Peter Wanat and we told him that maybe that line is our way in. Pete loved it. He said, “Here’s how I want it to go: At the beginning of the game, Riddick gets caught and thrown into Butcher Bay and at the end of the game he escapes. Figure out the middle and figure out the rest.” That’s how Butcher Bay came to be.

After we got the first draft done, we spent some time with Vin. We had been warned in advance that Vin shows up when he wants to show up and he’s going to have lots of notes. We were all prepped for that meeting. Then Vin shows up, and he couldn’t have been nicer. He sat down and goes, “I love the script. I’m looking forward to doing it. I think we’ve got it.” Then he geeked out on my partner because Flint knew Gary Gygax and was a big D&D guy. We got through the interview process really easily. Vin was happy with the script and we were off and running.

ROH: Awesome! That was another game where all the reviews mentioned how polished the story was and how consistent it was with the world. Obviously, the gameplay was great, but everything flowed into everything else. The story worked with the gameplay.

JZP: Thank you. Part of that was talking with Vin and making sure we understood what he thought of the character. Because there’s the written character and then there’s the performed character. We wanted to make sure that we understood everything he was doing with that character, what made sense to him, and what he was thinking as he was performing that character. Vin is one of those guys that spends a lot of time thinking about this stuff.

As we talked through it, we made this punch list of who is and isn’t Riddick. We took note of things like how Riddick never says please, and he never says thank you. Riddick never asks, he always tells. If Riddick wants you to open the door, he’s not going to say, “Could you please open that door?” he’s just going to tell you to open the door. Once we started to figure that out and get those rhythms, then the character started to come right back onto the page in a really interesting way.

Vin has a voice director he uses for all of his recordings named Jack. So, we go to record the script, and I don’t know if you have ever seen a game script before, but they look the same and different than a film script. In a game script, you might have just four or five pages of nothing but dialogue, one line after another, because it’s either incidental dialogue or dialogue for a specific cutscene.

Anyway, Vin starts going and it’s sounding great. I mean he’s just sounding on and the lines are working, but he’s just going through pages. Normally an actor will give you a line, stop, give you another reading of that line, stop, maybe give you a third take. Then the voice director says, “OK, we got that one. Let’s move on to the next one.” But Vin is just going nonstop. Jack is talking to the audio engineer, going, “Take two. That one. OK, circle that take.” and he’s just keeping up with Vin as they’re going. I heard one line that I didn’t like, so I nudged Jack and said, “That one, again,” and he goes, “It’s already marked, don’t worry.”

JZP: Vin gets about four or five pages in and then he stops. We have this glass partition window that we can see the performer through. He takes his head up from the music stand, leans out from the microphone, and goes, “I’m making you guys look good, right?” and I said, “Yes, sir. You’re making us look great!” Then he goes, “But, I want to redo this one line” and it’s the exact line that both Jack and I looked at. So, he was already in his own head going, “Yeah, I nailed that one. These are the ones I want to redo.” It was at that moment, that I just said, “OK, I love this guy.” He knows what he’s doing, he’s got the rhythms, he knows the character and he trusts the people.

He went through the entire 200-page script. I think maybe we changed three or four lines, which is amazing for a talent of his size and stature to just record it as written. That was a thrill. That led to a longtime relationship with Vin that continues to this day. So yeah, it’s fun.

ROH: Yeah. Incredible, incredible game. It’s one of my favorites. Everyone still has a reverence for it. It even got a remaster a couple of years ago so that just proves that it has stood the test of time.

JZP: When we came back, we did Assault on Dark Athena. I’ve had conversations with all the people that have been involved in the production of the films and everyone says the games are canon. What more could you want from your writing than that? That’s amazing. I hope one day we can do another Riddick.

ROH: Yeah, that’d be awesome. I think David Twohy is still working on a fourth one. We’ll see what happens.

JZP: Yeah, I hear rumors.

ROH: You mentioned your comic series, St. Mercy earlier, which is illustrated by artist Atilio Rojo: a story that pits the Incan Empire against the American West, and features two strong, determined young women who must defy authority and ultimately embrace their destiny. What motivated you to create this comic?

JZP: The comic really came about because I had been thinking about doing a Western for a while. I’d always wanted to do Western and write a young female lead. I grew up in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood and knew a lot of young women who were like Mercy. I wanted to write a character that goes back to some of the characters that I interacted with when I was a teenager, a lot of my first loves. I wanted to create a character like that.

I had been bouncing it around in my head for a few years and was surfing the internet doing some research on another project when I came across some mummified children that were part of the Capacocha ritual of the ancient Incans. There were these really weird, disturbing, and beautiful photographs of these sacrificed children up in the Peruvian mountains above the snow levels, basically preserved.

I thought to myself, there’s something here. How do I make this work? So, I started to work through some ideas. I thought this is all about faith and belief. When I look at those images, I’m looking at them through a modern, Western lens. But I want to look at it through their eyes. If I’m looking at it through their eyes, they’re rock stars. These children were literally treated like gods on Earth for a year. They were taken out of very difficult lives in their villages where they were already full-time workers as children. Now they’re in temples, sitting up in the throne room, if you will, of Incan society and treated like a god for a year. Then they are pumped full of coca leaves, so they’re not quite sure what’s happening, and sacrificed.

What would that mean, if you really believed in your God? If you really believed you were going to meet your gods? Wouldn’t that be one of the most glorious days of your life? I thought, now this is something. So, I started to put that together and thought, but what if it all went wrong? Because, for me this is interesting, but who pulled the rug out from underneath our characters?

ROH: That’s where the drama comes in, right?

JZP: That’s where the drama comes in. People asked me once to explain what I do in five words or less and I said, I create people in problems. That’s what a storyteller does. You create characters and you create problems to put them in. I thought, what’s the problem here? The problem is that a young Incan girl believes in the God, but the God doesn’t believe in her. The gods and the shamans of the temple are doubting her because she’s not ready to be sacrificed. What would happen if that went wrong?

The connection between that young woman, an Incan girl named Toctollissica, and the title character Mercy is that because it goes wrong, all the gold used in the sacrifice gets cursed. It then gets stored away, kept hidden, and passed from generation to generation.

Mercy and her father are the latest keepers of the gold. Unfortunately for them, a group of outlaws finds out about the gold and goes to take it for themselves, which sets in motion a whole bunch of insanity and leads to demonic children running around in the wild west. I paced the story so it starts out more traditional, but by the time you get to book four, it’s a completely insane, over-the-top Grindhouse slaughter-fest.

ROH: I read the first issue and I really liked it. I noticed that it was not just well written, but the subject matter was treated in a way that didn’t seem comic book-ey. It felt like a good story, but in comic book form, versus say, a novel or something like that. I’m looking forward to the other ones.

JZP: Thank you so much.

ROH: The original Fear Effect celebrated its 22nd anniversary earlier this year. It’s a game that has stood the test of time and is as compelling and entertaining now as when it first came out. Is there anything you’d like to say to all the fans out there who have enjoyed your work for all these years?

JZP: Yeah, thank you! Thank you so much. When you work on any project in the entertainment industry, but specifically when you work on games, they’re such a collaborative team effort. There are so many other people that are involved in the process, even creatively, besides me. But I am eternally grateful that I get to do this for a living, and the only reason I get to do it for a living is because of the fans and the people that go and buy the games, love the games, and embrace the games. That for me is something that is irreplaceable, as far as I’m concerned in my life. It’s what keeps me going.

I always think of somebody who may be grinding away at a less than premium job. Their dollars matter and they’re willing to take those dollars and convert them into something that I helped create, worked on, or delivered. I take that really seriously. I want to make sure that they’re entertained. My job is to entertain you and I want to make sure that I’m always doing that. Hopefully, you’ll allow me to keep doing it.

ROH: I’d like to personally thank you for Fear Effect. It’s meant a lot to me over the years. I still go back to it. I’ll be making breakfast or something and I’ll just watch the cutscenes like a show and they still hold up. They’re still so great.

JZP: Well, thank you very much.

ROH: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us!

JZP: Very much appreciated. Great meeting you!

Special thanks to John Zuur Platten for graciously taking the time to be interviewed.

About the Author: William Lockwood is the Editor in Chief of Rely on Horror. He’s also a freelance writer and illustrator living in South Carolina. When he’s not playing video games and watching movies on the big screen, he’s working on writing and illustrating his own fantasy series. Samples of his work can be seen on his DeviantArt and Instagram pages.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post EXCLUSIVE: Interview with Fear Effect Writer/Director John Zuur Platten appeared first on Rely on Horror.

Over the last few years, some of our favorite games have seen a surprising rise in adaptions — not in the form of movies or books necessarily, but in the form of board games. Dark Souls, Devil May Cry, and yes, Resident Evil, have all made the leap from screen to table thanks to the efforts of Steamforged Games. Partnered with each game’s publisher and acquiring funding through Kickstarter backers, Steamforged has built up quite a library of unique titles. Resident Evil has become perhaps their largest franchise, or at least the most ubiquitous one, as they are set to begin production on a third, full-scale board game adapting an entry from the series.

Based on the 2002 remake of Resident Evil, this latest entry promises to be the most nerve-wracking yet, with four playable members of S.T.A.R.S. (Chris, Jill, Rebecca, and Barry) and a hoard of zombies and monsters waiting to bring them to an early grave. I had the chance to play a session of this game’s demo with Steamforged Lead Designer and Writer Sherwin Matthews and Junior Game Designer Psy White, where they answered questions as well as walked me through an exhilarating round of Resident Evil The Board Game.

To start with, I’ll do a quick rundown of my impressions, then I’ll follow it up with an exclusive interview with Matthews!

The Game

The demo can be played digitally here (the final release will be a full physical board game), where you can group up with three other players to try and survive online. Don’t worry, the game starts mostly set-up, with all the pieces, cards, and parts of the board already in place to begin a game. All you have to do is pick your character and drag them onto the board (Chris and Jill are on the board to start with, but I swapped out Jill for Rebecca). After a quick read-through of the rules (which are mostly the same as Resident Evil 3: The Board Game from earlier this year), we were set to get survivin’. Your basic goal is to escape the mansion, and if all goes well, together. You aren’t playing against your friends in this experience, but rather cooperating with them to try and make it out alive. Each of you has your own specialties, load-outs, and health meters, so you’ll have to take care of yourself — but it’s in your best interest to help your friends if they end up in a sticky situation rather than leaving them to die. You can also play the game completely single-player if surviving alone is more your cup of herbal tea.

The gameplay consists of three phases: Action Phase, Reaction Phase, and Tension Phase. Each of these phases is made up of decisions made by both the players and by the random nature of the dice and cards.

In the Action Phase, a player can take four separate actions — these can consist of simply walking four spaces, or opening a door (and closing it, counting as a separate action), picking up and/or using an item, attacking a nearby enemy, or a combination of each. Actions are how you keep the game’s momentum moving forward, and this is where you’ll do your exploring. Once a player’s Action Phase is over, the game will go into the Reaction Phase.

During this phase, it’s the dead’s time to make their move. This has a chance of pitting players into combat with nearby enemies or simply step forward a space as they zero in on you. This might not sound too daunting, but you’d be surprised at how quickly the dead can overwhelm you, as they did Psy and me early on in our playthrough. Thankfully, this only applies to enemies on that player’s tile (the map is broken up into multiple tiles that are pieced together), or a tile connected to theirs — such as an open door. A good way of keeping things under control is by using one of your Action Phase moves to shut a door behind you. Sure, it eats up a move, but keeping the dead at bay during the next phase might be more important.

If a zed (or other beastie) gets close enough to grapple with you, you’re left to literally roll your way out of harm with the set of dice provided. A good roll can see you “wiggle the left stick” out of potential damage, shoving the corpse back a space, but a bad roll could see you taking a hit to your health. It’s really impressive how such simple depictions (leaving 99% of the action in your imagination) faithfully recreate the video game’s pacing in these fights, the feeling of a zombie lurching at you out of the shadows and that little lunge they do (I bet you can hear that gasping sigh right now) as their hands grasp your shoulders, ready to take a bite. If anything, it’s better to try and avoid zombies entirely as often as possible, just like in the original classics.

Resident Evil is not about killing every single zombie you come across, it’s not a game where you throw dice at the problem until they go away, because you will very quickly run out of ammunition. It’s a game where we’re very much focused on resource management, it’s focused on thinking of intellegent ways to block things.

-Sherwin Matthews

Regardless of which way your battle goes, this is all followed up by the Tension Phase. During this point in the game, a card is drawn from the “Tension Deck”, which will give the players a prompt that could have dire ramifications on the game. Best chance? Nothing, the room remains still and empty, and you breathe a sigh of relief. But if you draw poorly, monsters could overwhelm you out of nowhere in an instant…or worse.

These three phases mutate the game into a million and one directions and the instant tension and anxiety of staying alive in the ever so dangerous halls of the mansion is palpable within minutes of starting up a game. I was holding a conversation and interview while playing and the survival horror of this experience still managed to leak through despite it. Pop on REmake‘s score while you’re at it, and in no time you’ll find yourself playing Resident Evil exactly as you remember it, despite the little plastic figures and cardboard coins.

I haven’t even mentioned some of the more specific survival horror elements, like the limited inventory, resource management, or item pick-ups. Hell, you even have to use kerosene and a lighter to burn bodies lest the horrifying V-ACT takes effect on stagnant corpses, turning them into incredibly dangerous Crimson Heads.  You can even pick up “missions” that you can send non-player characters to accomplish, such as rescuing other survivors. There’s a depth to this experience that I admit I kinda wasn’t expecting (my board game experiences begin with Monopoly and end with Clue) and I relished every moment.

It’s very telling that during the hybrid gameplay session and interview that I conducted, we ended up getting lost in the game after a certain point and I forgot to keep asking questions. We played for a solid two hours and I later had to email the rest of my questions to Sherwin on account of having too much fun.

The Interview

Rely: How did you go about translating the gameplay of Resident Evil into a board game, and more accurately, the spirit?

Sherwin: One of the things we always do when we’re designing a game is we sit down and we try to establish what the core DNA of that game is. What is it that makes Resident Evil the game that it is? If you’re sitting down to play this, how do you identify this game, how would you describe it? It’s suspenseful, it’s scary, it’s got lots of enemies in it, there’s loads of different bits and pieces that you’d pick up.

Once you can latch onto those, you can then start to think about layering in mechanics that really work to that. For example, “Oh, you attack zombies”, okay well we can make loads of mechanics of how to attack zombies, but how should that feel? Some of it becomes easy, in terms of thinking about for example a green herb, having the idea of how to combine herbs. “Oh just grab two cards and mash them together and you’ve mixed a herb”, really straight forward. How do you emulate your inventory size? “Oh well you just make limited inventory so you can’t carry as much”, really straight forward.

But then if you look at something like combat, how do we emulate that idea of “I’m really looking at my diminishing amount of ammunition I’ve got, and looking at the enemies and getting a bit worried about this.”

Rely: Why did Resident Evil 1 end up as the third game in this Board Game series?

Sherwin: Going back to RE2, when we first sort of spoke to Capcom, “Hey, let’s make a Resident Evil game” and that was very much the discussion, and then the conversation went roughly along the lines of “Okay so let’s make Resident Evil [1]” at which point Capcom went “Well, we have a remake coming out, that would be a good time for you to release Resident Evil 2, and there will be loads of hype in the community about it”. At the time there was, because Capcom had announced that they’re remaking RE2 and then there was a lot of fan speculation of what that could be or what couldn’t be and so on. That was a really good time for us to jump on that.

When it got around to making the next game, which we knew we would do, we spoke to Capcom and the conversation was “we can make Resident Evil 1 or we can make Resident Evil 3” “Well, we’re remaking Resident Evil 3“, okay well that’s the obvious one to go with then.

When it came around to this game, it was very much “what’s next, do we look at RE4, do we look at RE, do we look at RE0, or something else” and we went “Well, it’s the 25th anniversary of RE this year, so actually that would be a good time to release this game, because then it’s a celebration of RE as much as anything else”.

Rely: Were there hard and fast restrictions on what could and could not be placed in this game?

Capcom always ask us to stay true to the original video game(s), and this release was no exception. Otherwise, Capcom are absolutely fantastic, and extremely accommodating. We were a little more spoiled for content here than we have been for games like Resident Evil 2 or Resident Evil 3, because there have been so many versions of this release, but we (SFG) really wanted to focus on the core experience that everyone would recognise, so that meant leaving out some of the less well-known ports, like the Windows and Saturn versions.

Rely: You’ve now covered all three of the “classic” Resident Evil titles, do you think that Steamforged is going to keep pursuing the series? Games like RE0 or Outbreak would be interesting to see as board games

Sherwin: That’s a really good question. We’d love to continue creating RE games, and our community certainly seems very hungry for them. I’d love to create a RE4, Code: Veronica, or Outbreak game next. My personal choice would be Gaiden of course – I love Gaiden, although I’ll be amazed if we ever get a green light for that!

Rely: In terms of complexity, is part of each game built around trying to one-up the previous games, or is it more about what fits the best with this experience?

Sherwin: We have something which we internally refer to as Complexity Points. Whenever we’re designing any game, we’re always very careful to not overspend our Complexity Points. Because the more of these things that there are in your game, the more that someone is likely to have to stop what they’re doing and go read a rule book or just bounce completely, because [they] just can’t get their head around this game. So, for example, let’s say that we’re looking at the Resident Evil engine, “Okay, so moving around and attacking things, that’s got some complexity around it, but mostly it’s pretty straight forward. The Tension Deck stuff, that’s pretty straight forward. [What about] the complexity of enemy reactions? So we’ll spend a few complexity points there, but not too many, just enough that it kind of ticks over nicely.

Any time we put anything else in, we’re [going] “Okay, so where are we adding extra complexity to this? Are we adding in a system which is really going to give people a headache to try and understand or is it actually quite straight forward? We’re always trying to balance things. We don’t ever want to get to a stage where someone just can’t play one of our games because they’re just too complicated for them.

This game ads a little bit more here and there […] but again, all of those have been kept relatively straightforward, simple things to process and do. Especially the mission system, which I particularly like, which is effectively a “push your luck” mechanic, where the stakes are the lives of your other survivors. It immediately has an emotional impact for players, especially Resident Evil fans. “Do we really want to risk Barry and Rebecca trying to do this thing? Mmmmaybe, but what’s the penalty if I don’t, well that’s kinda also not so good”. So it immediately makes people kind of ‘zoomed in’ and makes them care, but mechanically it’s very easy to resolve, very quick, very streamlined, and hopefully very intuitive.

Psy: All three of these titles are built in a way that they kind of add on elements as you go. It’s kind of like a video game in the sense that it adds tutorials the further in you go, so you learn the basics and then the next scenario will add a new element in once you’re comfortable with how the game plays and so on. It’s very welcoming to people that haven’t played board games, it doesn’t throw everything at you at once, and that’s true of all three titles.

Rely: I notice a distinct lack of Wesker in either Kickstarter tier, could he appear in one of the expansions?

Sherwin: Well, you’ll just have to wait and see…

Rely: Steamforged has covered a few horror and horror adjacent titles now, is there any chance of seeing other games such as Silent Hill get this same treatment?

Sherwin: Never say never – several of the SFG staffers are of an age where we grew up in that golden era of PS1 gaming, and all of the incredible titles that came out then, as well as the newer members of staff that we’ve indoctrinated into playing them just as religiously as we still do! I’d love to look at another survival horror game next…

Rely: Any closing remarks for the fans?

Sherwin: Making Resident Evil has been an absolute dream for me. I remember playing this game way back when I was young in 1996, and being thoroughly enthralled with it. Ever since then, I have always loved Resident Evil, and always been someone that buys and plays all of the games to death and put some serious amount of hours into them. Getting to make these games now, getting to go to Capcom and chat with people there, has just been an absolute living the dream, “Pinch yourself, can’t quite believe it’s true” moment for me. Without being a bit too gushy, which I’m sure I already am, I love this. I really love the opportunity to input into the Resident Evil universe. It’s a privilege I won’t ever forget.

Resident Evil: The Board Game‘s Kickstarter ends on November 11th, with plenty of extra goodies for pledging towards either of the reward tiers, and has an estimated release of March 2023.

As a life-long Resident Evil fan, this experience is more than just a nostalgia trip, it’s a faithful return to what made the original trilogy so beloved in the first place, and sacrifices nothing despite the shift in medium. This is not a game to miss.

The post Resident Evil: The Board Game — Impressions and Developer Interview! appeared first on Rely on Horror.

As most horror fans have already heard by now, the long-dormant and legendary Japanese horror series Fatal Frame is getting a remaster of its most recent entry, Fatal Frame 5, which is coming to all modern platforms on October 28th.

In celebration of the 20th anniversary of Fatal Frame this year, we got a chance to chat with the series creator/director, Makoto Shibata, and producer, Keisuke Kikuchi, to ask about their careers and the Fatal Frame series, both old and new.

Here’s what they had to say.

ROH: It’s been around 7 years since fans have been able to experience a new release from the Fatal Frame series, and since 2014, you’ve spent most of your time at work on the Deception franchise or on various JRPG titles. Have you wanted to bring out new Fatal Frame releases for all these years in between or did you feel like the series needed a break? Did you feel satisfied working on these other genres of games, or is the horror of Fatal Frame more where your passion lies?

Kikuchi: I have different personal feelings towards the Fatal Frame series, the Deception series, and other RPG series, and I enjoy working on them equally. During the development process for other titles, ideas and inspirations accumulate and are reflected in the next title. I’m a greedy person, so I want to make a lot of different kinds of things, but the whole time, I also wanted to continue the Fatal Frame series.

ROH: With the remaster of Fatal Frame 5 on the way soon, what are your biggest hopes for the upcoming re-release, and what would you like horror gamers to experience from the game? What do you feel are the biggest strengths of Fatal Frame 5?

Kikuchi: One of the strongest characteristics of the horror elements in the Fatal Frame series is the dilemma of having to lure something frightening towards you and wait until the very last moment to fight it. Another strong aspect is when a ghost seems to appear faintly, but ultimately doesn’t fully materialize, or when they appear suddenly and unexpectedly during normal exploration. I hope gamers are able to experience these facets of the Fatal Frame series on the current generation of game consoles.

ROH: Many early horror games developed in Japan have been set in the West, such as Silent Hill and Resident Evil. What inspired you to break that mold and set the Fatal Frame series in Japan, and what would you say separates “Eastern” style horror from “Western” horror?

Shibata: I would say the reason it’s set in Japan is simply because I live in Japan. When I thought about making the scariest game I could, I thought it would be more realistic to re-create scary events that I have seen or heard about myself. I like games set in Europe and the United States very much, but by basing Fatal Frame on scary events that have happened in places I have been to in real life, I can create an atmosphere where spirits seem like they might appear at any time, and where just walking around is scary. In a horror game, there are always some times when there are no enemies, so it’s important to know how to create a foreboding atmosphere where you feel they might appear, whether they actually do or not.

ROH: Have you taken inspiration for Fatal Frame’s scenery and imagery from any traditional artists, including painters and sculptors, or any specific regions or areas of Japan?

Shibata: Throughout the series, I have not been influenced by any particular painters, sculptors, or other artists. I was influenced by the houses I lived in throughout my life and the houses of my relatives. They were mostly old Japanese houses, but they have since been demolished. It’s often said in superstitions that those old houses were like a pathway for spirits to connect between two shrines, so sometimes spirits would come into the house.
As for the stages in Fatal Frame 5, I gathered all the famous haunted places in Japan and concentrated them into one sacred mountain. The fact that there are many different haunted spots on one mountain was influenced by Mount Osore in Aomori Prefecture. With this setting, I thought it was a good opportunity for me to be able to include the strange events I experienced on this mountain while I was there.

ROH: You have described symmetry as a central theme for Fatal Frame 2, stating that “tragedies and fear are what happens when you tear things apart.” Aside from the butterflies and the twins, can you give any more examples of this symmetry theme that you used in the game?

Shibata: In this series, each title has a different theme, and I aim to create a different kind of horror every time. In “Crimson Butterfly”, one of the themes was “symmetry”, and the visual motifs such as butterflies and twins were symmetrical, but I was also conscious of symmetry in the structure of the story. The tragedy that happened in the village in the past and the tragedy that is happening now, which the player controls, are symmetrical.
For “Maiden of Black Water”, we made the central theme of the story a type of fear which roughly means “connected to water.”

ROH: Fatal Frame 4 was never released outside of Japan and I think it’s one of the best games in the series that fans from all over the world would love to experience. Would you also like to release a remastered version of Fatal Frame 4 as well? Or remasters of the original trilogy? 

Kikuchi: We have received many requests for all of the older games to be remastered, so we will continue to explore what is possible in the future.

ROH: Is there still hope of seeing a brand new game in the Fatal Frame series if the release of this remaster goes well enough? You had spoken about this possibility in some interviews earlier this year, but I’m curious to know if that still holds true.

Kikuchi: This is the game we prepared for the 20th anniversary of the series, so we currently don’t have any plans for other titles yet. However, the response has been more positive than we expected, so we would like to continue thinking about it in the future.

ROH: If you do continue with the series at some point, would you like to return to the stories of any of the classic characters from the franchise, such as Miku, the Amakura sisters, Rei, Ruka, or Misaki? Some characters appeared as NPCs in future installments, but it would be interesting to return to some of the previous protagonists as main characters when they are older and see how they’ve dealt with the trauma of their paranormal experiences later in life.

Kikuchi: We have always created independent stories for each installment in the Fatal Frame series, so if there is a new entry in the series, it will be with a new character and a new story. However, the world of Fatal Frame is interconnected, so even if it features new main characters, there will likely still be a connection between these new characters and the Camera Obscura or some characters from the series’ past.

ROH: Are there still any ongoing efforts to create another Fatal Frame movie at some point? There have been several different film projects announced over the years, and most have fallen through except the Japanese film from 2014. Are there any new updates on a new film or maybe even TV projects?

Kikuchi: It’s still in the works, but there is nothing worthwhile to say as of now, so please be patient on new details on any film-related projects.

ROH: Any final words or thoughts you’d like to share with fans of the Fatal Frame series or horror gamers in general?

Kikuchi: For the past 20 years since the first title, the series has been supported by its fans, so we are able to release this updated Fatal Frame 5 as a big thanks to them. I would like to thank you all very much for your continuous support. Fear is an instinctual emotion that all humans share, so I would like to continue to offer new scary moments whenever I get the chance.

We hope you enjoyed this exclusive look into the minds of these excellent creators and their unique perspectives. Stay tuned for a full review of Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water when it launches next week.

Meanwhile, you can pre-order the game on every modern platform’s digital storefront and show support for the series, which has been rumored to possibly be continuing if this remaster gets enough support from us fans!

The post EXCLUSIVE: Interview with Fatal Frame Series Creator and Producer appeared first on Rely on Horror.

Chasing Static, the upcoming lo-fi psychological horror indie title, has been garnering positive attention for its premise, old school, “crunchy, low-fi graphics,” and its use of quality voice over talent.

We recently had the opportunity to interview Nathan Hamley of indie studio Headware Games, the sole developer of Chasing Static, whose passion for unique visuals and “AAA sound design” guides the studio’s design aesthetic.

Q. Can you speak a bit about your personal background and what led you to develop Chasing Static?

I’m really excited for players to explore the lonely, unsettling world that I’ve spent these past two years crafting, or living in. Development has been pretty intense since I started the project in January 2020, and given the ongoing circumstances surrounding the pandemic, it’s left me with little else to do but power through with development. I’m the only developer working on this game, creating all elements of the game par music. It’s nice to have that level of control over a project, making sure everything is in line with the initial vision. Thankfully the lo-fi 3D style helps keep production time down.

The project leans heavily into its inspirations. I have a background in film production and love obscure and unsettling horror, having a soft spot for films that can marry horror with light science fiction themes. I’d say thematically the game is somewhere between Silent Hill and Beyond the Black Rainbow with inspirations from films like Ex Machina, Drive and Annihilation…to name a few. Chasing Static is a slow-paced exploration of narrative first and foremost, with some more game-like elements layered on top. I can’t wait to see what people make of it.

Q. As Headware is UK-based and you chose rural Wales for Chasing Static’s setting, are there any location-related details that influenced the game? 

The setting of Wales was mostly inspired by a camping trip to Snowdonia with my partner that we took shortly before the game started development. We drove up to Northern Wales, arriving sometime after sundown during a particularly fierce storm. The roads were thin, bumpy, and often accompanied by a sheer drop on one side. We got a bit lost, and it took hours to get to our campsite. Signs of life were few and far between, the whole experience was kinda terrifying, in a good way!

Q. Please tell us more about your specific influences. You mentioned “80s horror and contemporary surrealist cinema” on Headware’s website. What games, movies or shows do you feel were influences for Chasing Static?

Silent Hill was definitely an influence. The first four games are my go-to games when I fancy replaying something spooky. I guess most horror developers take influence from that series, you can’t really top it. I really enjoy David Lynch’s work and how he finds a way to make simple character-based scenes feel uncomfortable, often just relying on the writing and performances of the actors. To name some other films that were an influence (and ones I enjoyed a lot) I’d say Annihilation, Hereditary, The Thing, and Event Horizon were ones on my mind when designing the game, and ones I rewatched during development.

Q. Could you explain more about your “sonic exploration” concept and how it influences the gameplay and narrative?

“Sonic Exploration” is the term I have coined for the core gameplay mechanic. Chasing Static features traditional inventory-based puzzles to complement this mechanic. After reaching a specific point in the story, the player will discover the Frequency Displacement Monitoring Device. This is the Device that is shown in our teaser trailer, which can tune into various frequency bands (like a traditional radio) and upon discovering an ‘active’ frequency, uses a modified directional microphone to enhance that signal. This mechanic is used for both uncovering new narrative elements and solving environmental puzzles.

Q. Notably, the game seems inclusive and accessible to players with hearing impairments. Could you touch on that?

We have had accessibility in mind from the very early stages of the game’s development and I’m happy to say the entire mechanic has been designed with the hearing impaired in mind. You will be able to play through the entirety of the game with the sound turned off. We’ve made a point of having visual indicators for both tracking frequency bands and narrowing signals. All voiceovers will also be subtitled.

Chasing Static’s gameplay definitely looks promising. With an anticipated release on Steam, you can wishlist the game and download the free demo on its official Steam page here.

You can also check out the trailer below.

The post Developer Interview: Chasing Static appeared first on Rely on Horror.

Few solo horror developers have ever gained as much traction and attention as Puppet Combo, the man behind games like Babysitter Bloodbath, Power Drill Massacre, and The Glass Staircase. Few smaller devs have also been able to have such a steady output and level of quality displayed in their games as Puppet Combo.

After staying steady and gaining so much attention over the years, he’s become one of the most well-known figures in indie horror development and a favorite of reactionary horror streamers and horror fans in the last ten years. We recently took some time to catch up with Puppet Combo on the past, present, and future of the indie horror scene and get a glimpse into the landscape of what it’s like to be a full-time solo developer.

ROH: How would you introduce yourself to anyone who’s not familiar with you and your work?

I’m Ben from Puppet Combo. I’m a horror game developer focusing on 80s and 90s themed horror games. Usually with a PS1, low-poly aesthetic.

ROH: Even though you had started working on game development as far back as the year 2000 with your Halloween 3D project, you didn’t get in the full swing of working on and completing multiple projects until around 2012. During that time between Halloween 3D and the 2010s, were you just learning more and honing your skills or did you have other projects going on?

Not really, it was just something I lost interest in. I started in middle school and worked off and on, and did pretty much nothing game-related in high school, then got back into it in 2011 because I was considering what I wanted to do for a living. I knew I had something good with the slasher game concept, and in all those years from when I started, surprisingly nobody else had jumped on it, so I had no competition.

ROH: What was behind the name switch from Pig Farmer to Puppet Combo back in the day? Were there any legal reasons or just something you personally wanted to change?

Legal reasons. I started using Pig Farmer Productions first, another company trademarked it before me, so it made more sense to change the name than get into a legal battle when I was just getting started professionally.

ROH: You’ve been pretty vocal about most of your horror film and game influences over the years, and it’s 100% in line with most of my personal favorite titles, styles, and nuances of horror, and it all centers around the 1980s lo-fi VHS aesthetic. I’ve seen quite a few imitators pop up over the years, but you always seem to nail this style perfectly in a way that many others miss the mark on. Do you think you’ll ever venture very far from this style, or is it something you’re going to stick with for the long run?

I don’t think so, cheap horror games are as far as my ambitions go. There’s no dream project I’m building towards, I’m making exactly what I want to make right now. I don’t see this as a stepping stone, I’m happy with how things are going: the games that have been released and the new ones right around the corner.

ROH: Power Drill Massacre is the game that “put you on the map” in many people’s eyes, with it getting tons of attention from streamers across the internet and your name getting into the mainstream of that culture for a little while. Are you still proud of the game and do you think you’ve surpassed it in some of your other work?

I think it started with Babysitter Bloodbath, as far as gaining attention is concerned. Things started really taking off when Pewdiepie played it. Luckily, I’ve been able to maintain an interesting stream of games since then. Power Drill Massacre was mostly a project I started to learn Unity and it’s still just an early access version of the full game. Since it has a self-contained story, everyone seems to think it’s the full version.

I’ve definitely surpassed it in terms of design. In many ways, Power Drill Massacre was even a step back from Babysitter Bloodbath which came out first, but something about the concept and aesthetic really spoke to people and helped to gain even more attention, so I’m locked into completing it. Figuring out ways to expand the game has been very difficult.

ROH: You’re constantly working with new ideas and concepts in your games over time, and it’s always great to see someone consistently trying new things in the horror genre. Is there any particular style or concept in your games that you’re most proud of and has turned out the best so far?

I’m proud of most of them for different reasons. My personal taste leans towards the games where you play as the killer such as Blood Maniac and Feed Me Billy. There’s a lot of fun stuff to design in those, and the concepts let me get away with a lot of things I can’t in the scary games.

ROH: Meat Cleaver Mutilator is one of my favorite games you’ve done, and I especially liked the work you did with the escalating sound as the killer would get closer instead of just relying mostly on surprise or stingers like Power Drill Massacre or Babysitter Bloodbath. However, it’s one that never got released outside of your Patreon channel. Have you thought of doing a wider release for any of your older games that never got that treatment before?

Thank you. I was actually working on an expanded version at one point but I lost interest and the new map ended up becoming The Riverside Incident. I’ve always wanted to at least polish it up a bit more but I can’t make any promises, since I have so many other outstanding projects. I definitely want to keep some of the games exclusive to Patreon, though. It’s nice to have some lesser-known projects for people to discover.

ROH: The Glass Staircase was another favorite of mine that had some of the best tension and environment scares in your catalog for me. The immense influence from Italian horror films is huge and very appreciated. Have you thought of doing a physical release for that or a sequel in the same style? Tenebra seems to have a pretty similar vibe, so I’m hoping that sees the light of day sometime soon as well.

Thanks, and yeah, there will be a physical release soon. Probably no sequel because there isn’t much more story to tell. I think it accomplished most of what I set out to do as a Lucio Fulci tribute. Tenebra is actually far more of a traditional survival horror game, instead of a slow burn moody one. It’ll definitely have similar vibes but gameplay will be front and center.

ROH: One of your longest-term projects so far has been Stay Out Of The House, with around 2 years in development without the full release yet, and I’d say it’s probably also one of your best-looking and most anticipated ones among fans. Do you still have plans to try to wrap it up before the year is over, and can you talk about some of the overall difficulties you’ve had with the project?

It’s probably actually been in production longer than that, haha. Stay Out Of The House has been difficult. A big part of the problem is working with poorly written code that’s leftover from early to mid-development. So it’s a matter of slowly replacing things (which is essentially coding a new game) or working with it and trying to patch bugs as they happen.

I think ultimately most of it needs to be rewritten. The last estimate I gave for its release was August, and after that was missed, I think it’s apparent I’m not qualified to estimate release times. Things can be going well, something breaks and suddenly it’s days or weeks behind.

Work is still actively being done, and it’s certainly a big feature project for Puppet Combo, but with work on Murder House being so close to completion, Stay Out Of The House is getting ever closer to being the next full-production project again.

ROH: As time has gone on and your projects have gotten more ambitious in some ways, I know you’ve looked to bring on some people to help you out with certain projects. As a typically solo game dev, has this turned out well for you to have helpers, or does it also make some things more complicated?

I’m not sure if it’s entirely true that I’ve progressively gotten more ambitious, haha. It’s more like a zigzag. Nun Massacre was certainly more ambitious than Night Watch, which was the latest release. I try to alternate between something bigger and something smaller whenever possible.

I have yet to put a team together to work on a game. I’ve attempted it, but it’s extremely hard to find the right people at the low budget I work on. Working with helpers and freelancers is usually very simple because I limit the work to certain assets. Such as a few animations or a 3D model. When it’s done, I drop it into the game and everything is pretty smooth.

ROH: Earlier this year, you started the Torture Star Video label where you publish and promote games from other developers. What specific roles do you usually play in the release of someone’s game that gets released on Torture Star? Do you have a team that works with you on this side of things?

It depends on what’s needed: PR, marketing, funding, advice. I look for projects I believe in, that fit the brand, and ones I think I can help on. The last thing I want to do is take away the unique, creative voices from these games.

As for a team, that’s a bit trickier. Truth is that we all keep in good contact and provide feedback on the progress of each game, so it’s definitely more of a pursuit of like-minded people that just all happen to love horror. It’s not collaboration, in the purest sense, but it’s always good to get a lot of eyes from other creators, helping to strengthen your ideas.

ROH: Is this new role of publishing personally fulfilling for you, or does it get exhausting sometimes on top of your own game development?

Nowhere near as exhausting as it is fulfilling. As much as game development takes up time, it’s genuinely a good feeling to see creators you actually believe in getting a chance to put their visions out there. Not to mention it helps that I just like the creators who’ve worked on the label, thus far. That helps, too.

ROH: Today you’re finally launching your new game, Murder House, which also marks the first time one of your personal games gets released on Steam. Are you happy to finally have one of your games launched on Steam, or has it never been much of a goal for you?

It was initially a goal before I knew any better and listened to everyone saying you have to get your games on Steam to be successful. That hasn’t been my experience at all and I think it’s a safer bet to not stake my whole company on one platform where a small algorithm change could kill your sales numbers and it’s completely out of your control. I’d say consoles are a much bigger goal than Steam. Every PC can install itch.io games as easily as Steam, so the cult-like obsession over using one platform is baffling to me. I guess it’s great if you’re the owner of that platform.

But the main reason for Murder House to be on Steam is because I’ve hit a sweet spot with the number of games I have released on itch.io and any more right now would throw things off balance.

ROH: Murder House is looking to be an awesome slasher-in-the-house archetype with some classic PS1 survival horror mechanics, and I’m glad it’s hopefully getting a wider audience this time. How can we expect it to be different from some of your previous games?

Murder House is Babysitter Bloodbath 2.0 in a lot of ways, improving the design, polishing, and taking it to the next levels. It’s also a big step in finally creating a playable slasher movie. The mechanics are sharpened and the difficulty is refined while adjusting the mechanics of classic survival horror to work as a slasher game.

It feels a bit like a lost Clock Tower game that dropped the point-and-click mechanics and integrated the design aspects of Resident Evil and Silent Hill. This is about as close to directly emulating the original PS1-era horror games that we’ve ever gotten, and I’m hoping everyone can see that big step up in quality.

ROH: What’s next for Puppet Combo in 2021? Do you think that far ahead, or like to stick with more short-term goals at any given time?

My main goal right now is to actually get all the older WIP Puppet Combo games finished – Stay Out Of The House is the priority, then Power Drill Massacre, as well as a big unannounced sequel for one of the most popular Puppet Combo games. Hopefully, it’ll keep everyone plenty excited between the bigger releases, and give everyone a better insight on the future of Puppet Combo and even Torture Star Video.

ROH: Anything else you’d like to say to our readers or your fans out there?

Just that there’s always something in the works, and your favorite game project probably isn’t dead. Keep an eye out for any other projects that you might be interested in from Puppet Combo, because you never know what’s lurking right around the corner.

You can follow Puppet Combo on his Twitter and Instagram profiles, as well as his itch.io and Patreon platforms, where you can get access to many of his new projects as they become available.

Murder House is available on Steam today and looks to be some of his best work yet, so go check it out today and see what the Easter Ripper has in store for you.

The post Interview: Power Drill Massacre Dev Puppet Combo Talks Past, Present, & Future Of Solo Horror Development appeared first on Rely on Horror.

With the release date and gameplay trailer released for Wales Interactive’s Maid of Sker just yesterday, we’re now gearing up for the final release in just a few weeks. With the date approaching fast, I recently had a chance to sit down with the composer and sound director for the game, Gareth Lumb, to ask some questions about the inspirations for the game’s heavily musical story and themes, as well as the soundtrack and sound design.

As a fellow musician, this was a great opportunity to ask some questions about what is quickly shaping up to be one of my favorite horror games and horror game soundtracks of 2020, and I got some great answers from Gareth as follows:

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ROH: Can you share a little bit of your background in video game work, like how long you’ve been working in the industry and what other projects you’ve worked on?

My background in the industry really centers around Wales Interactive. I’ve been with the studio as a freelancer since 2014 when I was studying for my master’s degree in creative sound production. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do and I hadn’t really had plans to work in games but we took part in an internship scheme as part of the course and I came to WI. I was there for a couple of weeks and it really opened my eyes that this was something I could do. They must have liked the work I was doing because they took me on as the resident sound professional. I was hooked immediately, I have always been an avid gamer and game music has been hugely influential to me as a musician, so I think it was just a good match. I’ve been responsible for all sound and music on all WI’s first-party games ever since, so I’ve had the pleasure of working on Soul Axiom, Don’t Knock Twice, Time Carnage, and now Maid of Sker.

ROH: It’s not too often I see composers and musicians also double their duty as the sound director on a game as well. Can you explain how you got tasked with both duties on Maid of Sker?

Haha … yes if it makes a sound, it was me! It’s always been that way since I joined the studio. It’s a really lucky position to be in. I love having control over all elements of the sound and it’s a great experience to be able to work on such a diverse range of tasks; I get to write and record music, record and edit dialogue and work with the fantastic voice talent, I get to design all the sound effects, and do implementation of audio in conjunction with our coders. It is a lot of work though and a lot of responsibility when all audio-related bucks stop with me! I think it’s mainly just by virtue of the size of our team. Most of the team do more than one job, and I’m no exception. The scope and ambition of Maid of Sker has really pushed all of the team and that’s been hugely challenging but a lot of fun too.

ROH: On to Maid of Sker specifically, I love the very frequent female vocals that carry so many of the tracks featured in the game, and the vocalist Tia did a fantastic job on the performances. Was this always part of the plan of the music design from the beginning to include a female voice as one of the main musical components?

I can’t praise Tia highly enough! Her voice is really the defining element of the soundtrack. It wasn’t always the plan though. In the research and development phase I had written a fair bit of music (in a totally different style) but our studio co-founder and Game Director, David Banner, came up with the idea of using Welsh hymns to tie in with the folklore themes running through the game. I went away and listened to loads of Welsh music which was a nice way to connect with my musical heritage. I came back with the three hymns. It took a while to arrange them into minor keys and to give them a more chilling feel. We have never had a performer budget on previous projects but I had done a bit of work with Tia on some of my own music, I knew her voice would be a good match and also that she was a fluent Welsh speaker, so we decided to give it a go. Once we recorded Tia, we immediately knew we were about to produce something special for the fans. The only downside was that it rendered a lot of the music I’d already written irrelevant and out of step, so I went back to the drawing board and based the more incidental music around the mood set by the hymns.

ROH: I also like the juxtaposition of the beautiful and haunting vocals mixed with many of the more shocking or unpleasant sounds from broken instruments or dissonant chords. Was there any inspiration for this idea to mix the two together so often?

I think that’s always been a central part of my musical philosophy — when something beautiful and melodic is contrasted against something harsh and discordant, for me that’s one of my favorite feelings. Also, this being a horror game, I wanted to set players on edge and that uncanny valley between beauty and ugliness is the perfect way to do so.

I wouldn’t say there was a particular inspiration, it was more that I’d just found a load of broken old instruments in my attic. In particular, a violin with one string and the most ragged bow you’ve ever seen! Plus, there was a broken zither with a load of the strings snapped. These instruments formed the basis of a horror sound rig that I built in my studio. I also used a branch from a monkey puzzle tree and a lot of my old broken cymbals (I’m a frustrated rock drummer) amongst other assorted junk. I tried to come up with as many interesting ways to make sound from this collection of objects and instruments, bowing the cymbals with the monkey puzzle branch and hitting the zither with mallets, that kind of thing. I had a lot of the basic ideas for tracks laid down as sketches with piano and string parts so I just recorded myself performing along to the tracks and that was how I started to flesh them out.

ROH: What other horror films or games inspired a lot of your work here on Maid of Sker? I heard a lot of Resident Evil 2/CODE Veronica influence on the track “Night Falls,” whether it was intentional or not, and I love it. I also felt what sounds a little like some of the Friday the 13^th soundtracks in “Green Fingers” and I’m wondering if those things were of any influence or you had picked them up from elsewhere.

Growing up I played all the Resident Evil games as they came out so there’s no doubt that’s influenced my writing. Specifically, the save room themes. I got really excited when I realized that we were going to have “traditional” save rooms in Maid of Sker and that I would get to write a theme for this. The track “Sanctuary” is one of my favorites on the OST. I also love the music on SOMA and Dead Space, and although different thematically, I tried to take inspiration from them on building and releasing tension which is a key approach when writing for horror.

John Carpenter is a huge influence to me, his films, but more specifically his soundtracks. I also look to Brad Fiedel and his horror scoring. Sticking with TV and film, I should give mention to The Haunting of Hill House which I watched during development. That really influenced a lot of my sound design choices and probably some of the writing too.

ROH: When playing through the game, I also noticed a fair amount of music and sound being tied to certain in-game actions, like when enemies turn around quickly, there’s often a stinger or musical hit of some kind that really heightens the tension, and the music also dynamically changed in real-time as you move around and encounter different things. I’ve always wanted to ask how complex it gets when trying to program those kinds of dynamic changes in sound and music during gameplay.

I would call the music setup in Maid of Sker “pseudo-dynamic”. I try to keep the score fairly dynamic so that it mirrors what’s going on during gameplay. It’s so important for the music to respond sympathetically to gameplay cues.

It’s really just a matter of creating audio assets that are compatible, in the same key and tempo, so that they can transition in and out seamlessly. This is the first project where I’ve really been able to do this thanks to the use of FMOD, a proprietary audio middleware. It can respond to signals generated by gameplay such as entering a new area or the distance of the player from one of the NPCs. Using the middleware gives me a great deal of autonomy to tweak how music can react to these cues. Programming this logic does get complex when you have to account for all the possibilities and timings of different players and then the potential combinations of events that can happen. With that said, I’d like to take what I’ve done to an even higher level but what I found was the system isn’t as responsive or comprehensive as I’d like. It’s definitely something I’ll be delving deeper into for future projects.

ROH: There’s several tracks that feature a music box sound to them, and a music box melody also plays from the in-game collectible dolls to help you find them. Was there a certain inspiration of where that focus on the music box sound came from?

The song played by the collectibles is “Hen Plant Bach” which is a song I sang in primary school. There’s a well-known correlation between children’s songs and horror, so this is the Welsh twist I put on it. Music boxes are creepy too, I think that might be something I picked up from Resident Evil.

ROH: The song “Suo Gan” was used beautifully in the game as the “counter song” of the story, and the rendition you hear near the end with the organ is top-notch. What was your thought process going in to bring modern arrangements to the ancient Welsh folk hymns featured here? Were these songs close to your heritage in growing up or did you discover them when researching for this project?

I found it quite daunting, to be honest. These songs are very special to me personally, I’ve grown up hearing them. Calon Lân was played at my grandfather’s funeral. They are pretty deeply ingrained in Welsh culture, especially Calon Lân and Ar Hyd Y Nos which are both Welsh rugby anthems so they are really well known. Because of all of this, it’s important to me that I do them justice.

The hymns serve very particular purposes to the narrative of the game so a lot of thought went into making them fit for purpose in that respect. This is quite an uncommon trait in video games but I don’t want to give away too much as the players should discover this for themselves.

ROH: The story of the game itself also centers around music on many levels and in many small details. Were you involved in fleshing out some of those more musical parts of the story, or was that mostly handled by the writers themselves?

It was really exceptional to write music that keyed off the narrative so directly and vice versa. Music is usually more of a narrative support than an actual plot device so this was a really fun element of the project. The narrative connections to the music were largely done by the writers and our game directors. I consulted with them a little about what songs we had to play with and where and how they could be used. Once we had the script and I’d edited all the dialogue, my job was fleshing out. So yes, I had to go over the gameplay elements that contribute to the narrative and tie together as much of the story as possible through the audio diaries and the incidental appearances of music throughout the game.

ROH: Many of the puzzles in the game also revolve around music. Were you directly involved with the creation of all these? They were generally all very satisfying and unique from what I encounter in most horror game puzzles.

Yes. That was a lot of fun. In one of the musical puzzles you have to match a series of tones to some bells and ring them in the correct order. I initially made that really difficult with intervals I knew to be harder to tell apart. Nobody in the office could do the puzzle! So, I made it a little easier, and then when the testers played it, they couldn’t do it either. I had to make it so non-musicians could identify the tonal differences, making a clear octave gap between bells and people still say it’s difficult! Anyone who plays an instrument would find it really easy now, I imagine.

ROH: Thanks for your time and I can’t wait until the public can experience this unique game you guys have put together. Any final words for anyone looking forward to the game?

You’re welcome! Thanks for having me. I’d like to invite your readers to Wishlist the game on Steam ahead of the launch on July 28. The game will be available on PC with a digital and physical launch on PS4 and Xbox One.

Additionally, I would like to exclusively reveal that we will be offering the full digital OST for free to anyone who pre-purchases the game on Steam from July 21.

I hope you have as much fun playing it as I had making it.

Diolch yn fawr!

Stay tuned for a full review of Maid of Sker as we get closer to the release date and check out the social media channels for Wales Interactive and Gareth for further updates on the game and soundtrack release as well!

The post Maid of Sker Interview with Sound Director/Composer Gareth Lumb appeared first on Rely on Horror.