With the usual gameplay mechanics of combat and puzzles out of the way, Campo Santo spent a lot of development time watching people play the game, to accommodate what they wanted to do. It's a game of exploration that's backed by what seems to be a solid tale. "I hope people keep trying, so some of these approaches continue to mature."įirewatch's approach to player choice and emergent gameplay is also fairly unusual. "If you look at other recent games that try and solve this problem-like Gone Home, Oxenfree, Her Story, or Cart Life, just to name a few - they all take a very different approach," he says. Remo says he is hopeful of studios reaching a method that works, and talks about how some of his contemporaries have tried to solve player interaction without resorting to combat or various kinds of puzzles.
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"It doesn't feel like game developers have settled on a lot of best practices so far in terms of how to design games that are heavily narrative-led, aren't traditional puzzle adventure games and don't have any kind of combat, but still prize player interactivity."
"This has been the most challenging aspect of game design on Firewatch, for sure," says Remo. It's this balance between gameplay and plot that makes Firewatch, from a development standpoint, a tough task. Beneath its stellar looks lies an intricate set of systems at play in terms of design and narrative and how they allow players to interact with the game. But the goal wasn't to make the game look like a painting instead the goal was to achieve unique and evocative colour palettes for the various environments and times of day, which Olly, and our artist Jane Ng, were instrumental in tuning."īut there's more to Firewatch than eye candy.
Obviously, we're lucky that our concept artist is Olly Moss, who is amazingly talented. "So I don't think our process is particularly unusual. These days that concept art is usually digitally painted, although in the past it was often hand-painted or hand-drawn," says Remo. "It is very common for video game art direction to start with concept art. (Also see: 10 Games Releasing in 2016 We Are Most Excited About ) According to Remo, the decision was driven by the need to attain specific shades and a particular range of hues.
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With more and more games now taking advantage of powerful PC and console hardware for photorealistic graphics, one of the first things we had to ask was why Campo Santo chose a style that looks more like an oil painting for Firewatch. Gadgets 360 picked the brains of Chris Remo, the game's composer and one of its designers, on what to expect from Firewatch. That's no surprise considering that Campo Santo - the indie studio behind Firewatch - consists of developers who have worked on games such as BioShock 2, Mark of the Ninja, and Telltale's The Walking Dead. The game has a fairly unique premise, and from what little has been shown so far, it also seems to have an unusual but appealing visual style, as well as smart dialogues. In the game, you play Henry, a fire lookout at the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming, and you have to explore a number of mysterious occurences. It is a first-person adventure game that takes place in the late '80s.
One of the games releasing in 2016 that we are most excited about is Firewatch.