mikemariano

Gone Home from The Fullbright Company

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Let's start setting up the artificial rivalry between Gone Home and The Witness now! You're only allowed to buy one of these games!

Whichever one has better graphics.

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My only question is, where's the game? This doesn't sound like a video game.

Why can't exploration alone be a valid objective?

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It definitely can, but it has to be super-interesting if the only motivation to play is that you'll find more stuff. I'm guessing, though, that once you add an explicit obtainable objective, you'll probably increase the number of players who will want to explore by thousands of per cents. If your goal is to have the most people experience your game, you should probably add a goal, and it doesn't even have to be the primary focus. This is of course based on my own experiences with games like Dear Esther and the Myst games. Riven, for example, is a game almost purely about exploration and discovery. If it didn't have the story and progression that it did, I probably wouldn't have completed it, but the biggest reward was still the exploration parts.

IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN

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Part two of the RPS interview. He mentions finding a key being a part of a preview build he sent to some people. I didn't want to mention keys and locked doors before, since it seems like the most obvious of physical obstacles. Anyway, it seems like the game progress will map to physical progress (in part, anyway), which makes sense, and there won't be just a bunch of abstract 7th Guest puzzles. I sort of took offence at the dismissal of Myst as "playing the piano to launch the rocketship," though I guess most of the puzzles are rather like that.

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You can alternatively just blow up a locked door if you find the C4, I assume.

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The more I think about it, the larger the array of possible obstacles becomes:

  • Find key card to unlock electronically locked door (colour coded?)
  • Find code/password to unlock electronically locked door
  • Find two or more artefacts that slot into ancient mechanism (magical?)
  • Door is hidden behind bookshelf. Which book activates the mechanism? The secret is up to you!
  • Look, those wall boards seem loose. Maybe there is a hidden passageway behind them? Did you find the crowbar/stick?
  • Omg what's the clickety-clack sound when I step on these LOOSE tiles in the old bathroom? Can a secret hide under them?
  • Nice candlestick! (Or lever!?)
  • Fancy door that leads to different places depending on which side you open like in the Labyrinth with David Bowie
  • Oh no, a retina scanner. If only you remembered to find the eye of who lived here.
  • Hey these books are not in alphabetical order! Will alphabetising them unlock the/a door? Only alphabetising them will tell!
  • Ooh yeah cool, Towers of Hanoi! Should I solve it? Maybe means of overcoming a physical obstacle will reveal itself?
  • etc

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This bit here makes the case as to why this form of game is an interesting and valid medium of expression:

One game people have brought up' date=' which I thought was interesting, is The Last Express. Our game isn’t going to have any people in it – spoilers!- you’re not going to come around a corner and find a dude. Exploring an abandoned place is the core of the experience. And so Last Express had this whole clockwork world, real time progression thing in it, and that’s not relevant to us, but I did really love the fact that the entire game took place on a few train cars, and you could go into one compartment and turn all around and fold down the bed and find something that was hidden in there when it got folded up, and open up the luggage and see what was inside.

What’s interesting to me is just scale. I feel like the scale of interactivity in most games is really coarse. It’s like, the scale of interactivity is basically human-sized or larger – you can shoot bullets at that other human-sized thing and kill it or not. In GTA, I loved some of the stuff they did that brought the interactivity down to hand scale in GTA4, but it was also really really, really secondary. The GTA experience was like ‘I’m a big human-shaped agent of chaos and I can get into a car and I’m an even bigger, car-shaped agent of chaos, and I cause havoc on a large scale, and in GTA4 they added the thing where you could go round and pick up any physics object off the ground, so you just pick up coffee cups and throw them at people, which is hilarious, but it obviously wasn’t what that game was built around.

I feel like, especially in a first person context, it’s really interesting for me to think about…in our lives, you’re going round, you’re looking at your desk right now, you could pick up and examine and move around any of the bits and bobs on your desk, and they’re actually really relevant to your understanding of this place. Our interest is taking the scale of the experience down to the smallest bit of granularity that’s actually relevant to understanding this place and being able to explore it. And so the Last Express thing, you can fold down the luggage rack and open the luggage and examine what’s in the pocket of the luggage, and then open up the wallet, see what’s inside the wallet… That is really cool to me, and I think it was ahead of its time in that regard.[/quote']

This is from the second part of the interview with RPS where the dude throws random game titles at Steve to compare to Gone Home—apologetically—horrified by his own crass journalistic methods.

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Just kick down the fucking door.

Can't because the door is reinforced steel because the house belongs to a crazy military scientist who does genetic experiments in his underground lab hidden under the house.

Gaynor really needs to visit this forum, we're solving all sorts of issues.

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I think he is afraid that we will sue him for stealing our awesome ideas, so he is staying away for his own protection. :yep:

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Can't because the door is reinforced steel because the house belongs to a crazy military scientist who does genetic experiments in his underground lab hidden under the house.

Gaynor really needs to visit this forum, we're solving all sorts of issues.

A basement lab. A crazy scientist named...

Dr. Fred Edison

?

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What made me love that screengrab even more is that it manages to be a Phaedrus reference for fans of the show and a neat Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance riff. Touché, Fullbright company.

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Sweet magic eye

shark.

 

I also somehow missed this:

 

 

I can only say that if I can't open the door and fiddle with the inner switch that makes the light go on and off, it's the worst most interactive refrigerator.

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Damn, I hope there isn't some kind of secret message/narrative element involving a magic eye. I am terrible at those.

 

It didn't even register to me as being a magic eye.

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If I already wasn't outrageously excited for this game, that trailer would have pushed me over the edge. Riot Grrrl music just makes everything better.

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