Project Announcements: The Masterplan & Talos: Road to Gehenna

Okay, so both these projects were already announced but I was too busy writing them to say anything about it.

The Masterplan
I played The Masterplan in early access six months ago, and instantly bought into its world. It's a top-down heist game with real-time pause and a tactical stealth focus, and central to the whole thing is the hostage-taking mechanic which enables you to control rooms and implement on-the-fly tactics like having the bank manager rob his own bank, or having the clerks form a human shield between you and the cops.

I ran into the Sharkpunch team deep in the snow at PAX East, and couldn't resist the chance to offer them some help with the writing. It's such a charming little game, it deserved better than second-language English - plus the entire script is less than 10,000 words, so it's not a great time sink.

Since coming onboard I've tried to make the world feel more consistent. A simulation game like this, where most of what happens is player-driven, turns not on the cinematics or the linear text, but the authenticity of the world you are interacting with. It doesn't need to be real, it just needs to make internal sense.

To that end I've been using flavour texts to build out the sense that you're in a 70s crime caper, recruiting a team, scoping joints and pulling off the impossible. Right now we're working on implementing more dynamic in-game speech. It's silly stuff, but the world comes alive when the characters in it react in unpredictable but logical ways.

Finally, the whole game is bookended with some more traditional linear plotting which was already hinted at in the original teaser. This is not a story-heavy game, but it wouldn't be a crime caper every detail went to plan.

The Masterplan releases on 4th June 2015.


Road to Gehenna

Having gotten Talos out the door in December last year I was all ready to take a bit of a break, and then come back and start something completely new. As ever, things did not work out that way.

Croteam collared me in January. They'd been working on extra-hard Talos DLC puzzles for who knows how long and contrary to their intentions throughout that development they decided the DLC needed some kinda story.

Not blown away by the thought of churning out more Milton, more Elohim Jonas and I immediately set about generating plot pitches which would  expand on the original world without simply following in its footsteps. We wanted a new challenge.

Pitches we discarded included the game being set in the distant past when the system was still being developed, with researchers commenting on and interpreting your every action; a secondary server with all the same rules, but completely different archive information, resulting in very different versions of ELOHIM and Milton; and one where far future beings discover the system and begin to explore it.

Without spoiling anything, the pitch we went with provides us huge flexibility in terms of the sort and tone of material we deliver. It gives us a world that fits within the original game's religious and science fiction mythology, but which resolutely has its own identity. Most importantly for me, it lets us explore completely new ideas about how to interact with the game.

Road to Gehenna is ambitious (overly so: the script is around the same size as that of the original game). I haven't undertaken a follow-up to one of my own games since the Penumbra series eight years ago because I want to keep moving forwards (the same reason, more or less, that I didn't work on Amnesia), and so Gehenna we have consciously designed to be experimental. We wanted to explore new ideas in a safe environment so that when we inevitably come to Talos 2 we will be able to raise our audience's expectations once again.

Story was fully implemented a week or two ago, and we are now in final bug-hunting. Road to Gehenna will arrive for computers and other toys in the next month or two.

Talos Principle Coming Soon (+ Games You Can Play Now)

Okay, congratulations me for failing to write anything here for ages. The reason I will give for this is that I am somewhat Autistic-spectrum inclined and I only have enough room in my brain for one obsession at a time.

Nevertheless I shall endeavour to formulate some form of update. 

The Talos Principle is almost done. The guys in Zagreb are applying final polish, and next week we complete the voice work. Sigils of Elohim, the Tetris-like minigame we're dishing out free, is out now. In case you're not familiar with the game, it's a first-person philosophical puzzler, set in a synthetic world. Or, as I've been selling it to my non-gamer mates, a game where you get to argue with the devil.

This is usually the part where I put my money where my mouth is and try to predict how the game will be received. I'm happy to say that, like The Swapper, Talos is at the very least a sound puzzle game. I'm not worried about scoring sub-70s. Beyond that, well, I'd say this is a looser game than The Swapper - it's a much bigger world, so that's only natural - but it also does something that none of my previous games have: it lets me write an involved interactive dialogue. It is my great hope that that dialogue will excite people. It is, I think, fairly unique.

A 2014 release date should be confirmed very shortly, and it'll release on Win, Mac, Linux, PS4 and Shield Tablets.

In other news, my brain has mostly been consumed with political philosophical research.

I have gone through a bit of a journey over the past ten years: from not really thinking about anything very much, to realising that and embracing philosophy. I searched frantically during my BA for solid ground on which to base my moral assumptions, and found none. Perversely this left me right back where I started: an individualist, who recognises that the system we live in is broken and resolves to do everything in their power to get the better of it.

Now I'm not ready to say yet that my ethical outlook has changed. I am still dubious of absolute moral systems, dubious of anyone who claims there is some authority outside of ourselves. What's changed is that I'm now better aware of the broader picture, politically and (most importantly) historically. I never understood the value of history in school; now I understand perfectly that history provides us an irreplaceable point of reference for how human existence can be - it enables us to identify the assumptions, the invisible shackles, that underpin our way of life today.

Supposing there is no absolute morality, the need for a sound political framework becomes even more pronounced. We are all, more or less, rational animals. It may only be our own sense of reason that provides authority to claims about how we should behave, but that needn't mean the output is any less authoritative.

So my next project is going to be aimed at replicating this journey on a massive scale. I want to pull our perspective out from the subjective, close-up one we take in every day life, and show how our political society is shaped by usually invisible forces on this grand scale. I want to explore what happens when we are all individualists and consumers who give in to these forces. And I want to construct a framework for how individualists might nonetheless find value in working towards a fairer society. And that is what I have mostly been thinking about.

Now, to lighten the mood, some excellent games I played recently.

The Escapists - Excellent isometric prison-break sim in Early Access. Plays like a minimalist, freeform Prisoner of War. Keep up appearances by attending exercise, rolecall and jobs; while simultaneously preparing for your escape by gathering weapons, digging tunnels, forging alliances, stealing uniforms etc.

Invisible Inc. - I was always going to love this one. The new isometric, turn-based stealth game from Klei, it boasts their usual high level of support, and I think is now my favourite of their releases.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter - A lot of positive things already said about this one, but they're worth re-enforcing. It's a uniquely beautiful world, not only for the fidelity of the graphics, but the architectural design itself. The plot is shamelessly pulp fiction, and somewhat predictable for it; but the real narrative punch is delivered by the mechanics themselves and the inventive ends to which they're put. This game takes you on a journey like no other.