RESEARCH AND IMMERSION IN VIDEO GAMES CAN MAKE FOR A POTENT BREW


Auroch Digital’s production director Peter Willington shares insight into how the research journey of a project can help contribute to its success.


I


Peter Willington, production director at Auroch Digital


n 2022, we released Brewmaster: A Beer Brewing Simulator. It’s performed really well for our studio in a number of ways – it’s had


our highest ever percentage of positive reviews on Steam, a great player base on Discord and awesome sales. Whilst its success has been thanks to the hard


work of so many teams across the studio, it has also been in-part down to how the development team embarked on a mighty research journey to ensure an authentic experience for our players. Our studio prides itself on making games


that relate to and deal with real-world issues – so ensuring our games feel real and grounded in whatever universe they exist in is hugely important to us. Whether we’re perfecting the mechanics of space exploration or becoming experts in the depths of Warhammer lore – immersion in the subject matter is vital.


RESEARCH METHODS It doesn’t matter if your game is grounded in the world we live in or in a far-off universe with


32 | MCV/DEVELOP February 2023


its own rules, the research process is crucial. A great summation of research can be found in Ed Catmull’s book, Creativity Inc, in which the co-founder of Pixar (and later the President of Walt Disney Animation) shares insight into how dining across France influenced Ratatouille’s famous kitchen scenes. They weren’t striving to create a kitchen full of unrealistic harmony and perfection, they wanted to show it as it appeared in life: beautiful culinary chaos.


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