poly, stylized look like ours, it was really amazing for us to the level of quality in the vocal performances.” When it comes to lessons learned while working on
time telling you what he didn’t learn while working on the game. Or perhaps not.
we all had our own personal moments of playing our prototypes and experiencing the tech and thinking, even in that rudimentary state, oh, this is a fresh feeling.” While trying to work out what to nail down design wise, the team had a lot to consider, and while experimenting and iterating, even found new possibilities. players’ blinks — which are so often involuntary — trigger time moving forward without eliciting a constant feeling of frustration in the player,” says Lewin. “Ultimately it was our a scene change from ones that wouldn’t. Through this, we also discovered new uses of that blink mechanic as well, which moved the story forward in time without cutting to a new scene.”
Lewin was also thankful for the visualisation technologies the team had available to it, like the ability to mocap its cast of actors. “We were super fortunate to record on a state-of-the-art stage with live visualisation capabilities, and the fruits of
“Just about everything I know, I learned while working on this game,” chuckles Lewin. “We learned the value of good scoping, since we got a couple tries at that, and getting it right earned more time for iteration. Also the importance of playtesting your works-in-progress importantly, we learned that there’s an audience out there for the kinds of games we want to make. quarter of our lives by the time we launched the game. Learning how to manage a budget, keep a schedule, scope a feature set, build a team, even just how to those things out as we went. A bit like jumping out of a plane before knowing your landing spot. Compounding all that was the fact that we were making something quite unique, so there wasn’t a playbook of solutions out there for our problems. “Most games are unique in their own ways of course, but it became a foregone conclusion that there likely weren’t answers to our technical questions out there out how to adjust the detection algorithm to account for the widest array of possible scenarios, tweaking the sensitivity of it, and building a calibration system that was adaptive … all that took a lot of testing and creativity, and a ton of ingenuity from our lead engineer, Richard Beare.”
CAN’T TAKE MY EYES OFF OF YOU
released, with a lot of content creators and streamers out. While the team weren’t certain that people would stream the game, they made sure to accommodate the fact that people might, and even put some special webcam options in place to facilitate it. “It’s very encouraging for us to see that big streamers and their audiences have an appetite for a variety of games, not just the usual suspects,” says Lewin. “We we saw, but we did take streamers into account during development, and there was a feeling that they could play an important role in the game’s potential success. So as part of that, we included a “streamer mode” that puts the player’s webcam feed on screen.”
54 | MCV/DEVELOP April/May 2023
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