The ups and down thoughout the development of Ever Forward
The problem that most of our early story ideas had is that they felt totally disconnected from the gameplay, or just silly and secondary to the point where we were asking ourselves:
“why are we even trying to tell this story?
The way we arrived at the final concept for the story was, firstly by failing about 700 times, & then trying to really tap into what emotions our game was evoking.
We had created a sense of isolation by having a single character in the world, but the most powerful emotion that the game seemed to bring out in people was… frustration.
We created a mockumentary years ago about the early development process which featured a lot of “reaction shots” of people playing the game.
The scenes with us talking were fake, but the reaction shots were all real. People were literally throwing controllers over some of the designs we came up with (don’t worry, would-be players: we toned things down… until late-game, that is…), and we came to realize that it was that frustration that we had failed to personify in our story.
in the next chapter we will share with you how we walk our way through these problems so stay tuned
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