[PC] [VAR] Alien: Isolation

[christian]

1Vi8GNR.jpg (160.46 KiB) Viewed 1374 times

[christian]

Finally got around to playing this for a bit over the weekend, and man, what an opening! What a delight it is to explore the ship as it comes to life around you. I loved that moment when you finally make it aboard Sevastopol Station. It's so rich with atmosphere. Dark, oppressive, with the rhythmic beeping of a nearby emergency station, and the terrible sound of what could only be the creature scurrying around in the air ducts far off in the distance. Like you've just walked into a lion's den.

[christian]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/2351 ... lation.php

During development, one of our designers (now a senior) by the name of Simon Adams came to me with a pitch for a manual save system. I said no many times -- "what we have is fine." It seemed to me like too much change, or hassle, and a lot of work on the game environment: We would have to place terminals everywhere, change the art for the affected areas, and change the code for the save system.

Then there was the alien. For those who haven’t played the game or don’t already know, our alien is systematic. It is an AI entity that works under its own logic, hunting for signs of the player, other humans on board, and anything it can kill. It adapts to the player’s movement, choices, weapons, and makes some interesting design possible.

It was the question of what to do with the alien when we save that raised the debate of save points again. "When I get to a soft checkpoint and the alien is about to kill me... What happens when I come back in? Is he still there?"

We had two clear options. One option meant not doing anything which would trigger an infinite loop of dying and respawning. The other option was to remove the alien on the load, which would mean sprinting to a checkpoint was a valid tactic -- as after he killed the player, they were safe again. Neither of these were good enough, and neither supported the core gameplay.

Simon again pitched his manual save idea, this time as a solution to our issues. If we could have a save location, we could either alter the alien’s behavior in some way so that it could adapt to save points or leave it up to the player to ensure that they were safe when saving.

We decided to test the latter in a simple quick-and-dirty prototype. Our design team quickly put together a simple scripted push-button save point that would trigger a manual save. The first mission to use this suddenly took on a different feel. No longer were we walking around, without a care, knowing that if we died, we wouldn’t lose much progress. We were afraid. If we didn’t make it to the save point and successfully save, we would lose our progress. Even in a single mission this was tense.

"Imagine if you had been playing for a while and not saved? How tense would that be?" This is where the emotion started to appear. Saving became tense. Looking for a save became tense. Imagine that! The simple act of saving had become supportive to the game's driving factors of terror and isolation.