Amnesia dev discusses success; next project won't lose the 'scary atmosphere'
Thomas Grip, project manager at Amnesia: The Dark Descent developer Frictional Games, spoke on "Evoking Emotions" earlier this week at GDC Europe, and explained the intricacies of the game that absolutely terrified those who played it. We wanted to discuss his emotions on the success of the game, which has sold over 400,000 copies --- an impressive feat for an indie dev.
"While we were quite confident that we had a game that was better than any of our previous, we had never expected the response we got," Grip told us when we asked if he was surprised by the success. "The press response was very nice -- both in terms of coverage and grading -- but even more fun and surprising was the player response that continues almost a year after. The amount of videos, images, etc. that players have created in response to the game is just amazing, and several orders of magnitude larger than anything we have had. Sales-wise it's, of course, also overwhelming, and I think especially how good it is still selling even a year after."
Grip told us the game's inclusion in Valve's Potato Sack bundle gave Amnesia sales "quite a boost," with the exposure increasing the average daily sales after the ARG concluded.
Despite the success of the thriller, we wanted to know if Frictional was going to forget about Amnesia and move on to something else.
"We have an Amnesia-related project in mind, but it is not 100 percent set at this point. Our main development project will be to move on a bit and try and expand what we built on in Amnesia. We have been so focused on just creating fear that we want to see if we can evoke other, less primitive, emotions as well. This means our next game will not have super focus on just horror. However, the other goals we are striving for will definitely result in a scary atmosphere."
He also told us that the company is very interested in consoles and are hoping to release its next game on one.
"It is a bit of a hassle now though since the difference in hardware between PC and consoles is quite large. We are developing to cram what we can out of what we think the average PC rig will look like in the two years or so when the next game is released. At the same time, we're keeping an eye on what the most pressing consoles limits are so we still can make a port from the PC."
