dan-pinchbeck
Latest
The mystery of 'Everybody's Gone to the Rapture' lifts a little more
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is a new game from The Chinese Room, the studio behind beautiful exploration experience Dear Esther and horror game Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. It's exclusive to PlayStation 4 and takes place in a gorgeous, abandoned 3D world. In-game, players embark on a mission to discover where everyone in this quaint village went -- how and why they all seemingly, suddenly popped out of existence. Time plays a "fairly central role" in the game and it involves mysterious beams of golden light. The Chinese Room revealed Everybody's Gone to the Rapture at Sony's Gamescom presentation in 2013 with an eerie trailer hinting at a retro, post-apocalyptic environment, and the latest video expands on these themes. It's similarly vague but offers a look at another environment, this time an empty children's classroom that appears to have been ransacked by ... something. Along with the new video, The Chinese Room offers a taste of the game's music with a haunting, orchestral track.
Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs will take lessons from Dear Esther
One of the keys to creating Dear Esther, said thechineseroom's Dan Pinchbeck, was allowing the player as much control over the narrative as possible. Speaking at a panel during GDC Europe, Pinchbeck addressed the intentional ambiguity of Dear Esther, saying that it gave players more freedom, thus making their time with the game more enjoyable. Rather than presenting the player with predetermined series of events, Dear Esther's story is filled with ambiguity and revealed randomly, leaving it to the player to interpret it. In a very real sense, they actually participate in the story's creation.While most games lay out their stories in a clear, linear fashion – think big budget FPS and action games – Pinchbeck likens Dear Esther's story to a toy box. Instead of giving players a cohesive, linear story, thechineseroom created story blocks and lets players put them together. It's a bit like "story Minecraft," he said. "The story of Dear Esther doesn't actually particularly tell you anything. It just suggests things that could have happened, but you can do the work."People are driven to think of events in terms of story, he said. "If something looks and feels enough like a story, people are likely to interpret the action in a storied way." As such, when creating Dear Esther, thechineseroom wasn't concerned with creating a complete, fully rounded story. "What we can try and do in games, is not tell a story, but to provide the player with the toolbox – the tools, the bricks that they need to tell the stories themselves," said Pinchbeck. "In exactly the same way that we consider things like physics sandboxes," he adds, "if you provide those units of useful, interesting stuff that players can play with, they will create an experience from it."During the Q&A session, we asked Pinchbeck if Thechineseroom's next project, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs will follow the same model of abstract storytelling. Unlike Dear Esther, said Pinchbeck, A Machine for Pigs exists within the constraints of a "classic horror story," so it won't follow the same model entirely. "What we're going to try and do is we're going to try and keep the lessons that we've learned in terms of not funneling the plot down, not being really explicit with the player about what's going on, using inference, using suggestion," he said. "We're trying to have any opportunities we can to keep that open" for players to do the work of piecing together the ambiguous bits, which he says are especially important in a horror game. "You pretty much can't represent anything in a horror game that's going to be more scary than what the player thinks you're going to represent, and the moment you actually show it, you've lost an awful lot of the power you've got to scare them."
Scared Stiff: Amnesia and the evolution of the modern horror game
If it's horror, Colette Bennett knows it. This column is dedicated to everything frightening gaming has to offer, from ghostly little Japanese girls to flesh eating zombie dogs. You fumble through the darkness, your feet slopping in the rain. You have no idea where you are or how you even got here. An unfamiliar sound reverberates in the distance, its tinny undertones stinging your ears and furthering your sense of confusion. You're alone and have nothing to defend yourself with. And the only sound you can hear is that of your breathing, ragged with panic.There's no mistaking it – this is survival horror.Unlike the basic action and platform genre, the evolution of horror titles has followed a slow, twisty path. By the mid-nineties, it was known for its signature talent: the ability to reel you into a dark, unknown world like a helpless fish. Titles like Silent Hill and Resident Evil acted as some of the first passports into the journey we now refer to as "psychological horror." System Shock, Parasite Eve, Fatal Frame, and Siren were memorable trips into less-than-reassuring territory. Throw in some unexplained, mysterious figures, watch the world spin out of control, and you've got one hell of a recipe for an addictive genre. Who would have thought that fog-choked towns and shambling creatures who greet you with a spray of vomit could be so appealing?%Gallery-148212%
Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs aims to frighten you, even if you know what to expect
Amnesia proved, among other things, that atmosphere is one of the most important aspects in a horror title, trumping jumpy music, grotesque character designs and top-of-the-line graphics -- but now imagine Amnesia's panicked, clammy tone coming from a game as dark and beautiful as Dear Esther. Pure terror.This is what Amnesia developer Frictional Games has charged Dear Esther's thechineseroom with accomplishing in Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs."The thing is, if we don't frighten people as much as the original, then we've failed," Dan Pinchbeck of thechineseroom told Gamasutra. "But now we have to frighten people that know what to expect. The big design challenge is: How do we protect the things that make Amnesia great, and how do we evolve everything else to make a really fresh experience?"Pinchbeck wants players to be reminded of the original Amnesia with each shiver of fear, but to be so enthralled by the new, horrific world that it will feel as if "something has burrowed into your head and is just scratching its nails at you. But you're so hooked. Inside, you're peeling away like bodies from a pile and you just can't stop yourself," Pinchbeck said.Now that sounds like fun.
Building A Machine for Pigs and expanding the universe of Amnesia
It takes place sixty years after Amnesia: The Dark Descent at the turn of the twentieth century, yet the next game to carry the franchise's moniker will feel like familiar territory in one major respect: it is built to scare you senseless.It's six-o-clock in the morning. My tea jolts me awake. The street outside is silent. It's serene and peaceful all around me, until I call Frictional Games designer Thomas Grip. His voice booms in my headset; he's obviously excited. This is the first time his team can talk about his upcoming project. This is how I was introduced to Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs.
Dear Esther turned a profit in just 5 hours, 30 minutes
Last year Indie Fund voted to support Dear Esther, a rebuild of the popular Half-Life 2 mod, and it gave developer thechineseroom $55,000 in one lump sum. Indie Fund had its reservations: In an email to thechineseroom's Dan Pinchbeck before handing over the money, Indie Fund said the Steam audience may not understand Dear Esther and it proposed a release on PSN instead. This didn't happen, and thankfully so.Dear Esther recouped Indie Fund's $55,000 investment yesterday in just 5 hours and 30 minutes, selling 16,000 copies and becoming the top-selling title on Steam for the entire day. This means all the sales now are going directly to thechineseroom, whether to fund another game, add to this one or take a team-building sky-diving trip, we'll have to wait and see.
'Dear Esther' now launching in early 2012, moved over to Portal 2 engine
It's strange, isn't it? The day after we're supposed to give thanks for all the special things in life, we subject ourselves to unknown abuse all in the name of saving a buck. Let's instead give thanks for indie game projects that you won't ever find under the heel of a particularly ill-tempered Walmart shopper on this or any other Black Friday. Like Dear Esther for example, the promising Half Life 2 mod turned real boy, coming to Steam ... when exactly? The more calendrically challenged amongst you may not have realized this, but Dear Esther has already missed its proposed summer 2011 release window so you'll be glad to know it hasn't been summarily forgotten. Developer Dan Pinchbeck says the project has been successfully ported to the Portal 2 engine, and discussions with Valve indicate a release "very likely to be either the end of January or the beginning of February next year." Right alongside Episode 3, right guys? Guys? %Gallery-140285%
Dear Esther HL2 mod remake to be commercially released this summer
Selected in December as Mod DB's annual "Best Upcoming Mod," Dear Esther is actually a remake of a 2008 Half-Life 2 Source-engine mod by the same name. The original mod was developed by indie studio thechineseroom (at the University of Portsmouth, UK) and was "stumbled across" by Robert Briscoe, a former level designer at DICE who had worked on Mirror's Edge. While "far from perfect," Dear Esther had both intrigued and inspired Briscoe, he wrote in May 2009, describing it as "an interactive painting or story, told through the eyes of a dying man on a journey to try and make peace with his tormented mind." "The whole thing is enveloped in deep mystery and hidden meanings," he continued, "I had the idea of taking the groundwork for the mod and develop [sic] it into a fully fledged, production-quality product." Briscoe took his idea to the original creative director Dan Pinchbeck, who "was very enthusiastic about it, giving me his full support on the project." 21 months of steady development later and the Dear Esther remake is on track for a commercial release this summer on Steam. That's right -- Pinchbeck and Briscoe approached Valve, which was "impressed enough to grant a Source license for a full independent release," recounts today's announcement (oddly dated July 30, 2010) on the just launched dear-esther.com. "Rob was creating something so extraordinary," Pinchbeck told PC Gamer UK in the new issue (via Beefjack), "[that] it deserved a wider audience than we could give it as a mod." You can get a glimpse of Briscoe's recreation in the June 2010 test footage postead after the break. [Pictured: work-in-progress screenshot; source: Robert Briscoe's Devblog]
