I recently played Gone Home the début title of The Fullbright Company; [SPOILERS]below is an analysis of the game-play elements which make Gone Home such a successful environmental-storyteller.I recently downloaded the ‘developer’s commentary edition’ of Gone Home which has been enhanced with sound bites from the development team – and special guests – on their experiences and thoughts on making Gone Home. During these sound bites Steve Gaynor the level designer on the game explained how a lot of ‘pointlessly interactive’ items were included in the game to add to the players ‘real’ experience. Gaynor said that if a player should feel that they should be able to (for example) turn on a tap, or pick up a pencil – this should be possible. In this way, he is following the advice from Smith and Worch’s GDC Talk on Environmental Storytelling – more specifically “Avoiding Disconnects” on slide 57.
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Disconnects are points in gameplay where “what a player can do and what the game depicts the non-player characters doing can be jarring” (Smith, 2010) or in another sense of the term, any point in a game where the player expects to be able to do something, and yet the game does not allow it. At that point a player will feel ‘disconnected’ from play. By Gaynor making sure that each tap or tissue box was interactive – and yet not additive to the narrative, he helped create a larger universe for the game to exist within. After all, one of the uses of a game environment is to create a cultural context for the game. This does not just mean the time-period or the social construct, but also of how the game plays, and what is possible and impossible within the game world (Salen, 2004).
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“And some of them were entirely worthless. I mean, if every single object in this otherwise startlingly believable mansion was part of some elaborate breadcrumb trail, it’d kill the illusion. That, though, is how Gone Home dug its hooks so deeply into me: it just sort of turned me loose in this tiny slice of mid-90s suburbia, never once held my hand, and let me interpret for myself what it all meant.” (Grayson, 2013)
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Another element to the pointless interactivity of some objects in Gone Home is that it adds to the significance of the objects you do find, which are key to the narrative in place. Steve Gaynor and Karla Zimonja discuss how they wanted to acknowledge the thorough and discerning attitudes of the player by ‘rewarding’ the player for being diligent in their search through the house. For example, if you fish out scrunched up paper from the waste bins in the game, you are ‘treated’ to extra elements to the story which fill it out laterally for the player.
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I want to be able to include a similar sense of crafty object placement which encourages the player to further explore my environment. Of course my possibilities will be limited by the amount of time I can allocate to such things as interactivity in the scene – especially as I do not have a background in scripting, or using Unity extensively before. I would like my work to be able to convey a similar extraordinary-ordinary feel to it.
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“…there isn’t a single physical character in the game aside from Katie Greenbriar – who you’re playing as – and that’s brilliant. It’s a game that dares to ask if raw curiosity is enough to keep players absorbed in its seemingly mundane world, and – based on what I played, at least – the answer is an absolute, unequivocal yes.”
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Below are some excerpts from an email I received from Kate Craig, the Environment Artist on Gone Home – Kate was so kind to take the time to answer my questions, and here are some of her responses.
How did you consider the layout of the house in relation to the development of the story?This is something I can’t take much credit for, as the layout of the house and the pacing of the story throughout it was the work of Steve, our level designer and writer. I created most of the larger assets and modular pieces of the house, but when it comes to merging those pieces with the story and lighting the space, I was fairly hands off at that point.We did discuss the feel of certain rooms before I started modeling, certainly – whether they should be smaller, include more angles and nooks, whether a given room should feel formal, playful, well-used, or cold and forgotten.
When approaching my own project I hope to be able to emulate the same moods and feels that Kate is describing here. I plan to achieve this through mood boards and colour palettes for each room, keeping in mind how adjacent rooms will either complement or clash with each other. Something that I am adamant to having different to Gone Home is that I would like my environment to be viewed in daylight. I understand that this will require further research into the lighting possibilities in Unity, but I would like my environments to have fresh morning light bathing them. Hence when I grey box the environment I will use mental ray’s physical sun and sky for rendering tests.
This layout of possible solutions for the east wing of the house (see below) was an interesting lesson. I was always pushing for a house that felt more like a traditional Victorian, where one room leads into the next and so forth, with an emphasis on pocket doors between rooms to really expand a space, but the hall serves a vital function in level design – it’s a sort of guide, a main artery – and without it progression through a space becomes more muddled. It’s a blank slate in a way, where a player can reset before moving forward in the story – hallways are tremendously important for narrative in some ways.
I will endeavour to utilize ‘neutral’ spaces in between rooms of focus for the player to be able to re set as Kate mentions above. It is interesting to me that Kate made this point as when I was researching the design of Day Centres for students on the Autistic Spectrum, hallways played a large part in the design for those buildings too. They allowed for students to navigate their space easily, and to better acclimatise to their surroundings.
What would you say in your opinion made the environments so immersive of the 90s and of the family as a whole?The house is obviously an older Victorian, with elements from various eras from that point until present day, so I’m happy that the space, despite being set in a much older home, still feels suitably 90s. We were shooting for a certain level of authenticity, and we can probably credit personal experience and research to much of that. If we remembered something from our own teenage years, some piece of furniture or design motif (dusty rose and hunter green were BIG in the 90s), we did our best to get it somewhere in the house.
There was an attempt to make certain areas the space of a given character, too. For example, Terrance’s study, where he feels his professional frustration and the heaviness of the house weighing on him – it’s a windowless, damasked old room with a heavy desk and little light. When he starts writing his novels at the end, where he feels free and more self assured, he’s working in the airy space of the greenhouse on a makeshift table with his trusty JAZZ mug.
Kate’s comments about how the rooms reflect the emotional states of the characters at certain points in time is so true of Gone Home; for example, the attic is where you see how the relationship of Sam – the youngest daughter of the family – and her girlfriend has developed in that space (see picture below).
Now, onto the “Exploration Goal” of the game, and how this is implemented through the player being able to inspect hand-written objects in the game (Rogers, 2010). In Rogers’ book he describes the ‘exploration goal’ as;
“allowing the player to discover the story at their own pace. [The game] let[s] the player explore the environment and create the story in their own order”
You can see that this technique of storytelling is clearly in place in Gone Home. In terms of my own work, I will need to focus on how I can allow the player the freedom to roam, and yet still keep them on a loosely directed path along the narrative in place.
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In Clockwork World’s article the writer discusses the varying levels of narrative within the game Gone Home (Clockwork Worlds, 2013). It was only upon reflecting of his first experience of the game, and then a second play of it – that he realised that there were more pieces to the narrative-puzzle to be found. It was not that any new items or rooms were found – more that the same items he came across were viewed with a different mind set. I aim to provide my scene with a narrative which allows the possibility of replay by the player. In order to do this I will analyse how Gone Home has left so much up to the player to piece together. In order for this to work in game, I will need to research how to trigger UI elements ‘popping up’ and how to best maintain the quality of textures when doing so. For example looking into mipmaps!
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In the developers edition of the game they talk at length about how it was important to get each characters handwriting to be just right. Funnily enough, this made me think about the research I did looking into how Downton Abbey was put together. Due to when the film was set, it was vital for them to have distinctive letters available on set – and due to filming constraints – several copies of the same letter. This is due to several shots featuring the character opening the letter – and if they need to re-shoot the scene, a new letter has to be produced for them to open! Another element I found inspiring of ‘Behind the Scenes at Downton’ was their technique for lighting large areas of the set with ‘natural’ looking lights – for more on that see my Downton Abbey Post (Rowley, 2013).
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Finally, a quote from my previous post which features the work of Frances Glessner Lee (Nutshell Studies, 2013);
The models undermine the notion of the home as a safe haven and reveal it to be a far more complex sphere.
I think this fits in really nicely with my research on Gone Home showing the family home as a vehicle for so much more than memories of birthdays and chores.
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Bibliography
Clockwork Worlds (2013) The Transgression – You Can Do Better | ClockworkWorlds. [ONLINE] Available at: http://clockworkworlds.com/post/58411117679/the-transgression-you-can-do-better. [Accessed 24 November 2013].
Craig, K. (2013) Gone Home Environment Art November 8th 2013 Email to Robin Silcock from Kate Craig.
Grayson, N. (2013) Impressions: Gone Home -Rock Paper Shotgun [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/11/15/impressions-gone-home/ [Accessed 15 November]
Nutshell Studies (2013) Nutshell Studies. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.corinnebotz.com/Corinne_May_Botz/Nutshell_Studies.html. [Accessed 10 October 2013].
Rogers, S. (2010) Level Up! The guide to great Video Game Design Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Rowley, E. (2013) Behind the Scenes at Downton Abbey London: Harper Collins Publishers.
Salen, K. Zimmerman, E. (2004) Rules of Play; Game Design Fundamentals Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Smith, H. and Worch, M. (2010) “What Happened Here” Environmental Storytelling, San Francisco: Game Developers Conference Lecture, March 2010
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