A Machine for Pigs (2013)

Creative/Game Director, Producer, Story Creation & Script, Narrative Director (including casting, voice direction, dialogue editing and implementation), Level Design & Scripting, Publisher relations, marketing + PR, QA, Concept creation and development.

I always loved Adam Smith’s write up of Pigs in Rock, Paper, Shotgun and felt like he got the game and what we were trying to do with it. It’s not a perfect game by a long way – you can really feel our inexperience in many aspects of it – but what it gets right, it really gets right (for me, at least). It was the last game I did all the voice direction on, and the last one I was actively doing level design, scripting and asset placement on. I think it’s also the one where I got good at voice-over placement, which is a surprisingly tough job that experience has shown me a lot of designers struggle with.

Pigs was contentious when it was released because it sat under the Amnesia brand. Thomas (Grip, from Frictional) and I talked a lot about this at the time, and knew it would create some ruffles, but he was keen to see us push the IP in a different direction in terms of the relative weighting of story and gameplay. There were mechanics that got cut that if I had the chance to go back, I’d definitely want to put in. A case in point is that we never cracked the AI system properly which meant the manpig encounters didn’t really fly. Those areas were built as larger hunt spaces than existed in Dark Descent, I was pushing for more of a traditional hunt/stealth game.

You can see where this is going in the section under the church with the hiding cages for example, but we didn’t get the pigs working well enough to make those happen. That tied into the ‘flickering lantern’ idea which was your danger radar, but also then made you visible and a target for the hunting enemies, so it added a risk/reward mechanic to make up for the lack of sanity meter. As a result, the lantern flicker ended up as atmospheric device rather than the active mechanic it was designed for, more like the radio in Silent Hill than something you were actively using to not just locate but also manipulate the monsters. Like most things that don’t make it off the drawing board, it got reinvented in the early prototyping of Still Wakes the Deep.

I still maintain getting rid of the sanity meter was the right thing to do by the way, even if it wasn’t popular with lots of Amnesia fans. My problem with it was once you knew how to game it, then all of the fear bled out of the game, it just became an exercise in resource management. We knew we’d have a lot of DD players coming to Pigs who already figured that out, so it would be more of a problem for player experience than a bonus.

Losing the inventory though? Yeah, the game would have been better with one. Unfortunately time and budget were against us on that one. Maybe with better prototyping earlier and a faster decision on inclusion it would have made it in, but it’s just one of those things. There’s always stuff in a shipped game you’re not happy with, so you get used to it.

Overall though, Pigs bucked the trend in horror games at that point, and got comparisons to Silent Hill in its focus on psychological rather than mechanical horror, so I’ll take that. And I do think it’s possibly the best end to a game we made. Mark Roper’s voice work on that monologue of the Machine as you climb the temple is brilliant.