So Let Us Melt (2017)
Creative/Game Director, Producer, Story Creation & Script, Narrative Director (including working with Mark Healy/SIDE on casting & voice direction, dialogue editing), Design Direction, Publisher Liaison (Google, including marketing + PR responsibilities), Concept Creation and development.
I think of this one as our lost game. It was one of a few ideas we pitched to Google when they approached us to make a Daydream game – there was also a locked-room time-travel mystery and an ‘immersive boardgame’ that then evolved into The 13th Interior, my truly lost game about pocket universes and welsh mythology that’s sitting in the concept vault I had to leave behind when I left TCR. But the idea of a science-fiction fairy-tale really appealed, it just felt like it fitted the tech, and I really wanted to do something around the idea of what we leave behind.
SLUM was, of course, limited by the tech. In retrospect, trying to make a game that covered a whole world and spanned millions of years on mobileVR was madness, but I genuinely think what Jessica and I often refer to as they “fuck it” instinct is behind why TCR’s games were always interesting, if often flawed. Risk-taking is famously hard to pull off in the games industry, and what is seen as risk is quite a low bar as well. You will fail if you take a lot of risks, but you’ll also do and make things that break out from the norm. For a while at least, we got to do that as a studio and I never take it for granted.
Anyway, SLUM had that soundtrack (for me, Jessica’s best work – the fusion of cellular electronica, choir and sweeping cinematic themes is genius and still utterly unique), it had an amazing voice performance from the great Siobhan Finneran (who I knew I wanted to be the narrator from the moment I came up with the idea), and actually the art team did a pretty good job of spinning a world from a tiny number of polys. And I still love the design of the Custodians which were inspired by Barbara Hepworth’s sculptures.
One thing with VR did give us was a sense of scale that traditional games can’t. The moment in the first level when the huge Custodian goes overhead is still wonderful, even if the game creaks in its ability to deliver a really deep immersive experience because it’s essentially just an on-rails thing (I think actually it’s the one time I’d side with the not-a-game crowd). The original design had a lot more emergent interaction with drone and the world – the moments where you trace a line with the wand to make flowers grow etc were supposed to be more integrated, so you were able to fire off ambient events throughout the game. We pushed too far with the visuals and scale and that stuff got wheeled back, but I’d maintain there’s a beautiful little traditional mobile title waiting to be re-imagined from SLUM that adds those mechanics back-in, because the world, story, music, voice work and visual concept of the game are all really lovely.
Lastly, the other inspiration for the game came from those old Ladybird books that have got an ironic dust-off recently. The original story idea for the game was an alt-history that was more steampunk, of a world of airships and locomotives but where these giant looping structures, created by some unknown lost civilisation, spanned the planet. It leant more on the discovery of the Custodians by the woken occupants of Polar City, who had slept while their world was terraformed. Then I wrote a short thing explaining the Custodians to kids, in the style of a Ladybird book. It started off with “This is a Custodian. It is a very clever and very kind machine, that created our world, while we all slept below the ice in Polar City. There aren’t any Custodians anywhere, anymore.”
The moment I wrote it I heard Siobhan’s voice in my head, and the story of 98 just poured out.
