“Hello I like making dogs in video games. They are my friends and my enemies, however I did not put a dog in this one because it would have died.”
Uncertain on how best to start writing this blog post, Liz and Alex opted to write it for me, taking turns one word at a time. What you have just read is the result of this exercise. I have decided to write it without their help.
We are currently aboard a plane somewhere over the Atlantic ocean (I say this with the relative geographical confidence of someone with a small touch-screen map mounted into the chair in front of me and not someone you’d pick for the geography round at a pub quiz.) as we head to Orlando to reveal our game at NPC, among other activities. They also apparently want me to sing?
I confess, dear reader, that to my shame, I am not a particularly confident writer when it comes to this sort of thing. For one, none of this rhymes which frankly feels wrong and pushes against every sensibility I have when presented with a keyboard. (Not that sensibility is something I keep in particularly healthy stock.) A creative writer I am, an essayist I am not, as evidenced by the fact we are currently two-hundred and twenty two words into this blog and I have yet to say much at all.
However, one can only shirk responsibility to be entertainingly informative via blog onto other people for so long and if there was ever an occasion to shake the shirking then I suppose the reveal of our first major project is it. Though writing on a plane isn’t ideal, I’m trying to maintain a positive altitude about it. Mostly I’m just winging it.
We’ve been working on The Seventh Screening for about eighteen months now, though for most of that time it went by ‘Project Popcorn’. We went back and forth on titles for a long while. There was a point where you might have ended up reading the dev blog for ‘How the Limelight Burns’, and another where ‘Kleos: Fall of Holloway’ was up for consideration. It still feels a little odd not calling it Project Popcorn, and in truth, internally we still often do! But with each day I feel more and more confident we eventually settled on the right choice. Besides, I’ve drawn the logo now. Like, dozens of times until we got to the final one. I’m not doing it again.
So now you’ve all had a glimpse at the world we’re building. A world of silver screens and golden idols. A world of shining stars and even shinier door handles. Of mid-century lustre and the tireless machine of Hollywood churning beneath the surface.
As a film-maker, I’ve long been fascinated with this era of history; the early days of Hollywood as we know it leading up to its golden age. Cinema’s evolution from a technological curiosity into something that would come to define how we tell stories, how we share and absorb culture in this modern age.
The choice to set our game against this backdrop of Hollywood came as a marriage of this fascination and of technical convenience. When we were initially brainstorming ideas for what our game could be, we knew we wanted a game set in a contained, finite space. Somewhere large enough to explore and discover but not so large or vaguely defined that the scope of the project could creep. We wanted to make a world rich in story and detail where we could craft each part of that world, so we knew we wanted a clearly defined space versus somewhere like an open town, a forest, etc.
We worked our way through all the classic indie horror locales. We thought about a factory, an office building, a shopping mall – at one point I became quite attached to the idea of a game set in a lost and found – but then one meeting Alex suggested a cinema and to be honest, I felt a fool for not having thought of it sooner. It’s something both Alex and I are passionate about and what better place to set a story than in a world of storytellers? Within a few days from there, the Kleos was born. (Conceptually. It took a lot longer than that to actually build it – we’re still working on that!)
Our game is set in 1953, towards the tail end of what became known as Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’. ‘The Studio System’ was at its height, stars were owned by their studios and traded between like Pokémon cards, their lives and public personas carefully curated by those on the other sides of their contracts to be as marketable as possible. Studios had realised that, more than anything else, the faces on the screen are what sold tickets. It was the birth of manufactured celebrity and the perfect backdrop for a story about the price of fame and what parts of themselves someone might sacrifice in the name of ambition. As a content creator, it’s a story I’m excited to tell and not one without parallels in my own experience. But that, dear reader, is a topic for another blog.
Making a game has been a lifelong dream of mine and I’m very lucky to have found the team I have to be able to make it happen. I’m excited to bring you along for the ride. It’ll be a while before we can yell ‘Action!’ and let you play out our story, but it will be worth the wait.
