Pixelsocks: Can you explain Spectre to me?

Daniel Ponce and Asher Vollmer

Asher: We’re calling it a biographical platformer. The idea behind it is that you’re an old man who has lived a full life, and now you’re looking back on it to figure out which memories were coordinated. The goal is actually to help him find meaning in his life: a thread that connects his memories together. The lose case is you pick a series of disjointed memories and the person you’re talking to says, “you’re not making any sense, old man. You should go to bed and stop worrying about it.” In short it’s about finding meaning, context, and exploring this old man’s memories.

Pixelsocks: Most games draw a thick line between the story narrative and the procedural narrative of player action. Spectre interweaves the two; why is that?

Asher: We were looking for a new way to tell stories. The game was the thesis project for our lead designer, Jamie. We didn’t want a linear game and we didn’t want to have to deal with a branching narrative. So we wrapped mini-stories into memories and laid them out in front of you to piece them together. The player can find them in any order, and they all tell a story that might be interpreted differently depending on which memories the player gets in what order. We’re very much fans of the player exploration and discovery.

Pixelsocks: The narrative is about as non-linear as it gets. I think if you mapped it, you’d get a bush: a hub with branching branched branches that isn’t overly long. Most games are more like a tree: long and narrow with branches at the end. Care to comment on the difference?

Asher: I like to think of it as a web where the intersections are stories to tell. You get dropped in the middle and you can go any way you like. There is a finite amount of story you can tell: 50 endings. However, there are a lot more ways to get to them so no user experience will ever be the same. That’s what we were going for, and we think we were successful.

Pixelsocks: A more agency-oriented description for the game might be as a minigame compilation that’s connected by a platforming hub. Would you say that’s a fair characterization?

Asher: I think yes, at least when the player starts out. The way we lead them along, with bright and dark memories, encourages you to explore the bright memories. However, once you’ve come along and you see the list of endings and you decide you want to pursue one, that’s when the game becomes a puzzle and the player really gets some agency. It’s when they really start to explore and see how the memories connect.

Pixelsocks: That connectedness must have required a lot of effort to make the pieces fit together. How did you make it work?

Asher: Jamie was designer, writer, and he did the voiceovers. He wrote down all this guy’s memories and then he would go through and tag them. One memory would be about brightness and flight. Another is about a friend. So as you go through, the game looks at the tags you’ve referenced on the backend. Luckily that’s not very clear to the player; we don’t like them thinking about that stuff.

Pixelsocks: It seems like there was a lot of careful planning to get the game working. However, has the GDC stampede through your booth taught you anything about your game that you didn’t already know?

Asher: Well, I didn’t write all the memories and so I haven’t seen all the endings. So players have been discovering new endings. Every memory has two endings, so I’ve seen new ways that the old guy sees certain memories. So it’s been fun to explore with them; it’s like I’ve played the game fifty times now.

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Tags:   asher vollmer · Bungie · GDC · gdc 2010 · IGF 2010 · spectre · Student ShowcaseNo Comments

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