Newly independent game director and writer Sam Barlow.
Climax game director and writer Sam Barlow has left the UK studio to go indie, with work already under way on his solo debut, a crime fiction game called Her Story. PC, iOS and Android are the target platforms initially, with others to follow, potentially.
Best known for writing and overseeing the development of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Barlow’s decision to set up as an indie was borne out of frustration with existing game narratives and industry structures. “I’m frequently bemoaning the games industry’s characters, its narrow focus on a limited set of types, so a big part of the impetus to go indie was to just bypass that problem,” he tells us. “I want to explore authentic characters who have a truth to impart, characters who aren’t necessarily aspirational or designed with one eye on the action figure range.”
Barlow spent 12 years working at UK studio Climax, and says that his departure from the developer will allow him to explore game storytelling in a much deeper way than he was able to at a larger outfit. “I realized that getting to work on the things that I’m passionate about was going to get tougher and tougher,” he tells us. “A lot of the publisher money is being spent on games-as-service, games that are much more social, procedural. The character driven videogame is increasingly becoming a rarer, more expensive beast. So when you do get to work on one, the restrictions are that much greater.
“I’ve been very lucky with the IP I’ve gotten to work with at Climax – it’s enabled me to try and to do things that I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. But there’s a really small list of IP like that.”
Barlow says he’s honoured to have worked on the Silent Hill series – but his new game simply couldn’t be made at a studio like Climax. You can read our Making Of Shattered Memories here.
Barlow says that studios like Simogo, Cardboard Computer, Chinese Room, Galactic Café and The Fullbright Company have made videogame storytelling a vibrant, exciting place to be right now, and he hopes to enrich that space further with Her Story. It’ll be developed with a very singular vision, he says. “I look at people in other media, like Shane Carruth who last year put out Upstream Color, which was an amazing film and he did everything on it – wrote, directed, acted, distributed, scored it. That attitude of just going out there and making stuff happen, rather than having to get permission, really appeals.”
Barlow is aware of the inherent risks of setting up as an independent, though. It is getting more difficult to get noticed online amid all of the other indie games out there right now, but he is confident that his new project is sufficiently different to the games available today. “I’m expecting a love-hate reaction to what I show, but that hopefully guarantees a reaction, a discussion around it,” he tells us. “I’m really interested in seeing how to reach out to different audiences – get the message out in places that have no real gaming content, try and put the game in front of people who have PCs or tablets but don’t identify as gamers so much.”
That means “going deep on story,” says Barlow. He plans to spend the next six months to a year working on Her Story’s narrative, lavishing the same kind of time and effort on its script as a novelist or screenwriter might. It’s an approach that’s simply not possible within the traditional model, he says. “It just doesn’t like to sit and wait for stuff like that. Publishers greenlight games with an end date in mind and there’s never enough time – certainly not to say ‘we’ll spend the first year on paper’. I’m going to make some bold choices that would never make sense on a publisher’s money. These are choices I know will turn some people off – those are choices you can never make when you’re chasing a Metacritic, or when you have studio overheads and a team of a hundred people working on them.”
Barlow is a keen admirer of Gone Home’s environmental storytelling, but his new title Her Story will focus squarely on actors’ performances, he tells us.
After that long period honing the game and its story on paper, Barlow will begin to recruit more staff to develop the game in earnest, the longterm plan being to grow with every release and establish an ongoing dialogue with players throughout development and after the release of each game. ”I want to show that there is a demand for this kind of thing and raise the scale of effort each time,” he tells us. “But I think each time it would see a shrinking back down for an extended development period to prove the idea on paper.”
Her Story is a game with “performance at its heart” says Barlow, but it is being designed with some restrictions in mind to keep the huge expense of performance capture to a minimum. “Part of what I realized was that performance is key to the kind of game I want to make. More and more I’ve loved working with actors and seeing how amazingly they can help communicate the ideas, emotions of a work. Subtext is the real alchemy of visual storytelling, but frequently it’s the one thing games lack.”
This is what marks out Her Story as different to games like Gone Home and Dear Esther, says Barlow – a focus on character, rather than storytelling through scenario. ”I want to put a character on screen who has the depth, the authenticity of characters from great movies, novels and TV serials by focusing on an authored experience, taking the time to build that story and trusting it to a performance, and show how the interactivity can be a part of this,” he adds. “There are very few games that can communicate the sense of a whole character, or a life lived in the way that we’ve seen other media do – I’d like to achieve that.”
The post Why Climax’s Sam Barlow is going independent to develop crime fiction title Her Story appeared first on Edge Online.
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