Interviews
House of Tales’ Martin Ganteföhr chats about The Moment of Silence
“To me, pacing the story was by far the biggest problem.”
A mysterious police action late at night, which is later disavowed by police officials leads the hero, Peter Wright, into an involved conspiracy in the taut political thriller, The Moment of Silence, a pending PC release from Digital Jester, House of Tales and The Adventure Company.
It takes a lot of energy, and creativity to create a compelling adventure game that wears an overcoat of thriller variety. But from all accounts, The Moment of Silence has the ingredients down.
For an in-depth look at the game, check out Aceinet’s preview posted today.
Martin Ganteföhr, of House of Tales, took time to talk about the title.
Question: This game was delayed, in part, due to the sheer size of it. Can you give us some sort of idea of what that entails in terms of how much territory the game encompasses and how many hours of game time players are likely to derive from it?
Martin: Actually, the original German version was out exactly on schedule, but we had to do the English localization almost simultaneously, which turned out to result in a too huge amount of work. I think it was a good decision not to hurry it out the door too early, but rather take the care that needs to be taken with the localization of a story-driven game. Bad acting or recording errors can ruin the entire experience, and MOS has close to 8,000 lines of recorded dialog. You just don’t record that on a weekend. Looking back, I think it has been worth the wait; the English language version is excellent. About the playing time: It, of course, depends on how experienced the player is, but 20-30 hours is a safe figure.
Q: The game description indicates this is a point-and-click type of adventure. Are there helpers of any kind along the way should players be stuck in a certain level?
Martin: We have implemented a Hotkey that will highlight the most important interaction possibilities in each scene. While we think that the game isn’t particularly hard, and enough hints to the solution of puzzles are provided by the characters and the overall game-world logic, the H-key is there to prevent frustration and getting stuck just because of a missing item. Hardcore adventure gamers won’t use the Hotkey a lot, but I think for casual gamers it is a useful feature.
Q: The game begins with the disappearance of a man's neighbor, and it’s termed a political thriller. Would it be revealing too much of the plot if we asked if the neighbor was just the wrong house, or does the game have much deeper undertones than that? What does the title of the game refer to?
Martin: Actually, the title of game refers to the very core of the entire game, that’s why I really don’t want to spoil it here. Let me just say that MOS asks questions about surveillance, technology, power, and the intelligence of machines. This game has political undertones, and it references today’s life in many ways. But still, it is of course a game in the first place. The purpose of MOS is to entertain people with a political thriller concept.
Q: Is this a game in which players will have to use their brains all the time, or is there some reflexive gameplay involved as well?
Martin: No. There is one particular situation that you could actually called a “timed sequence”, but the game will teleport you back to the situation right before it if you don’t manage it. There is action in this game (you would expect that in a thriller), but the action takes place in cutscenes, which means: Action is part of the narrative, but not part of the gameplay.
Q: When creating a game like this, and trying to achieve that feel of a taut thriller, what are the biggest challenges you face?
Martin: To me, pacing the story was by far the biggest problem. Since a game is an interactive experience, you cannot predict how long it will take players to overcome an obstacle. At certain points, too hard puzzles can slow down a game and affect the overall dramaturgy. That’s hard to balance. Other than that, the writing of a game like this is of course very complex. Much of a political conspiracy thriller’s appeal lies in how a seemingly overwhelming amount of seemingly unimportant or unintelligible detail is slowly linked together to form a coherent, threatening whole. Having the players guessing about the driving force behind a game world throughout the entire game is a real challenge for a writer.
Q: What type of graphics engine does this game employ, and what does it allow you to do to enhance the mysterious and dangerous feel of the game?
Martin: It’s a 2,5D engine with pre-rendered, animated backgrounds and 3D characters. We make a lot of use of real-time effects like rain, snow and even real-time camera moves. The mysterious and threatening feel of the game is created by the design and nature of its locations, I like to think, and by a rather cold, distanced art style. This is a game about a possible future, and as you might imagine, it isn’t a particularly comfortable future.
Q: When trying to realize that anticipatory tension of this type of game, helping to propel that feeling along are the musical score and voice acting. Does this game feature an original score and if so, who is the composer? How did you go about creating the voice action scenes (as in, did any other media - movie or television - serve as inspiration for the type of acting you wanted)?
Martin: The game’s soundtrack is something that we are very proud of. It features more than 80 minutes of original music and was composed by Dynamedion, incredibly talented game score composers, and good friends of ours. We’re very happy that the soundtrack has its own record deal, which is kind of a novum here in Germany – I don’t know of any other soundtrack CDs except Myst and GTA, and I could of course imagine worse company than that.
Well, we were of course looking for a movie-like voice acting style. Since the voices were recorded off-screen and take by take. This required a lot of direction, but any other technique would have resulted in ten times the studio time, and I’m very happy with the results. The English version captures the spirit and the vision of the game, that’s why I hope it will be enjoyed in North America just as much as this has been the case in other territories.
Q: Does this game support any co-op or other multiplayer features?
Martin: I think sitting with a friend in front of the monitor (as many adventure gamers love to do) doesn’t count, so my answer has to be: No.
Q: What do you feel is the first thing that game players will find compelling about this tale, that will draw them in and hook them?
Martin: I like to think that a disappearing neighbor is a perfect hook. The game gives you a subconscious feeling from the very beginning that the lives of the game’s lead Peter Wright and his neighbor Graham Oswald are connected to each other in a mysterious way. There is an immediate motivation to figure out what has torn the lives of both apart.
Share
Digg This
Glink It