I have been working for Microsoft for almost 12 years now, but I have never been driven by the mission statements. It has always been people around me. Yet, I think it’s important to lay out why and what I want to create here and how. I mean, the worst that can happen is that we will have a good laugh about this in a few years.
Why? I want to tell stories that I have been playing out in my head for years now and there is no better medium than video games. I want to bring and trigger emotions into our ever-more sarcastic and busy society. I want to leave something of value, of me, behind.
What?
We build worlds filled with stories.
You will find the above in About section and I am trying to capture two most important components of games I want to make.
Starting in the back, we have stories, storytelling. I don’t want to make sandboxes that you can sink hours and hours into, like Dotas, Civilizations or Minecrafts of the world. Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of respect (and hours played) for these great games. They are absolutely amazing when played and experienced with friends, but having played Dota for over 4,000 hours, I know I could have spent most of that time better and I don’t want to impose the same costs on the others. I want games to play like a book, you read through it once, maybe twice to discover some plot twists, but most importantly, it’s the story that drives you forward and its conclusion let’s you move on. It’s respectful to players time.
Then building worlds, and this is probably more difficult in practice than I anticipate, but I think about game world as a collection of systems that interact with each other in unscripted ways, which makes the world feel alive. You can think of reputation system in KDC2. Or another example, a reindeer herd defined as a set of basic behaviors like search for food, run away from threats, but otherwise it moves around the world freely with certain randomness to it. That’s a system, and you can have similar system for wolf packs and these systems may or may not collide – interact with each other, and you, as a player, may or may not experience that.
So, live worlds in which you play out gripping stories.
How? It’s never been easier to make games, yet it’s never been more difficult to succeed given the volume and latest developments in the gaming industry. I will focus on the first part of that statement, as it enables small teams to create a great things not possible before, leveraging constraints to create unique art and experiences that large studios cannot afford. And hey, digital publishing means there is an opportunity to reach everyone. The dream is a small, physically collocated team of developers and artists bursting with creativity, easy.
And of course, for those who heard me daydreaming about this in person, imagine few kilometers of private gravel road leading to a wood & glass self-sustainable building tucked deep in the Scandinavian forest :).
Next time, I will finally share a bit more about ‘Winter Winter‘, the first project of Here But There.
