1Up: Fahrenheit development story

For any Fahrenheit fans out there, I’ve just found another nice article on 1UP, from September – a post-mortem description of the development of Fahrenheit by its writer/director/designer David Cage. It’s long and the site’s based in the US so they keep calling it Indigo Prophecy but there are some interesting bits there:

“I wanted to create a game that anyone could easily enjoy, that would not be based on the mastering of controls but on involvement. It would not rely on violence but on emotions, would not reduce interactivity to destruction but would try to show that it is possible to interact with something or someone without a gun…

…Initially, Indigo Prophecy was supposed to be sold as an episodic game. I started working on the plot and the first episodes based on the TV series format, with an ongoing story, recurring characters and cliffhangers at the end of each of the 12 episodes.”

On the design of the action sequences where you react by pushing buttons corresponding to certain colours, he has this to say:

“We discovered that while the center of the eye was focused on the 2D symbols in the middle of the screen, the periphery of the eye tries to have a sense of what’s going on in the background. In my mind, this is exactly what would happen if the player were in the situation for real; the center of his eyes would be focused on his next move while also trying to see what’s going on around him. It requires some time for the eye to get used to the system, but when it works, it creates a kind of third dimension that significantly increases immersion.”

Uh… not in my world. If I watched the background I had all sorts of trouble hitting the keys fast enough. I had to stare fixedly between the circles and ignore everything else, though I imagine it would have been easier on a console with analog sticks instead of buttons. Did you find you could finish the scenes and watch the action at the same time?