I’m Marc Nicander, I started working for Frictional Games as a freelance artist back in 2006 and got hired full-time when development on Amnesia started in 2008. When I was freelancing I was still a student so I did my work in my 13 square meter student apartment but I have since managed to get a larger space.
The foundational design pillars of SOMA. When creating a game I think it is crucial to have a few basic rules that underlie all other decisions. That way it is much easier to keep everything on track and get the final game to play out as intended. For SOMA our intention is to craft an experience where players become deeply connected and affected by the game’s world and themes.
Hey there! So I finally dropped by to write a quick post on our stuff after quite a long hiatus (exactly 3 years, 3 months and 8 days long according to my last post) and Thomas pretty much took over the blog. Right now most of you might be wondering who’s typing even . The name is Luis and I mainly code the tools we use here at Frictional (also the ones you might have been using for making your own Amnesia custom stories) After the quick introduction, here comes a little editor feature showoff.
I’m Jens Nilsson, one of the people that started the company in 2006. Back then my work space was dubbed the “Pink Room” and in it all the Penumbra and Amnesia magic happened. The previous occupant of the apartment had a young girl and that room was the girl’s room. We did not get around to give it some new paint until the year before we moved out. I dug and dug but could unfortunately not find a picture of it. Anyway, I’ve always had the luxury of having a dedicated room to work in and currently I am located in a cozy attic space.
Linear-space lighting is the second big change that has been made to the rendering pipeline for HPL3. Working in a linear lighting space is the most important thing to do if you want correct results.
It is an easy and inexpensive technique for improving the image quality. Working in linear space is not something the makes the lighting look better, it just makes it look correct.
My name is Thomas Grip and I am one of the two founding members of Frictional Games. For the first few years at Frictional Games I used to work from my living room, on a desk placed next to the TV.
From time to time we get requests from people who want to license our HPL2 engine in order to make a commercial game. This is quite flattering, but the answer is always “no”. Our reply is to simply state that there is no documentation, we do not have time for support and they are better …
A while back Chris Pruett (creator of the excellent Chris’s Survival Horror Quest and currently at work with some creepy stuff at Robot Invader) and I had some discussion about common horror / puzzle tropes over twitter. Now all of these little nuggets, and more that came up during subsequent mail discussions, have been collected into a nice blog post by Chris. If you are ever going to make a survival horror please read this first.
After more than two weeks of teasing, we are happy to properly announce our new game: SOMA. It is a sci-fi horror game played from a first person perspective with the goal to deliver a truly disturbing experience. Having worked on this project for over three years now, it is really nice to finally reveal it to the world!
The year is 1899. Wealthy industrialist Oswald Mandus has returned home from a disastrous expedition to Mexico. Wracked by fever, haunted by dreams of a dark machine, he recovers consciousness in his own bed with no idea of how much time has passed since his last memory. As he struggles to his feet, somewhere beneath him, an engine splutters, coughs, roars into life…
