Hi! I’m Luis Rodero, and I’m the target of all nagging and the shoulder to cry on when everything goes to hell. In other words I’m the tools programmer here at Frictional. I started back in 2006 (that’s a while!) as a contributor; I made a few minor additions to the HPL Engine and then not-so-minor ones (like the OpenAL implementation that was added back in the day). I was hired for full-time work in 2008, when work on Amnesia had just started
I’m Patrik Dekhla, scripter and gameplay programmer. I joined Frictional back in 2012 and since then I’ve worked full-time on SOMA, making the gameplay feel awesome and terrifying.
So I recently saw this reaction video to Alien Isolation and I thought it showcased a few interesting problems with horror games. These are not issues that are specific to this game, but that plague horror games in general. We’ve had these problems in all of our games and are currently trying avoid them as much as possible in our upcoming game, SOMA. So I’m not trying to take a shot at Alien Isolation here (I’m looking forward to playing it!) but the video demonstrated these issues so clearly that it’s worth focusing on it for this article. That said, let’s move on to the two hardest problems in horror.
This blog post will be about a new way to approach narrative design in games – the 4 Layers Approach. It is based on a GDC talk I gave in March this year. The approach is primarily meant to suggest a workflow that focuses on the story and makes sure the narrative and gameplay are connected. The end goal is to create games that provide a better interactive narrative.
HPL3 is our first engine to support both PC and consoles. To make it easy to support multiple platforms and multiple shading languages we have decided to use our own shading language called HPSL. Shader code written in HPSL goes through a shader parser to translate it to the language used by the hardware.
I am making this blog as place with extra resources for a talk I will be giving at GDC on Tuesday next week (14.20 at the Narrative Summit). The talk is called “Making Storytelling a Fundamental Part of the Gameplay Experience” and will be about a new approach to narrative design called 4-Layers.
I am Mikael Hedberg and I’m the writer. I write all sorts of text that shows up in the game. I give actors lines to say and then ask them to scream a few times, because their character will most likely die at some point.
So I’m back with another HPL LevelEditor feature update, the Poser EditMode.
Hello! My name Rasmus Gunnarsson and I started working for Frictional Games as a freelance artist back in 2010 to help out with the final stages of Amnesia’s development. Later, I became an intern, and that landed me full-time employment as a concept artist / 3D artist / level artist / whatever’s needed artist.
Transcription of radio message intercepted at XX/XX/XXX.
UNKNOWN: Look, this is the short version. — [CORRUPT DATA] — gone rogue. We’re not sure what it’s up to, but it looks like it’s messing with the help. Are you hurt in any way, are you guys okay?
