Hey! Today I’m sharing the results of the last two weeks of work on the ParticleEditor with you. I’ve had loads of time for additions and improvements — I’m just gonna go over the most notable ones briefly.
Aaron Clifford: 3D Artist
Hello! I’m Aaron Clifford, one of the artists here at Frictional Games. Right now there are four of us artists and I’m relatively new around here. I started collaborating with Frictional back in April 2012 as a contractor, making props and other smaller bits for SOMA. A few months later I was brought on to the team full-time and, as they say, the rest is history.
People of Frictional: Luis Rodero
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
Patrik Dekhla: Gameplay Programmer
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.
Alien: Isolation and The Two Hardest Problems in Horror
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.
4-Layers, A Narrative Design Approach
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.
Tech Feature: HPSL Shading Language
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.
GDC 14 Lecture Resources
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.
Mikael Hedberg: Writer
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.
LevelEditor Feature: Poser EditMode
So I’m back with another HPL LevelEditor feature update, the Poser EditMode.
