This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they underwent to make the best bits of their games. This time, Darkwood [official site].
All roads lead deeper into the woods, says one of the twisted characters in Darkwood, an excellent and haunting game of survival in a nightmarish forest. There are horrors in its tangles of subsuming wood, things you won t quite understand, characters who aren t quite human, aren t quite friendly. A game in the tradition of Pathologic and STALKER, Darkwood was developed by a Polish team of three called Acid Wizard Studio, and in many ways, it sounds as if that mordant quote is a comment on their experience of making it.
Their desire to marry a strong non-linear story, meaningful choice, a threatening atmosphere, and a procedurally generated world that changes shape during play, led to serious challenges. As team working on their first-ever game, they d blundered into tackling some of the biggest design questions in games today. It was an extremely stressful experience, artist and writer Artur Kordas tells me, as Darkwood s development pushed into five long years. And part of their solution? Killing permadeath – a decision that led them deeper into the woods. (more…)