Fullbright's latest game, Tacoma, underwent some major changes during development, and studio founder Steve Gaynor recently explained why they decided to pivot away from the game's original aesthetic and design.
"As much as we were trying to move away or to make the experience we were building feel legitimately different from Gone Home, we had still stuck with too many of our assumptions about it—like kind of the shape of how you moved through the game was still very much based on Gone Home," Gaynor said on the latest episode of our monthly interview show IGN Unfiltered.
He noted how they had AR figures in the game, which were "much more isolated" and ultimately not all that different than the audio diaries in Gone Home. "We just realized that we were not going as far as we needed to, and that the game that we were making contained ideas that were kind of being pointed towards—like the idea was there but we needed to do more with it," he said.
According to Gaynor, it was this realization that served as the turning point in development, where they said: "How do we not just have these AR figures be there while you're hearing this little story moment? How do we make them be like what the game is about?"
He also discussed why they moved away from the original aesthetic of the space station, which had "large and sweeping" spaces the player could propel themselves through in zero gravity. "That was theoretically cool, but it didn't support what we do as storytellers in our games, which is to make very relatable environments where you feel like... 'Oh, I can see what happened here. I can see how this person was living,'" Gaynor explained.
In order to accomplish this, they decided to make the size of the spaces smaller and rework the structure of the station so there was gravity where the characters lived, such that the player could find different objects laying on surfaces like the floor.
They also decided to make the AR scenes "more expansive and move around you," such that the player isn't just watching them, but also having a level of interaction with them. In this way Gaynor said they wanted to ensure "that your relationship to those characters and those moments are the core of the game, and what it's about in a new and unique way, instead of just being like a couple of additional strokes on top of what we had already done."
Read IGN's Tacoma review to find out why we found Fullbright's latest to be an experience that "builds an intriguing and disturbing future world that's surprisingly well-developed even within its short playtime of three to four hours." While you're at it, check out our look at how Fullbright gets environmental storytelling right with both Gone Home and Tacoma.
Also, be sure to check out our full IGN Unfiltered interview with Gaynor for more about his experiences as a game developer, including his time at Irrational Games, working on both BioShock 2: Minera's Den and BioShock Infinite.
Alex Osborn is a freelance writer for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @alexcosborn.
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