{"id":122568,"date":"2020-12-26T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-26T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/news\/2020\/12\/best_of_2020_sam_barlow_on_bringing_telling_lies_to_switch_his_directing_style_and_his_next_project"},"modified":"2020-12-26T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-12-26T12:00:00","slug":"best-of-2020-sam-barlow-on-bringing-telling-lies-to-switch-his-directing-style-and-his-next-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2020\/12\/26\/best-of-2020-sam-barlow-on-bringing-telling-lies-to-switch-his-directing-style-and-his-next-project\/","title":{"rendered":"Best Of 2020: Sam Barlow On Bringing Telling Lies To Switch, His Directing Style, And His Next Project"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Telling<\/a><\/figure>\n

Over the holiday season we’ll be republishing a series of Nintendo Life articles, interviews and other features from the previous twelve months that we consider to be our Best of 2020<\/a>. Hopefully, this will give you a chance to catch up on pieces you missed, or simply enjoy looking back on a year which did have some highlights \u2014 honest!<\/em><\/p>\n

This interview was originally published in May 2020.<\/em><\/p>\n

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For many gamers the term ‘FMV’ may still be loaded with memories of shlocky ‘cinematic’ clips crammed into games in the early 1990s. The memory space of the CD-ROM enabled developers to ‘wow’ people who had invested in their first personal computer with compressed video clips, not to mention the poor gamers who until then had had to ‘make do’ with pixelated blips and blobs. When the clips weren’t simply serving as cutscenes, the results generally ranged from so-bad-they’re-good<\/em> to just-plain-bad<\/em>, and it has taken a long time for the genre to shake its reputation for low-quality video and lower-quality acting.<\/p>\n

We’ve come a long way since then, of course, and there is a small and select group of developers still exploring the potential of interactive movies, and none are more interesting than Sam Barlow. Having previously worked on the Silent Hill franchise (notably, the excellent Silent Hill: Shattered Memories<\/a><\/strong> for Wii), Barlow struck out on his own with the engrossing interactive hit Her Story<\/strong> in 2015.<\/p>\n

A collaboration with developer Furious Bee, Telling Lies<\/a><\/strong> is a spiritual sequel of sorts; a detective thriller which has you reviewing NSA footage of four protagonists’ intimate conversations over a 2-year period. We very much enjoyed the game<\/a> and recently had the chance to question its creator about the logistics of making a compelling interactive movie, the process of bringing it to consoles, and returning to the horror genre with his next project…<\/p>\n

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Nintendo Life: First off, just how do you go about writing something like Telling Lies? With so many intricate links and relationships for the player to uncover in a non-linear fashion, do you write it \u2018straight\u2019 and find the complexity in the edit? Tell us about the writing process.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sam Barlow:<\/strong> The process I kinda developed across Her Story and Telling Lies was to spend a lot of time up front on the research, the character\u2019s lives, back stories, etc. so that when we get into the plot of the game itself we have enough layers built up to support players really digging into it. So that in any given moment there are two or three things happening at once in people\u2019s minds.<\/p>\n

\"Telling<\/a><\/figure>\n

With Telling Lies it was important to carefully map out the main characters\u2019 lives over the two years of the story, ensure those stories sparked off each other and were well balanced against each other. I can tell you what each of them was doing for every day of that period! Then we write the scenes and really just do that from the characters\u2019 perspectives, trying to create interestingly authentic, organic moments. Finally, we then have a stage where the computer analyzes the script and points out balancing issues. Scenes with no good searches to find them, words that are over or under used. We iterate and iterate from here, tweaking scenes until the computer thinks things are fine.<\/p>\n

Anyone who played Her Story will feel immediately at home with the RETINA system and its keyword searches, which feels beautifully weighted in the amount of information it displays while letting the player piece clues together. After the success of Her Story, did you feel hesitant at all to return a similar set-up for Telling Lies?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Definitely when Her Story came out I wasn\u2019t keen to jump into a direct sequel. But once time had passed I was interested in exploring further the element of Her Story that I thought were most unique \u2014 the idea of exploring story\/video in the way you would a 3D world in a normal game. I wanted to see how we could build on that idea, whilst telling a very different story on a very different (bigger!) canvas.<\/p>\n

One of the weird things about creating a new genre is how the games are seen to look the same. If I was making a military FPS, I could tweak something tiny \u2014 say the reload mechanic \u2014 and it would be seen as a big innovation. But because Her Story is such a radically different game in itself, even though Telling Lies has many departures from the first game, from a distance it looks the same! To me the games feel like siblings \u2014 they share the same parents and genetics, but end up growing into two very different individuals!<\/p>\n

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If I was making a military FPS, I could tweak something tiny \u2014 say the reload mechanic \u2014 and it would be seen as a big innovation.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Finding that delicate keyword balance to create intrigue must have been tough to achieve, and doesn\u2019t seem like the sort of thing that\u2019s easy to change after the footage is in the can. How do you strike the right balance? How do you playtest and tweak a game like this?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We played the game as we developed the script. We had a program that would turn the script into fake movie clips with timed out subtitles. So we\u2019d \u201cplay\u201d it and get a sense for the scope of it, the way things were laid out. Then once we had a full script that we liked and that the computer liked we recorded a read through with actors and myself, just talking heads, over a few days. We used that footage to make an alpha build of the game and put that through several play tests. We\u2019d have people play for 3-4 hours and track their progress. It was reassuring to see how well people \u2018got\u2019 the experience even with very simple footage \u2014 and we used the data to help tweak some areas and improve the general flow and balance of things. Once that<\/em> script was then locked we moved into production…<\/p>\n