Exclusive: Director Sean Krankel Talks Oxenfree
David Gelmini
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If you haven’t already played Oxenfree (review), then what the hell are you waiting for? It’s only January; yet, it could very well be the best game of 2016.
I had the privilege of speaking with the game’s director, Sean Krankel, recently; and below is a transcript of our Skype conversation, in which he describes the creative processes that helped to make Oxenfree so unique.
Dread Central: Can you give an overview of your game?
Sean Krankel: From a gameplay perspective, the core idea was to try to create a story-based game where players don’t get stuck in a bunch of cut scenes, where they are allowed to move freely and communicate freely; we just haven’t really seen that in a game before. We’ve seen the branching narrative in other games, but they’re basically on rails and don’t let you go where you want when you want.
Our character doesn’t even speak unless you make her speak, and that’s also pretty different from most branching narrative games. Your characters have dialogue branching back and forth, and communication is the centre of all that. That then led us to the core idea of the story, and what we wanted to do is to make a game that feels like a horror game at its roots, but to fundamentally not have it be very bleak and overly violent, and to instead give it a bit of a sense of wonder, like how the original Poltergeist was fun, where the characters interact with the supernatural, and it has a sense of wonder in it.
So for our story, we wanted to put layers in it. To put you in some pretty relatable coming-of-age story like the characters, but then to throw them into pretty horrifying situations. So the first, maybe, third of the game, or first quarter, feels closer to Stand by Me or The Goonies or the TV show “Freaks and Geeks,” where it’s really dealing with the relationships of the characters, where the dialogue feels naturalistic, but when the shit hits the fan, with the opening of the crazy, otherworldly portal, we throw all the player expectations on their head and psychologically mess with them more and more over the course of the game.
DC: The characters do feel very human and relatable. How did you make them feel that way?
SK: Yeah, it’s great to hear. I think the intent was not to be the stereotypical archetypes of what you would expect in one of these stories; the goal was to make each of them really feel like real people and as unpredictable as possible and as fun to be around as possible. It was also key for us to have them all not be friends. We didn’t want it to seem like “the gang’s running off on an adventure”; we wanted them all to have an interesting dynamic.
You play as Alex; she’s this 17-year-old girl testing her boundaries and dealing with issues from her past. And then you’re meeting your new stepbrother that night, so it’s a way for us to make Jonas be a character who is just as unfamiliar to Alex as he is to the player. They unpack a lot of things and learn about each other. You can draw your own conclusions by the end of the game about what you think of Jonas and all the other characters.
Ren is the only one who you are really friends with; he’s a buddy from a while ago, and he’s kind of equal parts a bright kid and a jackass. Clarissa is the closest thing to a human antagonist, and she has her own reasons that you won’t know until later in the game, but she’s a real jerk to you upfront, and there’s a pretty good reason for it later, so it was just key. I’m glad to hear that the dialogue feels naturalistic. We never wanted to make a game like: “And here’s the jock, here’s the cool kid.” Instead we wanted them to be relatable and interesting.
DC: And the decisions that the player makes really influence the game.
SK: It was interesting creating the character of Alex. We wanted her to be fleshed out enough to be interesting and smart and fun to be around, and she also has her own history of course. You can evolve the character to be malleable enough so that at the end of the game, the Alex that you wanted her to be should be pretty close to how you are as a player. It’s central to the game, the idea of a coming-of-age story where you determine how the protagonist comes of age amidst all the craziness.
DC: And it’s creepy, but it’s not a full-on Silent Hill style horror game.
SK: Yeah, really the goal for us was that you have these characters who, not to say that they are underpowered, because they’re not, they’re not a bunch of weaklings, but they are normal people, so we wanted the scenario that they deal with to be really larger than life, but not like, how in games like Silent Hill, where you have very physical interactions with the bad guys, and it gets really gory, so we decided early on to make the game about communication, and that gave us the idea of these ghostly figures that you deal with.
Because there’s so much creepiness that can be bought about by misunderstanding them and not understanding if they have your best interests in mind or not, like an early decision that we made was: “What if their early communication was similar to what a ransom note looked like?” with letters from different magazines pieced together, so they were made of snippets from old radio dialogue, and they had a hard time talking to you. We thought that this was as much tension as you can get. We didn’t want the characters to be strapping on a proton pack and for there to be a lot of action, instead just this sense of dread the whole time that you’re on the island.
DC: I really love the art style.
SK: Our lead artist, who’s basically our only artist, Heather Rose, is to be credited for all of that. We had the design challenge of wanting to let the characters walk around as the player wants them to, and then we had to pull the camera way back to accommodate exploration, and so Heather worked out how to get the little tiny characters to move through a big world. It could run the risk of not feeling very creepy or interesting, but she really leaned in on this idea of making it feel like a dark feature animation where the matte paintings in the background are almost their own characters.
And our characters have strong silhouettes and look like they could be in an animated film. The game is intended to never feel like a little kiddie game. So the characters and the world are all sort of organic looking. And when the ghostly creatures and the portal come into play, making that feel really jarring and out-of-place was another challenge for her. So the portals and ghostly creatures are very rigid and digital/VHS looking, and it added up to something that we’re really proud of. In the beginning we spent a lot of time doing prototypes and trying to make it look cool, but I love the look that we landed on.
DC: Throughout the game, the characterisation gets really deep.
SK: Yeah, I mean, the thing that people realise is complex, and I don’t mean complex in a way that’s overwhelming, how deep the characterisations get. For the first half of the game, you’re dealing with friends and there’s some spooky stuff happening, and you don’t know what’s going on or what it’s building to, and we’re really proud that by the end it all comes together very nicely, in terms of Alex’s story and all of the rest of the events on the island. But the way that we psychologically deal with the player and their expectations over the course of the game gets a lot more intense, and like I said, it goes deeper than most people are expecting on the surface.
The other thing is the actual influence that the player has over the characters and the story. It’s something that we spent a lot of time on, so it’s not just a bunch of branching dialogue choices. Every character pays attention not only to what you say, but what each other says. You can influence what other characters think of each other, which can lead to a lot of different outcomes and endings.
DC: Any franchise potential?
SK: Yes, we just announced that we partnered with Robert Kirkman’s company, Skybound. We talked to major publishers before that, but we just didn’t want a traditional publishing relationship. We didn’t necessarily need it, but what we wanted was a way to expand this story because we have a lot of versions of this story. So we thought about movies and graphic novels, etc., and when Skybound reached out, it was a perfect overlap.
So we’re figuring out what the movie of this would be, we’re working that out with them now, and we don’t have the answer yet. We have versions that continue the story of Alex and the other characters, and we have versions just on the island and the things that lead on to the events, so what happened after? So yeah, we think that the story is flexible enough to become a franchise.
DC: Anything else you’d like to add?
SK: Yeah, the music and the score were done by this guy called Scientific, and they really shape the game and the way that you interact, and they led us down the road of “let’s not just have these supernatural things mess with the characters” but “let’s have the game itself mess with the player,” like having the score and the soundtrack sort of degrade and break down.
A lot of those ideas came from Scientific. To mess with the player at a meta level. All the music is created on really crazy analogue instruments; he got radios from the ‘40s and reel to reel tape, so we’re really proud of the game’s audio. I can totally see this in a big movie, and it really reacts to how the player plays and makes it creepy as well.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAhrOoNR4ng]
Categorized:Horror Gaming News
