InterferenceEngine: Unreal Engine 4
Platform: PC
Genre: Science Fiction / Horror-Lite
Development Started: April 2018
What is Interference?Interference is a short interactive experience in which you play as a security guard monitoring the mysterious happenings of a top-secret laboratory from the safety of your isolated desert outpost. Just as the sun starts to set on another quiet night on the job, the facility is attacked by a fanatical cult hell-bent on releasing the lab’s most secretive and dangerous asset.
Through careful monitoring of multiple radio channels and effective use of the resources around your guard booth, it is up to you to guide your friend safely out of the facility and to thwart the escape of the infiltrators. But be careful – there are strange forces at play in the desert tonight, and not everything you see or hear is necessarily as it seems.
Who We AreThe Scary Farm is an independent development team focused on creating explorative and engaging single-player narrative experiences. We are co-founders Brad Leyden and Jared Bohlken.
Our ProgressWe've been working on this game for almost a year, after 3 years of failing multiple times at getting a game off the ground. We've been hesitant to make this game public until we were sure that it was going to happen, but we recently feel like we've crossed that threshold. Before setting out on this project, we spent some time analyzing our past failures to come up with some development guidelines and rules to follow as we develop
Interference; we plan on dedicating some posts to talk about those, but for now, the good stuff:
Gameplay involves balancing information given to you from a variety of sources to affect the narrative. The centerpiece of this system is a CB radio where various parts of the story play out in real time across different frequencies the player can tune in to individually. The player has full autonomy over the channels they listen to, how they respond to questions over the radio, or if they even want the radio on to begin with.
But the radio is not the only element demanding the player's attention. In order to effectively control the outcome of the narrative, players will need to use everything at their disposal to stay on top of what's happening in the laboratory, requiring tactical decision making along the way. Is it worth it to give up control of the radio for a few seconds while you check on the facility's power levels or refresh your memory of its floor plan? You won't know for sure until it's too late.
These time-sensitive decisions will make each playthrough unique. The story occurs regardless of how the player chooses to intervene, but it won't unfold exactly the same way twice. And one missed piece of information can alter the outcome of the entire narrative.
Now, of course, we need to give the player options of what they can do if they choose not to engage with the narrative, so we've filled the guard booth with all sorts of distractions. We consider this an "experiment" in how a player plays a game, the short duration lending itself to different play styles and, hopefully, a decent degree of replayability.
We very recently began working with a writer to help flesh out the story and dialogue, which is a challenge since we ultimately
want the player to feel invested in what’s going on. We created a dialogue system that accounts for variability in responses based on a player’s previous decisions, and because we will ultimately be working with what will be hundreds and hundreds of lines of dialogue, we tailored it to be flexible so we can iterate quickly.
There’s not a lot to show right now without spoiling much of the experience. After all, the whole thing takes place in a single room. More updates soon!
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