The newly formed Australian Summerfall Studios has announced its first game, the "adventure musical" Chorus: An Adventure Musical.
The Melbourne-based studio was announced in September, but co-founders Liam Esler and David Gaider have been working on the concept for almost two years. Speaking to GamesIndustry at International Games Week, they revealed that it all started at Game Connect Asia Pacific in 2017, where the shared admiration for small story projects like Gone Home and sparked the idea to work together.
Gaider and Esler are experienced developers; the former has a long career as a lead writer at BioWare, while the latter is an influential figure in the Australian game development scene. Projects like Gone Home and Firewatch made an impression on many at the time, but both Gaider and Esler knew right away that Summerfall Studios would have to do more to stand out in a crowded market.
βDistinction was one of the first things we talked about,β Esler said. We are both fans of games with a focus on characters and storytelling, but over the past couple of years, the genre has not performed very well. There was a peak in popularity for games like Gone Home and Firewatch that went wildly - they were incredibly well received - and then Life is Strange came out, and since then the success of releases has been less and less. That's because the genre of narrative games hasn't really changed. There was no innovation or development within it in a way that would be interesting to the audience.β
This stagnation may be due to the proliferation of the term "walking simulator", which is applied to games like Gone Home and Dear Esther. In recent years, there have been dozens or even hundreds of such projects, but only a few of them are of any interest. Esler and Gaider don't like that description, and as co-founders of a small studio, they too recognize the need to bring something new to the genre.
βFrom a marketing standpoint, we need something different,β Esler added. βPeople are hungry for something they can talk about β itβs wonderful, in the truest sense of the word. You can mark it because it's different."
The studio's first game is Chorus: An Adventure Musical. The name of the game directly indicates what it will offer. Esler said the concept is "built around interactive musical numbers and the player can decide where the song branches and how it goes." He and Gaider are sure that this has never happened before in video games. Heroes of Chorus: An Adventure Musical communicate with each other; dialogue choices are similar to those used in Mass Effect, where Gaider was the lead writer - offering three separate paths that lead to different outcomes.
βIf you make aggressive choices [in dialogue], the drum is added to the song and it gets faster,β Gaider said. βWhen we came up with the idea, we came up with specific questions: βHow can we do this from a functional point of view? And how can we creatively do that?' This is where Austin Wintory comes in. We needed someone who understands music."
Austin Wintory is one of the most famous composers in the world of video games. He wrote music for , and John Wick Hex. Both Gaider and Esler knew that Summerfall Studios' ambitious vision would need the right people in the right roles to bring it to fruition.
In addition to Wintory, Summerfall Studios hired Troy Baker as the voice director and Laura Bailey as a key cast member of Chorus: An Adventure Musical. Together they will try to bring something new to the genre of narrative games and do something that even BioWare failed to do.
Summerfall Studios hopes to raise $600 for Chorus: An Adventure Musical on . To date, the developers have managed to achieve this goal by 17% - over $106 have been donated. The campaign will end on November 10, 2019. The game is currently only going to be released on PC.
Source: 3dnews.ru