Context of Practice 3: Alien Isolation Talk

Today me and Sophie Curwen from my class had a brilliant opportunity to go and see the talk about Alien Isolation that was being held at the college, but we got to conduct a mini interview with them first about the game and to get a little bit of research for our dissertations, which was so helpful. The three people we got to interview where Alistair Hope who was the creative director, Dion Lay one of the writers, and Will Porter another writer. We asked them very broad questions in the end, which could have been more concise looking back, but we didn’t have a lot of time to prepare beforehand and I found that I could only really ask one question that was relevant to my dissertation but it was still very helpful.

Which do you think it more immersive, first or third person? 
‘You have to ask yourself which one is more believable and you have to think about your audience first and work from there with it. It also works well with audio and that really adds to the atmosphere. You need to create a certain atmosphere and with third person you can see when your character is scarred and you know you should be too. But with Alien Isolation we wanted to the alien to stare you down instead of just the character, you get to feel closer to the environment and you get to personally experience it.’

After the interview we then went into the talk which was really exciting and I took away a lot of information from the production side of it, and it was interesting to see how they used the film as such a big influence towards making the game, and making it well.

Alien: From Film to Game 
To begin with they gave us a bit of background to themselves and how they got into the industry which was very interesting as most of them did start by doing art and worked up from there into what they are doing now. They wanted to create a game based around being underpowered and defenceless and it all started with Al’s love for the Alien franchise and him creating a technical demo which was a great move as his boss loved it and asked him to make more.

To create the environment they started with the writing and it started as workers in space and they wanted to keep them very down to earth and laid back characters. They wanted the setting to be in the middle of nowhere, so that when the alien does turn up they want the player to feel more deserted and alone in this sense. They also took a lot of influence from the first alien film and the 70s appeal in the furniture and the technology as this is meant to be set after the events of the first film.

They wanted to create a space station based on people with real lives and make the whole game has that 70s feeling and keep the same texture as the first film in terms of aesthetics of the machinery and overall look to the station. A really nice touch that I liked in the game was the monitors that were accessed throughout the game and how they were created. They would generate the images that they wanted and how they would act when interacted with and then they took the footage and played it through on very old TV monitors, then they scrunched up the wires and used magnets near the screen to try and distort the image further to create that fuzzy effects and again create a 70s feel of technology that works, but could work better.

They then spoke about the posters in the game and how they were created. They first researched into 70s posters and made up propaganda for the game so that they could aspire to create these posters that looked like they were straight from 1970 and also a lot of posters that reflected ‘home’ which isn’t necessarily Earth, but definitely isn’t on that space station and the workers are reminded that.

They really did want to bring a lot of things back from the original film and they believed that every action carried out by the player should be meaningful. When using the scanner to find the alien’s location they blur the background so that to gain vision on the alien you have to loose vision of your surroundings as a compromise to find it and avoid it.

They then lastly had to think about the character and one that they could use which would have a connection to the actions in the film and they had to pick someone that would make the connection with the missing ship, the Nostroma. So it became obvious that they would have to use Ellen Ripley’s daughter Amanda and thankfully Fox let them. They wanted this strong female lead and they had a great back story to her as she wants to find out where her mother is and what happened it her.

Finally they spoke about the alien, as this is obvious a huge part of the game. They wanted to make the alien scary again like it was original and they wanted the encounter to be frightening and unpredictable and make the alien constantly looking for you. It’s not a scripted encounter and the alien interacts with its surrounds and environment in the way a hunter would, stalking its prey and looking for you. If it can’t find you in an environment or area it will move onto another, but this doesn’t stop it coming back to a previous one, something that I think is brilliant. They build up the music perfectly with the encounters and try to make it as unpredictable as possible which creates an even more interesting experience when the alien does eventually find you and you experience that music escalating.

Overall this was a fantastic talk and I really found it very interesting finding everything out about the story behind the game and how it linked in so well with the film. One thing in particular that I thought was a great touch was the fact they don’t give the alien a name throughout the entire game, much like in the films as well. This creates a weird interaction when you finally meet ‘the thing’ or the ‘organism’ as it makes it seem deadly and the fact that there’s no word to describe it makes it even scarier and feels like it’s not human.