Oxenfree releases today, but Krankel and Night School plan to expand from the game itself. But now it's such a weird extra piece of the game that feels so natural to it that we're super happy we landed on it." "That one definitely was not like an immediate 'ah ha!' We sort of evolved into that. "And it's got an analog feel to kind of interact with it and we're like, 'God, all of our needs for the game can kind of be posited onto this.' So everything from just using radio to listen to stuff to using it like a metal detector to find lots of lots of weird secrets in the world, to even using it like a Zelda ocarina to rip open things in the sky with different sequences of stations. "Radios have this magical quality to them that is unfamiliar, and it is weird when you hear a station that's not fully tuned in, and static is sort of creepy," Krankel says. Having played Oxenfree, I can tell you that hearing these creatures speak in broken radio clips is a truly creepy experience. Throughout the game, Alex and her friends communicate with otherworldly beings through use of a radio. It ballooned out and it made it a much bigger challenge because the way that dialogue works in this game, even though on the surface it feels similar to the Telltale stuff, it's pretty different."Äialogue is one part of a larger theme in Oxenfree, which is communication. "You can play that whole game not talking if you want to, which is weird and I don't recommend it, but you could. This is intended to be a break from the norm in games with branching dialogue, where choosing a single line can often lead to a long back and forth of predetermined conversation. "Now that we're saying you have all this freedom to walk around and explore as you want, we were like, 'Let's make sure that Alex never says a word unless the player makes her say a word,'" Krankel explains. Maintaining the player's agency even became a vital part of Night School's approach to how the dialogue was delivered. The Night School team was forced to overcome challenges with how to pace dialogue, and making sure vital narrative points weren't lost without taking agency away from the player. Those two things will just go together like chocolate and peanut butter.' But in reality, it became a massive challenge" "On the surface, we felt was a pretty simple thing, like, 'Oh, it'll be like Limbo and The Walking Dead mixed together. But we were like, 'The biggest challenge that might be cool for us to try to overcome is just marrying those two things,' and going, "All right, let's do something more naturalistic where the player doesn't ever get taken out of the 'gameplay' and put into a cutscene. And that's fine, that's a great, perfectly fine, more passive experience. "So it's usually like, I'm walking around, I'm solving a puzzle, I'm doing things, doing whatever, and then I walk into a trigger, and now suddenly I'm watching this cutscene where there's subtitles, but I'm choosing from these subtitles. "The first big one was when you look at those games or a lot of branching games, the moment of actual communication is very divorced from the rest of the gameplay," Krankel explains. So we thought, 'I wonder if we take some of those true events and some of the things that were happening in that time and put our kids in a story that is dealing with some of the ripple effect of that and tell it in a supernatural way.'" "It feels like ancient history to most people, but in reality, 1943 is not that long ago at all. And one, which is not talked about very much, but one fired a rocket into a Little League field in Oregon in like 1942 or '43 at night, and luckily nobody was hurt, but that got really close. And there were actual Japanese subs getting extremely close to the shore. "So we started to do some research…actually there are a bunch of de-commissioned military islands off the coast. "There would be grown-over radar stations and then we went, 'Oh, well, that's interesting, was this just American paranoia or were these actual functioning things?'" "Adam and I went up to this 30-year reunion party thing that they did for The Goonies, and went on a bunch of hikes when we were there and started to find some really weird stuff like in the trees," Krankel says.
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