The further we leaned into those role-playing aspects of it the clearer that picture became.īut early on we wanted to make a game that was in a bar first of all, and then we thought that maybe one bar wasn’t enough so then we turned it into a pub-crawl. So now we have a system where each drink can change your personality, none of them have an overall negative effect, it’s more of a personality boost. So we kept thinking about what we could make which was fun about drinking in a world like this, and we veered closer to something like Harry Potter and the way they do potions. It would be you blacked out, then you would wake up somewhere and have to run back again – like in Dark Souls, but none of these things were fun – they felt really annoying at best.
There was moment where you were able to blackout and be thrown out of bar’s in this kind of risk/reward system. “It took a really long time,” Krankel said. And that entire process turned out to be quite lengthy. They are wildly different personality types.”Īlthough the dialogue system was something they were familiar with, Night School Studio’s was still looking for that gameplay hook to make it more distinct from Oxenfree. Early on they are fairly standard, you can be a little more boisterous or flirty, but by the end you can talk like a mobster or a pirate. That is what partially led us to the drinking system, we thought it would be fun to augment the system.
OXENFREE ACHIEVEMENTS HOW TO
“In terms of things like how you can interrupt people, how not saying something is a choice, how to write for three dialogue choices, and ideally make the player feel like they are empowered – almost like their weapon, because the game doesn’t have any fighting in it. “Even though it became very streamlined, there were a lot of decisions under the hood for how that worked,” Krankel said. Because the dialogue system was for the most part already in place thanks to Oxenfree, that made things a little bit easy this time around during development. Though it’s not an episodic game, we want it to feel like little vignettes of stories as opposed to Oxenfree, which felt like one very continuous night, this is more like stumbling your way through a lot of different adventures.” A little more conversationĭialogue in both Oxenfree and Afterparty are a huge aspect those games, so much so that you can look at Afterparty and see in its visual design the direct lineage between the other title. Even The Simpsons and Futurama we reference a lot internally, it’s about how they balance the humour and darkness kind of at the same time.
We still wanted it to be an adventure, so we were thinking about things like the Edgar Wright movies, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure was a huge inspiration for this, and Beetlejuice in terms of how it handles the macabre and the afterlife in its own particular way.īut then we talk about shows like Rick and Morty, its partially the cadence of jokes in the style of how earnest it can be at times and also how awful it can be at the same time.
“And so, we wanted to do something more comedic, and then the main thrust was, ‘Well how do we do a comedy?’. “Even right after Oxenfree we were very much in the mode of, ‘That was a pretty bleak story’, Krankel said. While Oxenfree channelled supernatural thriller films with an ‘80s vibe, Afterparty turned a corner and leaned into comedy that spanned across various decades. Along with this I also had the chance to sit down with Sean Krankel, co-founder and studio director of Night School Studio, and talk to him about a few of the things that went into making their latest game. From what I’ve seen its looking like a terrific successor to 2016’s Oxenfree. At a recent preview event in San Francisco, I was given the opportunity to check out the first hour of Night School Studio’s upcoming graphic adventure, Afterparty.
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