Everybody's Gone to the Rapture - Game Changers

   Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is a first-person adventure video game developed by The Chinese Room and SCE Santa Monica Studio and was released in August 2015. It is a story-based game, taking place in a small English village whose inhabitants have mysteriously disappeared. It is considered a spiritual successor to Dear Esther. The game tells the story of the inhabitants of a remote English village in the moments leading up to a cataclysmic event and the end of the world. There was a lot of technical stuff discussed about during this talk and so being someone that doesn't necessarily have any knowledge in video game design, it was a little unfortunate that I couldn't understand a lot that was talked about near the end.

   As described by its creators, the game is a story driven science fiction set after the apocalypse. At the time of development, the company was already working on Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. And during the development of Dear Esther, the team wanted to introduce interactive elements within that game and when that proved to be impractical, the concept of this very game was born. During its development, there were certainly numerous times when this small team had to make more than one attempt before they were actually happy with the finished product itself, having scrapped many ideas before going with the one they had released. While certainly a small team that consisted of just 2 artists, a music designer and a part-time coder, they were nonetheless a very ambitious bunch.

 Development actually started with the recording of the narration and music, and so the music especially was ready by the time they had gone through several trial versions of this game. Their goal was to create an open world explorative game without a linear narrative, something no one has really done just yet. Initially, the gameplay was for the character to interact with one object from another before events actually triggers. Symbolism of some kind was reinforced to each character and their story. Silhouettes provided a form of storytelling for the lack of actual visual characters in the game.

   Sony had fortunately already liked the idea that had been pitched to them and were much more interested in knowing how they would go about making it. And again, it was normal to reach dead ends during the process of game development.