atraylor – Looking Outwards – 01

If you like games you’ve probably heard of Firewatch, an award winning narrative exploration game (a walking simulator to some) made by Campo Santo. It is heavily narrative based; the player plays as a Henry, a fire lookout in the Shoshone national forest. The game highlights feelings of isolation and human emotional connection through Henry’s/your conversations with his/your supervisor Delilah. These conversations happen as you traverse the open world, and are facilitated by a hand held radio. Other than disembodied chatting, you are completely alone.

Firewatch was made by ten people using Unity 4.5 as a game engine. There were several challenges that they faced being a relatively large team for the functions unity provided at the time.  Two challenges they faced were making a contiguous open world and having multiple people work on the scene at the same time. They implemented door and portal scene streaming using trigger volumes to load and unload assets when the player enters a certain area and used plugins that allowed the separation and compilation of the scene based on different disciplines (for instance, one person could make a scene of trees and the other could edit post processing, and the plugin would combine the two without destroying the changes of the other person’s section.)  This, on top of custom tree shaders, custom atmospheric fog that changes color over distance, and their custom made skybox generator, challenges the functional and artistic capabilities of Unity in its generic form.

Artistically, Firewatch focuses on strong colors and silhouettes, realism and style, to convince the player and immerse them in the narrative.