It's not a tell-all disguised as a game or a way to criticize someone who upset him. You know, just to kind of open that satirical door a little bit and say, 'Here are some reasons.'"Īccording to Thomas, The Magic Circle isn't about any specific game or person in the real world. "People who consider themselves armchair designers or just have followed the development of games and wondered, 'Well, why was this game delayed?' and espouse theories about it. " make it interesting to people who do have a passing interest in the process of making games," says Alexander. The story tackles the challenges that come with one auteur creative leader running a project, the loss of confidence that everyone has from time to time and the struggles of making a game work as well for a player as it does in a designer's head. And the team can't seem to commit to decisions, so the main character is simply "The Hero" rather than someone with a name or even a gender. The game they're making has been in development for many years with no end in sight, analogous to something like Duke Nukem Forever, or perhaps, BioShock Infinite. It feels like you're sitting at a desk in a development studio playing their game. It feels like you're sitting at a desk in a development studio playing their game while you overhear them talking about each other and their design choices. Then there's another layer to the game with a more direct commentary on game development - as you play through the game-within-the-game, you can hear its fictional developers talking in the background. The idea is to give players a surface-level feeling of what it's like to be a game designer. It's more about solving puzzles than it is about combat. It looks like a first-person action game, but you don't shoot a gun or swing a weapon - you program other creatures to do the work for you. As the game goes on, you learn you can program the Howler to attack other creatures, you can earn special abilities, you can program other creatures and you can combine the abilities and creatures in creative ways. Early on, you come across a dog-like creature called a Howler who has been programmed to attack you, so a simple solution to avoid getting hurt is to edit the Howler's abilities to make it your friend instead of your enemy (as seen in the tutorial video below). You see black and white environments that look like placeholder art, and you play by running around and editing creatures' abilities like a game designer would. The game places you inside a prototype of a game-within-the-game, also called The Magic Circle, designed by a fictional "legendary" designer named Starfather. You don't see cubicles lined with toys and monitors running Unity. Sit down to play The Magic Circle and you might not immediately know it's about game development. "And though they are often requested to present as unified a front as possible, behind the scenes it is Lord of the Flies, man." "There are flawed people behind each of those decisions," says Thomas. But after witnessing the process firsthand, he realized that almost everyone struggles to make games work, and many game design decisions don't have clear answers. Growing up, Thomas idolized name brand developers he saw in magazines, like Ken and Roberta Williams at Sierra, and Doug Church, Warren Spector and Ken Levine at Looking Glass, thinking that they could easily dictate game ideas. It's one of many examples, Thomas says, of how game development is harder than it seems from the outside. "And in classic Irrational fashion, my mistake has a beautiful sketch surrounded by everybody's signatures," he says. So Thomas hung up a piece of concept art for the idea as a badge of honor. Some who saw it thought it looked like a bug others thought it looked like a "little glowy peanut," says Alexander. Thomas had the idea to make a "ghost" or "shadow" version of her appear next to each tear, but the team wasn't able to make it read clearly. It's a "Shadow Liz" drawn by former Irrational Games concept artist Robb Waters, from back when Thomas and FX artist Stephen Alexander experimented with a way to show that the game's "tears" were connected to the character Elizabeth.
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