The small size of the team was important in helping to quickly address some very basic questions: Gone Home‘s empty house is explored entirely from a first-person perspective, which means there was no need for character artists, animators, or AI programmers. Other pieces fell into place quickly from there. We thought… what if that becomes the main attraction? It’s the only thing that the game is about.” “In a big game, what do you do? You fight enemies and do mission objectives and collect loot… and also there’s a story there to be discovered. “It is the kind of experience that is usually a sideshow in a big AAA game,” Gaynor continued. “This kind of distributed narrative where you’re finding the dots in the constellation and connecting them.” That doesn’t make a whole game though… but what if it did? “You piece the story together yourself by finding these little bits of voice and writing and objects,” Gaynor said of the core idea. The Fullbright trio’s past work experience informed the discussion, and all of them agreed that the idea of telling a story built entirely out of environmental cues is a compelling one. With three BioShock veterans forming the founding heart of Fullbright, it wasn’t long before their ‘What’s our first project?’ conversation turned toward the narrative. We want to make something that we’re 100-percent invested in.” “It’s great to have that support and that access to a bunch of people with expertise in the building, but part of our motivation for doing Gone Home is, we want to have that small team experience. Making DLC is like a small team/small game experience, but within a much larger organization,” Gaynor explained. “We’re really excited to be making this small game. Environmental artist Kate Craig joined the team a few months later, and now works with Fullbright remotely from her home in Vancouver, B.C. He convinced them both to leave their cushy studio jobs in northern California and move to distant Portland to work on a project that they could all take ownership of. “It is the kind of experience that is usually a sideshow in a big AAA game…”It was at this point that Gaynor got in touch with his former 2K Marin colleagues Johnnemann Nordhagen and Karla Zimonja. There’s not really a big, established game industry in Portland so you kind of have to do your own thing.” “I did my year and I hope I contributed, but then my wife and I decided to move back to Portland. “I got to work with guys who made a bunch of my favorite games – I mean, they’ve been shipping amazing shit for 15 years – I learned a lot,” Gaynor told us in a rapid-fire interview on the crowded show floor at GDC 2013. He then went on to put in a year at Irrational while Infinite was in development, and those combined experiences working with material from one of the industry’s most creative storytellers left him with some fresh ideas. Gaynor served as a level designer on BioShock 2, and as the writer and lead designer on that game’s campaign DLC, Minerva’s Den. Gone Home delivers its story in an unusual way, but it makes a lot more sense when you consider the backgrounds of Fullbright’s three founder.

The phones are out and the inclement weather makes leaving impossible, so you’re left to explore the house and try to piece together what happened. The game sets players loose in an empty suburban home on a “Dark and Stormy Night.” The setup establishes the main character as the eldest daughter in a family of four – mother, father, two daughters – who returns home after a year abroad to find everyone missing. This is the line of thinking that led 2K Marin and Irrational Games veteran Steve Gaynor to found The Fullbright Company, a Portland-based indie studio that is currently hard at work on its first game, Gone Home. What if it wasn’t though? What if the audio recordings in BioShock game were in fact the focus of your journey from Beginning to End? Story is secondary, even in games like BioShock Infinite in which significant time and effort was clearly put into crafting an impactful narrative. Most video games tend to operate under a fairly simple set of rules: you have a set of play mechanisms and rules that exist in the service of driving players toward some sort of objective.

Gone home ps4