Our backgrounds are in Fine Art and post production (we met at art school almost ten years ago). Outside of that we’ve both worked an eclectic range of jobs (techy and non) before we decided to give the indie game thing a go. It certainly helped to have a broad experience base.

A Light In Chorus

A Light In Chorus © Broken Fence Games, 2015

We want the world to surprise you as you discover new parts of it so we’re trying not to reveal too much right now. At a base level you’re exploring a bunch of overlapping spaces. When you begin the game you’re wandering around what looks like a dead, grey world- you float through walls and steps instead of colliding.

But as you wander further you encounter coloured lights which illuminate and solidify (ie; make collidable) parts of the dead world around them. The gameplay then becomes about finding ways to materialize more of these lights to build out paths through the space and flesh out the stories of these places.

A Light In Chorus © Broken Fence Games, 2015

We want any mechanic we add to use something unique and specific to the aesthetic. One of the ways we’re doing that right now is with object morphing and swapping: allowing you to pick objects or bits of architecture and morph them into other parts. So you can solve a spatial puzzle in multiple ways depending on the pieces you have made available in the environment.

Technology and Tools

We knew the art style would be a challenge to implement and optimize in whatever engine we picked so we ended up making our own. It’s not that we’re necessarily doing more than any other engine is capable but we’re fully in control.

A Light In Chorus © Broken Fence Games, 2015

All software has advantages and disadvantages. Working right up against the limits of what you have forces you to be creative and you’re more likely to learn something. Games might be designed to be played a specific way but that doesn’t mean they have to be. It’s the same with software.

We’ve built a bunch of tools specifically to deal with point cloud generation, there isn’t really one way that works for everything. It’s still very hand crafted in a lot of ways. The way we generate the assets is not too far from a normal cg lighting pipeline though. Most points are the results of raycasting of some form. What you see in the game is not a textured model though. It’s a collection of coordinates and other attached data.

Inspirations and Gameplay

The game came out of some research I’d been doing for an art piece about how visual technology relates to our understanding of landscape. As part of that I had come across these SONAR scans of shipwrecks on the sea bed. They were haunting and beautiful. I wanted to get closer to them and knew it would be difficult to gain access to the raw data, so I went about constructing some tools to generate versions of my own. That’s where the raycasting comes in.