Bill Lowe has been making Before for a while. Screenshots of his beautiful prehistoric group-survival sim regularly shone out among those of other games using the #screenshotsaturday hashtag on Twitter -- so at the very least it's been a blip on the radar for the better part of the year. But it wasn't until Lowe and his game were acquired by Facepunch Studios, they of Garry's Mod and Rust, that things with Before really shifted into gear. The project has now reached a new level after Before had a trailer featured during the inaugural Game Awards, alongside some of the biggest upcoming games on any platform. I spoke to Lowe about how he got from there to here, and exactly what Before is, and is trying to become. Can you quickly outline what Before is, and what your intent is and what you want to achieve with it? It's a tricky one, because I try and avoid just throwing genre names and influences at it, but it can be quite convoluted to describe it without those. So I'll start by saying it's really inspired in part by games like The Sims and Black & White. Those are the two touchstones in my head when I think about why I'm making it. They're not what I want to make but they're the biggest influences. It's not a god game; it's more of a collective consciousness game. You're not a deity but you do have control and influence over a tribe of prehistoric people. Really it's just about their journey through their lives and their world, and your main adversary is the environment, and the other animals and predators within that. You're not really fighting other people, so it's just about their survival, and hunting and gathering, dealing with the weather, the changes of season, all of those things. 
So one of the most interesting things about it is the art style, and I'm inferring here, but I assume you've gone for this low-poly, rough around the edges art style because you're doing it yourself, and it's easier? I didn't really set out to achieve a particular style for any reason other than I saw some nice illustrations online; there's one illustrator in particular called Timothy J. Reynolds, and he does a lot of 3D illustrations for magazines and online publications, and he just had a really nice style. It's all pre-rendered, so you have lots of lovely lighting and nice variation in tone which you don't always get in real-time rendering. 
So that was one of my main inspirations. I was trying to recreate that aesthetic in an engine, in our case Unity, and seeing how that played out. The game part sort of happened by accident, if I'm being honest. There's no design document where I started and said "I want to make this game." It was born out of that art style. Did you find that you had that image of what you wanted Before to look like and the game arose out of that? It was really very organic. I started out with the urge to make a pixel art caveman for no particular reason, and pixel art is tricky, so yeah, it's part inspired by that illustration work that I mentioned and also the urge to get back into basic 3D, as I'd been doing a lot of high-poly sculpting in Z-Brush, and was trying to go down that road, but there's very lengthy production times and a lot of learning involved. So by having these low-poly models, does that free you up to do a lot of other things with the game? In theory, yes -- that's one of the bonuses to using the art style, definitely. It's very quick to fabricate lots of stuff, it's very quick to make nice rocks and things, because you don't have to worry about UV mapping, and texturing, and those two, to a lesser extent, are the things that take up most of my time, when I'm developing.
"It's very quick to fabricate lots of stuff because you don't have to worry about UV mapping, and texturing."
It frees up resources that you can use elsewhere, so we're really heavy on the post-processing, the lighting and the shadows, and hopefully we can push that a little further without all those resources being taken up by textures and polygons. But people often call it a ‘low-poly' game, and while that's certainly how it started I'm trying to refine the art direction so that, at a glance, people aren't saying "Oh, it's a low-poly game", hopefully it will be more distinct than that. 
And how did Before being shown at The Game Awards come out? It's just been kind of like everything in my career so far; it's because of Twitter. Because Twitter is what got me involved with Facepunch and Garry Newman just sent me a message saying "We like the look of the game", and I ended up working with them and making the game with them. It was similar with The Game Awards: Geoff Keighley just sent me a message saying, "It looks cool, would you like to show a trailer?" I panicked and said yes, and we spent three and a half very manic weeks putting it together. It's a cinematic trailer, it's all in-engine, but we're at a point where we're really crunching down on very low-level systems to make sure everything works, so right now it's not a very sexy game to play. So it wasn't the case that we could just load it up and film things going on; it was a very hard thing to pull together. But it was an amazing opportunity to go over to Vegas to show it. It's suddenly gone from a very small level of awareness on Twitter, where a few people know it, and now it's everywhere. And has that put it on the radar for anyone like platform holders and large publishers? No, not so much. To tell the truth I've had little bits of communication with platform holders, and Sony and Microsoft and whoever else have expressed interest in the past. I really think that Twitter is where all this stuff works now, because really, that's where the industry lives, day-to-day. Facepunch has got a really lovely way of doing things, though, and yes, we'll see what works on different platforms, but we don't need to commit to any exclusivity, and as and when that makes sense, that's when we can make those deals. At the time of signing to Facepunch, were you in talks with any other publishers? I had a back-and-forth with a couple of smaller publishers, but didn't really get very far. Really it was because I wrote a small blog entry saying I was planning on running a Kickstarter, and Garry reached out and said "Well I'm sure your Kickstarter will work, but what about this idea?" And really, that seemed to be the best idea. In hindsight, the risk of Kickstarter -- and playing with people's money like that, setting a number, and the risk involved -- I just really wanted this game done, and I'm sure it would have been done, but Facepunch is the ideal place for it. They're, I was about to say "loose," but that's not really fair. We have a very open, free-for-all management style. I don't have to adhere to any particular deadlines. You know, really, it feels like working on a mod team in the early 2000s.
"We have a very open, free-for-all management style. You know, really, it feels like working on a mod team in the early 2000s. "
Because of Garry's history, he's turned that into a company that works really, really well. Everyone is self-motivated, and we just get on with it, and there's no strict hierarchy telling you how to work. That really suits me, as I've been a freelancer for going on 10 years, and I'm used to managing myself, and managing a few other people, and that's how we're working now. So you would now consider yourself part of the Facepunch team? Absolutely. I work at Facepunch Studios. It's an interesting company in that there's only 10 or so people who work in their offices -- and I forget the exact number, but I think we're 30 or so people now. There's more people who work offsite than on, now, and it's not a publishing setup at all. The technicalities are that now Facepunch owns the property and I work for Facepunch, so I'm not an independent developer in that respect. And to get back to Before: We've had a large influx of survival games in the past few years, with games like DayZ, Rust, and they're all focused on individual survival, and it seems like Before is looking at the survival of a group. How does that change how you develop the game? It's interesting this survival genre thing, because you see in the comments, now that we've been exposed to a larger audience, are saying that "Ugh, it's just another survival game", or "it's just like Rust with different art." I think I've actually made a mistake describing it as a "survival game" on the website. It is, inherently, about people surviving, but really, most games are about people surviving. You've almost always got a health bar, unless you're talking about sport, or racing. So really it's a survival game in that literal sense, as people survive as part of the mechanics, but really I don't think there are very many parallels that you can draw between
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