Adam Tierney is game director at Wayforward.

Beginnings

I think I’ve always loved horror video games. I can’t remember a time when spooky games weren’t a big part of my life, going back to titles like Alone in the Dark on PC (1992), Castlevania on NES (1986) and before them all, Haunted House on Atari 2600 (1982).

I work as a designer/director for game studio WayForward, most commonly associated with cheerful, cartoony games like Shantae, Mighty Switch Force!, and DuckTales: Remastered. But lately, we’ve also been quietly building up a sub-genre of WayForward horror games with LIT (WiiWare), Aliens: Infestation (DS), BloodRayne Betrayal (PC, consoles), and Silent Hill: Book of Memories (Vita). One of the cool things about WayForward is we’ll tackle just about any style of game, so long as it’s got solid gameplay fundamentals and interesting characters.

Around the summer of 2013, Amazon came calling -- more specifically, Amazon Game Studios, a brand new game division within one of the largest companies on the planet. They wanted to work with WayForward and asked us what original concepts we would be interested in for an opportunity like this.

Our creative director Matt Bozon and I immediately thought of the same concept. Somewhere in the dusty, virtual bins of unrealized WayForward games was Til Morning’s Light, a horror game concept I’d written about five years earlier, with concept art by Skullgirls lead animator Mariel Cartwright. The game followed a cute, slightly-punk teenage girl named Erica trapped in a haunted house by mean-spirited classmates, who must survive monsters and ghosts for 12 hours until she can emerge the next morning -- hence the title.

Amazon Game Studios liked the concept, and after some discussions and additional documentation, our two studios partnered to begin production on the game in the fall of 2013. The year that followed was an exciting, inspiring, and exhausting development experience.

The ultimate payoff? Releasing the game and having players call it “a spooky good time” and “brilliant” made all of the work worth it.

So without further ado, here are some of the notable highs (and lows) from the development of Til Morning’s Light. Enjoy!

What Went Right

1. High Quality VO Casting and Performances

Til Morning’s Light is a very story-driven game that revolves entirely around the main character Erica. She’s in every scene, she drives the story, the humor, the drama, and the tension, so it was absolutely crucial that we nailed casting her actor. If gamers didn’t immediately love and care about Erica, then the game as a whole wouldn’t work.

I’m pals with Cristina Vee, an accomplished anime and games voice actor, who’d previously directed VO on the fighting game Skullgirls. Cristina and I had worked on a few WayForward demos together, so when we began discussing the VO for Til Morning’s Light with Amazon Game Studios, I knew immediately that I wanted Cristina to be our VO director.

Normally on a game, we’d just pick the voice actors we wanted, reach out to them, and if they were available then that would be that. But Amazon Game Studios thought casting a wide net per role would help us find exactly the right people for the right parts, so between the approximately 15 speaking parts in the game, Cristina ended up wrangling over 100 VO auditions -- by many of anime and gaming’s most beloved voice actors.

The part of Erica ultimately went to Stephanie Sheh (pictured left), who I always loved as Mamimi in the anime “FLCL.” Stephanie brought a humor and dorkiness to Erica that made the character immediately lovable, and actually changed how I wrote Erica’s dialogue for future pickup sessions. Although the runners-up for that role also delivered great reads, I can’t picture anyone but Stephanie as Erica now.

The game’s villain was a pompous, theatrical, British ghost and I had my heart set on Cam Clarke (Liquid Snake from Metal Gear Solid) before starting the script. Cristina reached out to Cam and luckily his audition was as good as I’d hoped, so Cam got the part.

Every one of our dozen actors blew me away with their performances, and Cristina, being an actor herself, knew exactly how to get what she needed out of each line read. Upon release, the game’s VO has been cited as a high point in player and media reviews, and we owe a great deal of that to Cristina’s excellent casting and direction, and Amazon Game Studios pushing us to do those numerous, early auditions.

2. Keeping Inputs REALLY Simple

Til Morning’s Light is the first mobile game I’ve directed. Previously, all my games have been on console, handheld, or PC. Mobile games present a challenge to doing any sort of complicated gameplay because of the lack of tactile buttons. And here we were, ready to attempt our homage to games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil, each of which typically uses every button on the controller. How do you do survival horror well on a touch screen?

Rather than attempt to cram every ounce of functionality from games like those on a tiny screen, we opted for the opposite approach - reducing everything in the game to its most basic. Essentially, everything in Til Morning’s Light is a series of single screen touches. We never require the player to use more than one finger at a time, which allows them to hold and control the game however it feels most comfortable to them. Erica is controlled with a virtual analog stick, but you can place that anywhere onscreen and it follows your thumb, so you can always make quick turns. And if you STILL hate it, you can ignore that style of input altogether and move Erica by tapping locations to auto-walk her around.

Surprisingly, players always seem split 50/50 on which input is preferred, which is part of the reason we left both in. We noticed that players more focused on completion and puzzles tend to rely on tapping, whereas users more focused on the story and Erica tend to use the virtual analog stick. I think this is because you're able to steer Erica around more naturally and 'act' better with the virtual analog stick, as opposed to tapping, which is more of a straight rush to each objective.

With object interaction, we boiled everything down to a single interactive icon - spot an icon, tap it and see what happens. This was used for opening drawers, depositing items, interacting with puzzles, and so on. Erica has no foreknowledge what anything in this house does, so allowing the player to experiment by tapping these icons to see what happens made sense and felt very natural.

I don’t remember whether we considered a more complicated input system, but if we did, it was dismissed very early on. The end result of moving Erica around each room, tapping icons as they appear, then deciding your next step after you’ve seen what the room has to offer, makes for a more cerebral experience that pretty much any gamer can enjoy. If you want to see what a clock does, touch the clock. Want to run to a door? Tap the door. Everything is simple and straightforward.

3. A Map System with Lots of Guidance

One problem with survival horror games (or any big adventure games, really) is that it’s easy to lose track of where you are, where you’re headed, and why you’re going there. I know whenever I play through a game like Silent Hill, if it’s been a while since I last played, I might waste up to an hour wandering around, trying to remember what I was supposed to be doing, because of the open world. We knew that problem would only be compounded on mobile, where players are more prone to short, infrequent gaming sessions than to longer, continuous play sessions.

So we decided to address this with the game’s map system:

With this setup, players can open the map and immediately know where they’ve been, where they haven’t, what keys are needed, and (if holding a key) where they should go next. But this is done by reinforcing what they’ve already done, not leading them or giving things away before their discovery.

The map system was a real success, we got great feedback from gamers and critics with one saying “the game features an excellent map system” with over 100 unique locations, dozens of puzzles, and hundreds of enemy encounters, we needed to make sure players would never be confused or frustrated about their progression through the game.

4. Regular Team Playthroughs and Creative Leeway

Early development involved a lot of me hovering over individual work desks, working with team members one-on-one. But once we got enough of the game hooked together to be able to play through the entire experience (albeit roughly), we began doing group playthroughs with all the designers and project leads.

This proved to be an invaluable practice because team members could see how other players experienced their sections of the game, and we could talk as a group about what worked, ask questions, express confusion or excitement, and come up with ideas as a group for improvement.

The risk with a puzzley adventure game like this is that it’s entirely possible to have portions of gameplay that make 100 percent sense to you (the creator), but stump everyone else who plays the game. By getting the entire team playing through the game as a group, we ran into confusing and problem areas early and were able to address them before the game’s release.

Another team-related aspect that worked well was providing team members with as much creative leeway as possible (so long as we served the greater game and story). On a much smaller game, I might just design everything myself. But on a game of this size, we had a design team of about five people (in addition to myself). I would hash out the broad strokes of puzzling and progression with Nick Garcia (our lead designer), then Nick would work with the other 4 designers to flesh out and implement those concepts as creatively as possible.

A lot of the game’s best moments came from what our design team individually came up with. Allowing each of our designers to own different areas of the mansion, implement their own sets of puzzles, story sequences, and boss battles yielded more varied and