2 weeks ago
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It's easy to look at a walking simulator like Firewatch and only see what's been stripped out. After all, it's a genre that got its start when developers took the shooting out of first-person shooters. However, look a little closer and you will see how much design can go into the simplest interactions.
In the lookout cabin you call home in Firewatch there is a desk. On one side of that desk you will find a pine cone and on the opposite side you will find a picture frame. Hover your cursor over either item and press 'E' and you will pick up the item and hold it in your hand. It's when you press 'E' again to put the item back down things get interesting. The pine cone will roll off the desk, but the picture frame will return it to the spot you picked it up from.
In that difference, you can see the world that Campo Santo made in Firewatch.
"We're not perfectly replicating the real world," Campo Santo co-founder Nels Anderson says. "That would be crazy." Instead, the team were doing what they could at the edges to make the world "tangible and grounded."
Firewatch begins with your character, Henry, taking a job as a fire lookout in Wyoming's Shoshone National Park. He packs up a rucksack, slings it into the back of his truck, and drives into the woods, set on spending the summer months on his own in a small cabin on stilts, looking out over the horizon for the telltale smoke plumes of a fire. The pine cone is presumably something that Henry found in the woods near his new home. It is, also, one of thousands. As such, it's not an item that Henry will care about.
Turning a pine cone into an object that can roll around on a desktop and fall to the floor is simple, Anderson explains. In Unity, you just need to give it a round physics shape and turn on simulation. However, while it's easy, he also emphasises "it is a choice."
Likewise, it is a choice and act of restraint when deciding which everyday item becomes interactive. You could just as easily turn on physics for every object in Firewatch's cabin. Its chairs, books, tin cans, and picture frames. Were you to do that, though, moving around the lookout tower would be like walking through a ballpit of everyday items. If they treated every object as a physics object, he explains, the world becomes "over simulated in a way that itself becomes weird and not tangible anymore".
The picture frame, on the other hand, holds an image of Henry with his arm around the shoulders of Julia. In Firewatch's opening we experience the beats of Henry and Julia's relationship – how they met, fell in love, got married. We also learn how Julia became ill, developing early onset dementia, and how Henry couldn't cope. Couldn't care for her. And how, when Julia's family took her into their home to give her the care she needed, Henry didn't follow. The job he's taken in the park, it's an escape from his life outside of the woods.
Henry wouldn't mind the pine cone falling to the floor, but he wouldn't drop the picture frame unless it were deliberate. If you want to drop the picture to the floor, you can, you just need to look away from the spot from which you picked it up.
The picture frame uses something Anderson calls a "put back spot". It's a mechanic Campo Santo copied from Gone Home, and it allows them to match your intention with Henry's. It's not something reserved only for precious items, it's also used where the team have a strong idea of what you would want to do with it. "There's slots on the bookshelf that you can put books into," Anderson explains. "If I'm a person, I can put a book back on a shelf and it will stay there."
If they had made these items physics objects like the pine cone, players could get them into the spot they wanted but they'd have to do what Anderson calls "the physics fiddle hell", where you're trying to balance an item on the exact right pixel so it doesn't tip over or bounce across a surface. With a pine cone, that feels appropriate, we've all had those moments where we've spent too long trying to balance something that refuses to stay put, but with a picture frame it makes Henry seem incompetent.
These decisions may seem minor, but they are the scaffolding that supports some of Firewatch's more poignant moments.
At a later point in Firewatch, you discover a child's hideout under the overhang of a rock. Etched in chalk all over the back wall of the shelter, the boy, Brian, has drawn castle walls and spires, shields and dragons. By this point in the story you've learned a lot about what brought Brian to the Shoshone National Park and what he went through while living there, so it's clear from the attention he paid to the hideout that this escape was dear to him.
As well as his drawings on the back wall, Brian strung clotheslines from the roof and decorated wooden boards to hang as bunting. When you discover the hideout, the bunting is scattered across the hideout's floor but you can rehang it, returning the hideout to its former glory. This is another moment where Campo Santo chose to use put back spots. Dealing with the physics fiddle here would take you out of the moment, instead it can feel like a moment where you and Henry are paying respect to Brian.
Anderson says it's "crazy" how something so simple as how to hang a piece of bunting "could actually carry a bunch of meaning with it". It was those small interactions and the world they built for the player that he says "was very interesting for a lot of us throughout the entire production."
Campo Santo were not the first developers to explore these interactions. As well as the 'put back spot' taken from Gone Home, in my longer piece on the influences and ambitions of Firewatch Anderson and fellow designer Chris Remo share how the team also drew ideas from games like Mirror's Edge, Far Cry 2, and Deus Ex. But that doesn't make the details any less worth exploring.
In understanding the choices that go into a world and its interactions, we can better read the intentions of developers in other games. After all, as small an interaction as picking up and putting down may seem, five years after Firewatch, in Unpacking, developer Witch Beam made that simple action into an entire game.
In Unpacking, you learn everything about your character through the act of unboxing her possessions into a series of different houses. From what belongings she takes from home to home, what other items are already in the house she's moving into, and where she is or isn't allowed to place her things tells you what is happening in her life.
So, the next time you pick up a pine cone or a picture frame in a game, ask yourself what you think will happen when you put it down and wonder why that is.
English (US) ·