E3 and Fan Reactions
Matt Amenda: Now that Tacoma’s been featured at E3, what have things been like at the studio? Did it get crazy for a while?
MA: How have fan reactions differed between Gone Home’s announcement and Tacoma’s?
Expanding the boundaries
MA: Tacoma looks like a bold departure from Gone Home. First an old house with no one in it, then a sprawling space station. What inspired the team to go in that direction?
Folks are also pumped about space as a setting. In the past few years it feels like space exploration has become more and more humanized - you can read personal Twitter accounts of ISS astronauts, see them answer questions on YouTube and watch mission control react when something like the Curiosity rover landing is a success, so I think there’s a real interest in seeing the human element behind all the science.
MA: Developing a sci-fi environment sounds a lot harder than building one house in Gone Home. What were the challenges that went with switching gears like that?
New Experiences
MA: What tone are you going for in Tacoma, story-wise? What do you want the player to feel?
A space station is also ground well covered in the game world (and in other areas of pop culture) so thinking about how The Tacoma is different (and similar) to existing stations is another consideration we’ve been tackling.
MA: What new gameplay features will there be? Will it still be entirely exploration based, like Gone Home was, or will there be things like combat?
MA: Any plans to release the game on other platforms besides Xbox and PC/Mac/Linux?
And there won’t be any combat in the game, which always takes away some of the pressure.
MA: After Tacoma, what next? What does the future hold for Fullbright?
From the looks of things, this small Portland indie studio is going places. We’ll see in time if they can deliver a larger-scale game while keeping the heart that fans loved about Gone Home.
For further reading: Fullbright site, Tacoma site, and company blog.
