Alan Wake

We had already decided to start working with something else during the production of Max Payne 2. Max Payne was a fantastic property to work with, but after seven years of Payne it's quite refreshing to get started on something completely new.

Alan Wake is a concept that we've been working with for over a year now. Once Max Payne 2 shipped we spent a little while recovering from the crunch, and then started working on different concepts trying to find the concept that would excite us and that we could be passionate about. And after several drafts we found something that we really liked... and that concept was Alan Wake.

It's been pretty much what we expected. Having so much more computing power at your disposal makes a huge difference. One of the key things with the next gen is that the demands on content creation have grown so much bigger, and just building the right tools for that take a while.

Not really. I mean game development is always a matter of compromise. You try to find the best places to put your effort and you can never do everything that you'd really want to have in a game, but still... with this coming generation there's so much more computing power, memory and so on, that we don't really need to compromise that much.

Yes, Stephen King is certainly one source of inspiration for us. I haven't read Bag of Bones myself, so I cannot really comment on that, but using a writer whose life turns nightmarish as a main character is something that King has successfully done in several of his books.

The most obvious Twin Peaks related things are naturally the location and the setting, the small town of Bright Falls in the state of Washington. As a TV series it really was the first to focus on a quirky and creepy small town setting. That kind of a setting has since been used in many other shows, but it's still something that hasn't really been seen in games. Atmosphere is a very important part of any thriller, and David Lynch is brilliant when it comes to that, so any lessons we can learn from him for this game will be a big bonus.

Intense cinematic action is something that we love to do, and Alan Wake features tense combat gameplay as well, but all things considered the game has a lot more emphasis on adventure and exploration that what Max Payne did.

Driving is an integral part of the game.

It's been fun. We never got around to introducing driving mechanics to Max Payne, so getting finally to work with vehicles is very cool, and the game will feature a variety of different vehicles that the player can use. Havok has been really good to work with in this regard as well, and we got the vehicles up and running very rapidly.

The changes in the weather affect everything on global scale. Visibility changes, audio cues will behave differently, driving dynamics change and so on. Pretty much what you'd expect to happen in the real world as well.

The dynamic nature of the environment is something that we use to create drama as well... for example, when you start a mission branch, it's a nice peaceful morning, and as you keep completing missions a storm begins to rise and that continues and gets worse and worse when you progress through the sub-mission tree.

With a world this dynamic, even the same location can feel radically different depending on the time of day and the weather.

Definitely. High quality voice-overs make a huge difference in the players' experience. We won't name any names yet though.

Story and dialogue are important parts of Alan Wake, just as much, if not even more than they were in Max Payne.

We're going for a combination of player freedom and story progression. Since we're focused on integrating a good story into the game, it will require a new approach to the game's structure as well. It will be challenging, but it is a challenge we gladly welcome.

We won't spill all the beans just yet. Part of it is that we want to hold things back so people will have new things to discover on the game, part of it is that we're still iterating things and finding the best solutions for some of the problems.

The combat is not purely about gunplay. The use of light plays an important role in the combat, and different light sources provide new gameplay angles there.

These figures first appear in Wake's dreams, and then they start slipping to the real world as well, or so it seems to Wake at least. They are connected to him and his past in many ways. I'm tempted to say a lot more, but I think that this is an area we'll save for later.

This too is something we still want to keep under wraps. We want everyone to get familiar with Alan Wake himself before we start introducing the supporting cast. Our small town setting and the fact that we are using TV-series as our story template might give you some hints of things to come though.

We're looking at Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC SKU's.

We haven't announced anything yet [smiles].

The final hardware specs are not locked down, but suffice to say that the PC version will require a high-end PC.

It's a completely new engine. When Max Payne 2 was completed, we re-evaluated all of our existing technology, as well as other engines out there. After long consideration, we thought that the only way to create something special and to build a game where the tech is completely supporting the gameplay would be to write our own new engine and tools.

You did see the game running, right? [Smiles] By far the biggest element in my opinion is how everything is so dynamic. Lighting is no longer static, objects in the world are dynamic and react to changes in the simulation. Effectively, we are building a massive world simulation with unprecedented depth.

Having said that, the visuals do make a huge difference as well. There is simply no way that something like this could run on a 32MB PlayStation 2. It would be just as impossible to reach this level of versatile environments and visual fidelity with a 64MB Xbox 1.

There's a huge amount of extreme visual technology constantly taking place on-screen... atmospheric scattering, fully volumetric shadows, high dynamic rendering, ambient occlusion, bloom, depth of field, normal mapping and loads of different pixel-shader effects that all work in harmony to create the dynamic and versatile visuals.

That's something we're looking into. However, as of now, I don't think that digital distribution-only would be an option yet. We do want to offer a good boxed copy with manuals and all that as well.

I think both consoles will have great looking games. Xbox 360 is initially easier to approach and harness all of the power of the system whereas and PS3 has more theoretical power that won't be as easily utilized by the developers.

We're targeting both next gen consoles, and we do have a good relationship with both hardware manufacturers. However, due to NDAs I can't comment in any further detail.

Yes, we believe that by focusing completely on the single-player experience we can deliver a better game. We'd much rather give the players a great single-player game, than a mediocre single and multiplayer game.

Working with 3D Realms was a great experience and we learned a lot from them, especially during the first Max Payne game, but it's time for us to stand on our own now.

After the huge success of the Max Payne games, we've had a lot of publisher interest. We've been talking with the key players, but we'll lock down the right partner once the time is right for that. Since we're in a strong financial position we do not have to rush madly into a deal or anything like that.

First of all, working with Rockstar on our previous games has been fantastic and we have a lot of respect for them and their production team. With Max Payne games, I think they gave us almost complete creative control.

As for now, we're looking for the best possible match that will help us to create a strong new franchise.