Adventure Classic Gaming

Despite being a newcomer to indie adventure game development, Areo has already aroused a great interest among genre fans and critics because of its very ambitious premiere game project—a brand new episodic adventure series titled Casebook. Casebook Episode I: Kidnapped, the first title in the series, is a realistic simulation of crime scene investigation that focuses on collecting and analyzing forensic evidence. What sets Areo immediately apart from other competitors is its use of an innovative technology called Areograph to recreate, from footage filmed at real locations, a totally fluid and fully explorable 3D game world that blends seamlessly with FMV (Full Motion Video).

Recently, we have been granted an opportunity to interview Sam Clarkson, Areo's Creative Director, about Areo, Areograph, and Casebook. In the interview, Clarkson speaks to us about what makes the essence of a good mystery game, how much care and attention has been taken to bring into the games the realism that is made possible by the use of FMV, and how Casebook showcases Areo's patented camera technology. He also tells us how the gameplay for Casebook is tweaked to please fans of both casual and adventure game genres and how the gameplay will grow and evolve with each installment of the series. We are grateful to Clarkson for providing us with such exhaustive descriptions of a very unique game production process that will be of great interest to adventure game players and game developers alike.

Check out our gallery of concept and production art from Casebook!

What is the history behind Areo as a game development company? What are its creative goals?

'Areo' started out as a technology company called 'Areograph'. My good friend and colleague Luke Reid believed there must be a way to create immersive game environments using photography and began researching it in 2006. After years of R & D we had a working prototype and decided it was time to put it to some use. It seemed obvious that if we created a game using Areographed (e.g. real) environments that the characters must be real too. Given this situation, it was clear that the game would benefit from a more cinematic approach, which is where I came in. My background is in film and television and I was fascinated by what the Areograph technology had to offer... I felt this was an opportunity to create a game with characters that players could really care about, in a way that can be a huge challenge with traditional polygon characters, and sometimes less of a challenge with cartoon characters... but that's another story.

So the goal was fairly simple: Create a game which capitalises on Areograph's strengths (photo-real environments with real actors) and work within the current limitations (small, static environments). So we formed 'Clocktower Games' and created the Casebook design document, at the time it had the less catchy name 'Crime Sense'. We settled on a forensic game because it was well suited to Areograph - after all, crime scenes are something that a player could spend quite some time in, studying every detail, and they also benefit from the realism.

Lastly we had a financial reality to consider. We felt that if it was a game that only hardcore adventure gamers would enjoy that our market may be limited, so we decided to create it in such a way as to appeal to adventure game fans while still making it accessible to more casual gamers, hopefully meaning we'd reach a broader audience and fulfill our financial responsibilities. Overall I think we were successful in finding this balance, however, we have been made aware that the game is still too easy for seasoned adventure gamers and too difficult for some casual gamers... It's hard to please everyone but we are working on improving this balance.

Recently 'Clocktower Games' and 'Areograph' merged companies. We are know simply known as 'Areo'.

What is the basic premise of the Casebook series? What cinematic style are you aiming to recreate for the series?

The basic premise of Casebook boils down to the following: it's an interactive crime show, where you help Detective Burton solve various crimes. You find the evidence and Burton interviews the suspects. In fact, I'd like to mention something here that some players have been unhappy about: the lack of interactivity in the dialog scenes. Personally, I have rarely enjoyed traditional dialog trees in adventure games, with the few exceptions being comedy games like Monkey Island. Generally I find it tiresome: you have this feeling that you only need to know one piece of vital information, yet you end up clicking through all the options just to be certain... Which is fine if it's highly amusing dialog, but even in a well written drama I think it's harder to make the entire dialog tree interesting. Thus our design decision to simply make these as high quality and entertaining as we possibly could, while conveying the information in a non-interactive manner. In future episodes I'd like to explore a happy medium, semi-interactive interview scenes, along the lines of the nod or shake-the-head boolean we have in the interrogation scenes.

Another thing that influenced Casebook's premise was who we targeted as our first distributor: Big Fish Games. When we decided to make a forensics game it occurred to me that collecting evidence is not dissimilar to collecting objects in the popular 'hidden object' style games. What I hoped made Casebook different was that our objects have a context: forensics. You aren't just finding 8 Umbrellas and 4 pairs of sunglasses in a garden, you are finding items of evidence which shed light on the crime and connect directly to the narrative. I realise hidden object games aren't exactly a huge hit with the hardcore adventure crowd, but I wouldn't classify Casebook as a hidden object game, it merely has parallels to the hidden object format. I've noticed that more developers are moving in this direction, so I'll look forward to seeing where others take this concept, particularly the Tex Murphy team with 'Three Cards to Midnight'.

The other main aspect of Casebook is that it was designed as an episodic game, with a show coming out every three months (we'd like to release them sooner, but we are a small team and the film shoots and post production take quite some time). We felt this would really suit the 'interactive crime show' feeling we wanted to attain and we also did it for selfish reasons: we love computer games but are simply too busy to commit 12+ hours to beat a game. We wanted to make games for people like ourselves, a game that could be beaten in a single session and left you wanting more... short and sweet was the motto.

In terms of 'cinematic style', I wanted a fairly broad feel, that is to say that I didn't specifically set out to make an American or British style show, the intention was to take elements from a diverse range of shows and create an original show which honored its influences, but which had its own distinct vibe. This desire to straddle both American and British aesthetics was also reflected in the set design, costumes and cinematography - a sort of comfortable balance between American and European sensibilities. I have often referred to our setting as 'nowhere land', meaning that it's difficult to pin down exactly where it is set. Hopefully this means it appeals to people from all over.

Who are the major characters in the game? What famous fictional characters, if any, inspire the character of Detective Burton?

The major characters are Detective James Burton and Pete the lab technician. Pete needed to be both believable and amusing, which I think he pulled off admirably. Audiences seem to have responded positively towards him so it's a shame he had to leave for Scotland after Episode 2... you can expect to meet a lab woman in Episode 3.

Burton has influences of Harrison Ford's Deckard character from Blade Runner (what a great adventure game that was) with a little of Bruce Willis' irony thrown in. We wanted him to be approachable though, not an anti-hero, and a little left-field, so there's a dose of Columbo in there, too. Generally though, there is a set of classic traits a detective requires which Burton also shares, while - hopefully - remaining a unique character. Our main concern was that he wasn't the cliche Bogart style detective or overtly American (we didn't want to look like CSI rip-offs). Of course, things changed when we cast a guy from California as Detective Burton... One of the techniques used in film is to adapt a written character to the strengths of who you cast in the role, this couldn't be more true than with Julian Temple who plays Burton. Julian has an interesting mix of being a fairly mellow guy on the surface, with an underlying intensity, which was just perfect.

Each episode requires additional characters to fulfill the basic needs of the 'who-done-it?' mystery format. You always need a few decoy characters, a victim or two, and some sympathetic characters that the audience really cares about. In the case of Episode 1, the victims are the kidnapped children, the sympathetic character is the nanny Clara and the decoys are... well, that would be giving it away.

Why is the decision made for the player to play a generic, nameless character as a silent, faceless rookie instead of Detective Burton? To what extent will the relationship between these characters change in future episodes?

One of the design goals was to not alienate female gamers (both a creative and financial decision). This didn't mean making it overly 'girly', this simply meant making it equally accessible to both men and women. This is reflected in various ways: the low quota of violence for one, but most importantly a 'gender neutral' avatar for the player. I felt that if the player never heard or saw themselves they could picture the character as they wanted... funnily enough some players have assumed they are a male because Burton calls them 'Partner' all the time, but this wasn't our intention.

Secondly I didn't want the player to inhabit Burton because we needed someone to act as a guide for the player, rather than simply having the notebook popping up with objectives I wanted a sense of a friendship to develop, because you are in it together.

The relationship between Burton and the player will not change dramatically over the course of the series, however, Burton will become slightly less hands-on as his faith in his partner's abilities grows. So by the end of the season I imagine that the player and Burton will be more like equals - as the player transitions from being a rookie to becoming a seasoned pro. This will also suit the game getting progressively more challenging.

What elements make for a good crime mystery? How are these elements realized differently in an adventure game as compared to a novel?

I'll let the writer of Casebook, Henry Feltham, answer this question:

"A good mystery has always been, at base, a simple thing, and I don't think games alter the fundamental nature of the mystery form. The art in games, as much as film or novels, is to dress up a simple plot as something more complicated. Motivation needs to be clear, while the execution can be (almost) as elaborate as you like. This is true for an Agatha Christie novel, it's true for CSI, and it's true for Casebook. It's nearly too obvious to bother mentioning, but the critical questions are who? and how? and why? Mystery games are no different in their need to ask one or all of these questions.

Characterization, too, seems to me to be largely unaffected by the change in form. Genre writing necessarily involves a degree of shorthand in developing characters, as they are most often vehicles for story events.

When you start talking about specific elements, I would have to say that betrayal is THE fundamental crime element. I've never read a good story, seen a good film, or played a good game that didn't involve this somehow. In a sense, it's the ONLY story worth telling. Whether it's the underling betrayed by his superiors, the lover betrayed, the investigator, the idealist betrayed by her beliefs - the critical element here is the action turning in on itself. This is always going to be the most tragic event, the one that cuts sharpest against the audience's sympathies.

The difference comes in, with games, in that the flow of information is very different. If a game designer exercised only the kind of structural control that a novelist or scriptwriter used, the game would be very boring, very linear, very confined. I want to ask: would it even count as a game? At any rate, I think it would be a poor mystery game that did not allow the player some latitude of movement in how they solve the crime. I'm not saying that Casebook has perfected this, or even taken it as far as we could have, but within each location there are vast number of permutations for how a player goes about assembling evidence, and progressing.

A related difference is that a game, unlike a novel, can respond to a player's actions. Roughly speaking, the elements of a game only find their final form at the game's end. This, in a mystery game, must be one of the most useful aspects of its design, because it's possible to alter the outcome of the game based on a player's actions. The ending is not set, and mystery structure is formulaic enough to graft a variety of end states onto a single plot. I think that's a strength that mystery game designers are yet to fully exploit, because it's damn difficult to anticipate the various ways players will answer the question(s) you're asking them. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, even our budgets only allow for fairly modest diversity."

The gameplay in Casebook follows in a perpetual triad of tasks: Photograph Crime Scene, Process Evidence, Sort and Link (in the Evidence Folder). Why have you chosen to divide the gameplay in this manner? How do you avoid making the gameplay too repetitive?

Yes, how does one avoid making the gameplay too repetitive? Well, that is a question I have pondered endlessly and by some accounts, failed at. Some reviewers have found Casebook repetitive in the sense that it is a chore to repeat the cycle (collect evidence, process evidence, link evidence) while others take pleasure in the process, enjoying becoming more and more efficient at it.

What we were trying to convey with this process is that in forensics there is a lot of repetitive work. If you find a footprint you have to find out who it belongs to. This means first getting exemplar shoes from every suspect and comparing all of their shoe-prints against the original. This by definition is a repetitive process and we tried to do it justice in the most fun way we could conceive of.

If I put on my film director's hat, my hope is that if the narrative succeeds, and the player cares about what is happening, that this lends an air of meaning to all their actions, mitigating the sense of repetition. If the story and characters were not engaging, then the gameplay would carry no weight, but from what I gather, players of Casebook seem to thoroughly enjoy the story and characters and this helps them to engage in the somewhat repetitive task of being a forensic detective.

We will be introducing 3 - 5 new mini-games in each episode which will add variation. Additionally, we have tried to distribute the mini-games more evenly in Episode 2, so that no single mini-game occurs too frequently.

How did you cast the actors (particularly for the role of James Burton) in Casebook? What interesting experiences did you have filming on set?

We cast our actors in the standard fashion. We contacted local talent agencies, found appropriate looking actors and ran several days of auditions. We didn't have too much trouble casting most the supporting parts, but we were struggling to find an actor who could play Burton. In the early days we wanted a woman to play the part of Burton, but no one appropriate turned up, so we decided to try men in the part and re-wrote it accordingly. We found a trained actor who was suitable, but who lacked that undefinable quality that someone has when they fit the part perfectly.

I had meet Julian Temple (Burton) when he modeled for my wife's clothing label. He had a cool look but I never considered him as the lead because he had no acting experience. However, a colleague bumped into him and suggested he try out for the part of Burton. He got hold of a script and practised his lines with his band-mates while they drove between concerts in their van (he's the singer in his group: The Julian Temple Band). When he turned up on the casting day he strolled in confidently and proclaimed 'I am Burton'. He sat down, said his lines with conviction and that was that... we'd found our Burton.

Pete the lab technician was cast in similarly random manner. We'd heard from the owner of our favourite pub that a Scottish actor had been hanging around, so we left a message for him and he got back to us after a few days. We auditioned him and he was a perfect balance of believable and funny. Even more importantly he had a great voice, crucial given how much audio-only dialog he delivers. Once we realised we had an American and a Scotsman as the leads we re-wrote things slightly to accommodate an amusing rivalry.

Some of the most fun I had on set was directing the children. There's a scene near the end of Episode I where we show a summary of the crime, which we call the 'crime flashback'. In this scene the kids were tied up and had tape on their mouths. As you can imagine, even a make-believe situation like this made the crew quite uncomfortable, but the kids were having great fun. To keep them amused I let them tape up my mouth also, which made directing the scene interesting. At the end of the day we all tore the tape of each other's mouth and shared a laugh... People say working with child actors is difficult, but with these kids it was a breeze.

The live action scenes were all shot on location. To what extent were the sets dressed up for the different scenes in the game so they would meet the story's specific needs or create a suspenseful mood?

When developing the screenplay, our writer also creates what we call the 'forensic synopsis'; this lists every forensic prop and its rough position in each set. It's important that we get this right in two situations: 1. That all the evidence is where it should be when we 'Areograph' the crime scenes. 2. That the suspects can be seen leaving behind this evidence in the cut-scenes. For example, we show the kidnapper in Episode I slipping on some marbles and landing on the wicker birdcage. So it was important to film this scene before we Areographed so that the birdcage would be intact at the start of the cut-scene, but damaged in the game environment. This attention to detail is crucial in a game that deals with evidence, but even we stuff it up occasionally - hey, we're game developers, not crime scene investigators!

The other top priority of the sets is that they are each unique; we only get to provide 3 - 4 crime scenes per episode so we do our best to make them as diverse as possible. Episode I contains a Victorian style children's bedroom, an abandoned factory, a dirty trailer home and an old bombshelter now used as a garden shed... So you can see we go to some trouble to have a broad range of sets, while making sure they serve the narrative. When we first set out to use photographic data for our environments we were determined that they would be highly atmospheric locations, so our set designer works hard to attain this goal. We believe there is an intangible 'something' that you can only get with real environments and we hope this is apparent when exploring them.

What caused the demise in the use of Full Motion Video (FMV) in adventure games in the 1990s? With Casebook, how did you intend to change the perception of how FMV should be used in video games?

I'm no expert on the history of FMV but I have my theories. I think that FMV games got a bad reputation for several reasons. Firstly, there was the 'let's fill up CD-ROMs with lots of video approach' which meant we ended up with a bunch of 'games' which were nothing more than a bad pick-a-path novel with video instead of words. This was confounded by the fact that the production values were generally low and the people behind the cinematics weren't always film-makers. This meant there was a fleet of dreary games, with horrible cinematography, bad acting, clumsy editing and minimal gameplay. Obviously there were exceptions here and there such as 'The 7th Guest', 'Gabriel Knight II', and of course the 'Tex Murphy' series... though I am embarrassed to say that I only briefly experienced 'Under a Killing Moon' a few years after it came out and for whatever reason didn't finish it. We are certainly proud of comparisons to such fine examples of the genre. Now that I am working in this field I will return to older titles and see if I can mine some inspiration from the FMV classics.

This brings me to an important point regarding Casebook. During development we never consciously said 'we are making an FMV game'. Our environments were real and it seemed only logical to film actors as our game characters because placing cartoon or polygon characters into our photographic crime scenes would look incongruous. In fact this disconnect between characters and environments is what I believe also contributed to the seeming demise of 90's FMV games, in their case they were often placing filmed actors into 3D scenes and the effect was, well, not seamless to say the least. Personally I find the combination distracting, and feel that this is the primary breakthrough that our Areograph technology finally allows: an environment that FMV actors do not look out of place in. Of course, we still have a long way to go to integrate the actors more deeply, such as allowing you to walk around the room while the actors are in there. This is certainly one of our goals with future developments in the Areograph technology. Which brings me to your next question...

What is Areograph technology? What is this technology's original intended use? How is it used in the game to recreate "virtually" the live action crime scenes "? How easy or hard is it to handle as a game development tool?

Areograph is two things: Firstly it is a robotic device with an attached camera that allows us to capture real environments, in our case film sets. Secondly it is the process by which you take the hundreds of thousands of photos that the robot generates and then stitch them together so that they can be explored inside a computer. This patented process was invented by my colleagues Justin and Luke Reid.

Areograph's intended use is to provide an alternative to polygon environments for applications where realism is a requirement. As developers well know, a lot of money goes into creating the art in video games. Teams are growing larger in proportion to the increasing power of computers, and gamers are demanding higher quality graphics every year. Areograph offers a potentially cheaper alternative to the 'art team army' approach. A set can be constructed fairly cheaply in a matter of days or weeks and every object in it can be sourced quickly without the need for them to be designed from the ground up. For example, if you take any number of objects from the children's bedroom set in Episode I; say the rocking horse, that alone would take a 3D artist days to model and texture to that level of detail, where as we can just walk into an antique shop and rent a real one. In the time it would take a team of 3D artists to create all the objects in the children's bedroom alone, we could have constructed three entire sets with one production designer and a few builders. So you can imagine the reduction in cost.

Of course Areograph isn't appropriate for all game types. I would never suggest someone use our technology to create a vast game world like 'World of Warcraft' or a cartoon world like 'Sam & Max', which is why we state it is an alternative to polygon or cartoon environments. We are working on a more elaborate version which will allow us to capture any type of environment, but this is someway off.

To 'virtually' create one of our crime scenes, the process is as follows: We build the set and then lower our ceiling grid onto the set. This ceiling has a robotic 'boom' hanging off it with a camera attached at eye level. We do a pass in both directions and then the images are stitched together to form 360 degree views in every position in the room. Currently these need to be fairly compressed to allow Casebook to come in at under one gig per episode, however we relish the chance to release the game on DVD (or even Bluray) one day, where we can really show off the fidelity of the original images. Having said that, it's becoming more and more acceptable for 'large file' download games to be quite big, so we may get a chance to release (or re-release) episodes of Casebook at a higher resolution someday.

In terms of using Areograph in a game development environment, it has presented some big challenges. Like anything brand new, it had its teething problems. Many people looked at us like we were insane when we first pitched our idea to software companies or robotics suppliers. It was an uphill battle to build it and get it working smoothly, but we were determined and got there eventually. The biggest technical challenge is actually lighting the sets. In normal film sets you 'cover' a scene from one side, favouring one actor and then film the reverse angle after that. This means that you can put the lights behind the camera, pointing towards whichever actor you are covering. In our case the camera would be looking in both directions, so no light - except the normal lights in a room - could be visible. This sounds simple enough, but it's a very unique and difficult lighting situation. So as you can imagine, working with Areograph demands a broad range of technical skills.

From the perspective of an indie game developer, what are the most challenging parts of this project? What other adventure games, if any, are Areo planning to develop besides the Casebook series?

The most challenging aspects of creating Casebook... I'm not sure where to begin. We had little to no game making experience and only a handful of us had worked in the film world, so first getting our heads around a game design document was a major challenge (how long should it be? how detailed does it need to be? why is no one reading the game design document?). Then there was the question of scheduling something that was using a completely new technology. What roadblocks would it present? We tried to guess and came close.

At the heart of every project are the people making it. This was the hardest thing to get right: hiring the right people. We are based in New Zealand. The entire population is about 4 million, so finding available, talented staff was a challenge. But after a few ups and downs throughout the project we have finally found our groove and are settling into the production cycle.

The current challenge, as a small indie developer, is raising awareness that Casebook exists. We have no marketing budget, so other than the visibility Casebook gets at distribution sites all we have are things like this interview to inform gamers that Casebook is out there. We are in negotiations with various other online portals, but the process is always long-winded to secure a distribution deal. There is a lot of back and forth with contracts before finally being available for download. It's a difficult situation when you have an unknown game on your hands: You want it to be available on as many websites as possible so that you can make enough sales to survive, except the big distributors don't want it until it has proven itself elsewhere. So it's a catch 22. At least now we are finally getting positive reviews and raising awareness, so getting onto other distribution sites shouldn't be as difficult as it was initially.

We have been approached by film studios looking to turn their existing franchises into games using the Casebook template. It's too early to comment, but I would not be surprised if we have another game being developed in parallel to Casebook in the near future. We also have another game we are working on internally, which will utilise Areograph 2.0 technology. It's too early to discuss anything, but suffice to say, it is set outdoors and is nothing like Casebook.

The Casebook series is currently scheduled to have 4 episodes. Has development begun not only on Episode 2 but also on Episode 3 and Episode 4? How far apart in time will the episodes be released? What will the new cases be about (just a teaser...)?

Casebook is intended as a six-part season, with a new part coming out every 3 months. Episode 2 is running a little late, but is almost complete and will be out in February. Episode 3's video content begins filming shortly, while Episode 4 is a first draft screenplay, with parts 5 and 6 merely at the rough synopsis stage. At any one time we have 3 episodes overlapping each other in various stages of production. It keeps us very busy to say the least.

What follows are the plot summaries for episodes 2 and 3:

Casebook: Episode II - The Watcher

It looks like an open and shut case - a lonely young man in a bad part of town calls it quits. His body is found beneath the window that he jumped out. Just another rough day at the Skylark Apartments.

But then there's the strange marks on his floor, and the video camera in his window. Was he monitoring the tenants? Lord knows, there's entertainment at the Skylark if you're looking for it. And when the room goes up in flames, the case only gets murkier - who broke into the apartment? why burn it?

Meet the weird inhabitants of Skylark Apartments, explore the rooms, figure out who's lying and who's just stretching the truth. Because in a place like this, you'd be crazy to take things at face value ...

Casebook: Episode III - Snake in the Grass

When a killer escapes justice, Detective Burton takes it on himself to solve the case. He's outside the law, following a trail of unsolved crimes to an old haunt ...

Welcome to Garden, a small town with a big problem. There's been a murder at the local chapel, and Burton's certain he knows who's responsible, even if the suspect claims to have reformed. Surely Burton's old enemy is covering up, but a little investigation points to someone else. Still, that's his style ... right, partner?

As Burton grows more obsessed, it's up to you to sort truth from fiction. Talk to the locals and figure out where this is going, because an old snake's been whispering in folks' ears again...

Well, thanks for giving me the opportunity to share the story behind Casebook.

Thank you very much for your interesting and exhaustive answers.

Related Articles

Casebook Episode I: Kidnapped  review

Casebook Episode II: The Watcher  review

Casebook Episode III: Snake in the Grass  review

Related Galleries

Sam Clarkson

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