The Making Of...
How Alien met 2001: the untold story of No Code’s stellar sci-fi
How Alien met 2001 – the untold story of Observation, the sci-fi game where you play the AI
Few studios have made such an attentiongrabbing start as Glasgow’s No Code. Observation opens with a squall of noise, the crackle of a microphone audible over a rumbling score, as a caption tells us we’re aboard the titular space station, orbiting 410km above Earth. A light briefly illuminates a darkened room within the craft, which is passing floating detritus (including a spinning astronaut helmet), as the nervy voice of Dr Emma Fisher lets us know something has gone very wrong. She accesses the station’s computer system, SAM – at which point we discover it’s not Fisher, but the AI we’re playing as. As a relative calm settles over proceedings, we’re asked to run hull and pressure diagnostics, reading data and feeding back to the anxious medic. Then, out of nowhere, a series of symbols interferes with SAM’s display, alongside a persistent highpitched sound. A message appears onscreen in all caps – “BRING HER” – and we cut to black. Establishing the game’s premise and the story’s central mystery with economy and no little flair, it’s one of the most memorable introductions of recent years. And all the more remarkable when you consider this was the studio’s debut.
Or at least that was the plan. No Code’s second game was supposed to be its first; Observation was, after all, the project co-founder Jon McKellan set up the studio to make. The idea behind it first took root while he was working at Creative Assembly as the lead UI artist on Alien: Isolation. On a project with a lot of overlap between roles, his work involved plenty of general game design. While there, he began mulling over the idea of making an adventure game that played to his skills. “I wanted to make something that had a lot of motion graphics, and a lot of UI work – something where we could tell a story through the UI in some way.”
When Creative Assembly moved onto developing Halo Wars 2, he decided it was perhaps time to leave rather than work on a game in which he had no personal interest. Despite having spent five years totally immersed in the world of Alien – the studio, he says, had Ridley Scott’s film on a loop for inspiration, “which sounds like a PR line, but it was totally true” – he hadn’t grown tired of it. But then he read an article about Alien that examined it from a different angle, retelling the story from the perspective of the alien. “It recontextualised everything that happens,” he says. “This is a film where an alien is born in a hostile environment, and the humans chase it down with a cattle prod as soon as it’s born. They try to capture it and throw it out of an airlock and flame it out when it’s hiding – when all it really wants to do is eat and live.” The piece left him shocked but inspired. “That idea of looking at something from a different perspective had a big impact on me. I thought: maybe I can apply that rule to something else that I love.”
That thought took him from a ’70s sci-fi classic to one from the ’60s: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. “It’s a story I’ve wanted to rip off in many ways for my entire career,” McKellan laughs. He began to think about ways a game could explore the idea of an AI suddenly gaining sentience – in other words, approaching the story from HAL’s point of view. “That became the kernel of the whole thing: how do we put the player in that situation where they’re in control of this new body and the player is filling the role of the new consciousness that this AI has developed?” McKellan had just started a new job at Rockstar, but he couldn’t get this thought out of his head and knew he had to explore it. “That’s when No Code came about.”
This, he realised, was an opportunity to explore ideas that hadn’t been possible in Isolation thanks to the pervasive threat of the xenomorph. McKellan liked the idea of a horror game where you could afford to stand still; one that conveyed a sense of danger without some presence constantly stalking the player. There were, he reckoned, enough games that did that already, so why make another one? The UI angle, he admits, was partly down to pragmatism. “I know how to make UI-driven interfaces and know how to make them immersive to some extent. So it made sense to play to those skills, and that really fit in with the concept of being an AI and looking at everything through computer systems. It felt like all these bricks were fitting together nicely.”
It helped that he had a team of people he knew. McKellan wasn’t the only departure from Creative Assembly in the wake of Isolation’s release, and while he kept only a small in-house team to deal with the bulk of the game design, the exodus meant he could call upon a range of friends and former colleagues across the globe for assistance with art and writing. “A lot of that original Alien team have scattered far and wide to different projects,” he says. “But we’ve kept in touch.” And so, as Observation started to become a reality, he called upon the people he knew he could rely on, having begun to build the game with their work in mind. “Most people were really keen – a lot of the concept artists, the character teams and environment artists all got involved again,” he says. “It meant we could take that experience and knowledge, not just of their abilities, but the fact we’d worked together and knew how each other worked. It made it much easier to build something of high quality, but with a really small team.”
That team, including co-founder Omar Khan, who was responsible for the game’s ominous soundtrack, put together a build lasting around ten to 15 minutes. It comprised that opening and the introductory tasks that follow, including some tense time-sensitive objectives. Though condensed, it was, McKellan says, “almost beat for beat” the same as the finished game’s first chapter, through to the moment where Fisher realises that Observation is no longer 410km above Earth. No Code took the build to Sony, who loved it. It was early 2016, and so, with PSVR just on the horizon, the format holder naturally asked the developer to see whether it
“THAT IDEA OF LOOKING AT SOMETHING FROM A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE HAD A BIG IMPACT ON ME”
would work as a VR game. But having spent a couple of months prototyping, the idea fell through. “It felt really weird to be an AI in a CCTV camera, but still be able to move your head and body like a human. There was a total disconnect. And so it just failed right away.”
Sony wasn’t dissuaded, however. It thrashed out a plan with the studio before agreeing to sign the game – “though it still had to get through contracts and legal and all that kind of stuff,” McKellan recalls. In the meantime, it had pitched the game to Devolver Digital, which also liked the concept. Still, both parties seemed a little hesitant, mainly for financial reasons. “For an indie project, it was quite expensive bearing in mind the team we needed and the time it would take,” he says. Eventually, all three parties came to a mutual agreement. “We got the best of both worlds,” McKellan says. “We had platform support and we had a publisher that was really cool and easy to work with.”
But with six months to get everything rubberstamped, the studio didn’t want to sit there twiddling its thumbs. Instead, it decided to make Stories Untold, an episodic horror-led adventure game, as a way to test out some of the concepts it would later explore in Observation. The result, and the critical response, gave McKellan confidence that he and his team were on the right track. Two days after its release the contracts came in. Work could finally begin in earnest.
The game may be steeped in the spirit of sci-fi cinema – alongside Alien and 2001, there are hints of Moon, Arrival and Gravity, among others – but McKellan also drew inspiration from episodic television. (An episodic release for Observation was mooted but scrapped, though that structure is still evident in the finished game.) This was, in part, inspired by McKellan’s approach to writing. “A lot of the stuff I write is about moments, rather than planning out this grand plot and then executing it,” he says. “It’s like, ‘I think this would feel great; this would be an amazing moment’. I like cliffhanger endings. These are the things that get me going.”
“BRING HER”, then, came very early on. The story’s climactic twist on those two words arrived soon afterwards. That isn’t, however, to say that he didn’t have a plan for what would come between those two moments; rather, they would act as narrative anchors. “It’s a push-andpull between that and the bigger vision,”
McKellan says. “I’ll have moments and scenes in my head of how something might look or feel and then trace a line between them and adjust as necessary. But I still have a measuring stick of that main plot.” Perhaps unsurprisingly for a developer with a background in UI, his approach to the narrative design involved a lot of infographics. “I had all these graphs and data charts about how characters would change over time and stuff like that,” he laughs. “To me, it takes away the blank canvas where you’re not sure where to go.”
There’s no such hesitancy in Observation, which shifts smoothly between modes, from the static cameras of the early game to firstperson exploration, as SAM inhabits a series of floating mechanical spheres. As SAM gains sentience, the peril is transferred: at first, it seems like Fisher is the one in danger, but when you’re down in the bowels of the Observation, you feel under threat. “The spheres were always part of our arc for SAM as a character and for the game design for the player as well,” McKellan says. “They became this method for him to be able to experience things in a more human, or a more alive way. You can bang into doors and you can get stuck in a room – these might seem like simple, trivial problems, but for SAM they’re completely new experiences.”
The changes within Observation’s surrogate HAL are handled with a light touch, and McKellan is concerned the game might have approached his growing humanity a little too subtly. His voice, for example, is more robotic at the beginning and more fluid at the end – though without directly comparing the two, he suggests most players probably failed to notice. “There was one point we added to try to drive that home, where SAM uses Emma’s first name – which is obviously more of a human than a computer thing to do – which we hoped would spark people to think he’s acting differently.” Still, when it came to focus testing, he was fascinated to see how different players responded to the same problems. “If you give Emma some kind of information she hasn’t asked for, she’ll scold you,” he says. “And some people laughed at that, whereas some were like, ‘Oh shit, sorry.’ And that was great, because we definitely wanted to see those two sides of people: some feel like their role is to be a good AI and do a good job, while others are more rebellious.”
SAM’s own rebellion gives Observation an ending as gripping as its start – though McKellan suggests we shouldn’t expect more of the same from No Code’s next project. “Once it shipped, I said, ‘I’m never doing a game in space ever again’,” he laughs, albeit conceding that was mostly thanks to the challenges of working in zero-gravity, and how to build environments where ‘up’ can mean any direction. “I don’t want to retread the same steps,” he says. “But, having had a sleep since, I think it’s still a genre where there’s lots to do that hasn’t yet been done.” And, on this evidence, who better to do it?