Post Script
Q+A: Chris Olsen, writer and director, Somerville
We previously spoke to Chris Olsen at the beginning of 2022, for E368’s cover feature. As the year draws to a close, we pick things up right on the eve of Somerville’s release. The passing of time quickly becomes a theme of the conversation, Olsen having started work on this project back in early 2014, when he was working as an animator in the film industry. After spending so many years developing it, he is now in the process of letting go, he confesses, and of anticipating the reaction to a game he fully expects to be “polarising”.
After working on this game for so long, initially on your own and then with a growing team, how was the final stretch of development?
It was really tough, the last year. I’m normally the person that, when everyone’s panicking, I’m quite level-headed, and I have a lot of energy to keep going and going. Making a game, especially over this amount of time, it really pushed me to the limit of what I can tolerate. I’ve spent the last year not only working on the game but trying to look at it not from the inside out; trying to change my brain to look at it as a player. I think if I saw this over someone’s shoulder, it would draw me in, and I think I would sit and watch a little bit, and then I’d probably be like, “Don’t spoil that – I want to play it”. And that’s kind of kept me sane throughout the whole process, just holding on to that idea. A lot of people aren’t going to see the things that you see, and some people are going to see the things you didn’t. I’ve had to learn to not be so controlling over the over the process – it’s really difficult to give it over.
We’ve had our eye on Somerville since 2017, but what really pushed it into the spotlight was Microsoft’s E3 2021 showcase, when it was also announced as a Game Pass title. When you were putting yourself in the head space of a potential player, was that the audience you had in mind? That was probably [the biggest reason we signed up for] the Game Pass thing, other than the help to our production from Microsoft. When I talked to them, they said, “You’re going to get people who try out your game who normally just play Forza or Halo”. They’ve seen a lot of evidence that a lot of people try out these very obscure games on Game Pass because there’s just zero risk for them. If they don’t like it, they can just uninstall it. Obviously it has to be calculated against the sales you’re going to lose everywhere else – but losing that barrier to entry, I think, is great. I never want to be niche; I want to be mainstream, I want the largest audience possible. That’s not to say that I’m going to change the game to suit a wider audience, I just want the exposure level to be very high. And in hindsight, I still believe it was a good deal. But we’ll see how that goes, obviously. Because if it blows up, then, I mean, I don’t really care about the money side of things, but then we might be like, should we have maybe got more for this? But you do what you can, to get your game out.
One of the big questions that remained unanswered when we spoke previously involved the ‘Sediment’, the alien matter that players can reshape with their newfound powers. It went through many iterations as development progressed. Are you satisfied with what you finally landed on?
I’m very happy with the look. I think if we had more time, we would obviously keep digging, but it’s part of the learning process – not to take things like that lightly, in the future. Most games introduce maybe one or two risky aspects on top of a known quantity, but I feel like we had lots of from-scratch aspects that impacted production quite heavily but weren’t sort of focused on in the early period of development. The Sediment was really tough to solve. Like anything in the game, from my perspective, everything could have done with a little bit more love. But I think that, left to my own devices, I would probably still be polishing this game way into my 50s. It’d be like Phil Tippett on [the movie] Mad God. That was, like, a 20-year project that drove him insane – he got sectioned because of the stress of it. He kept going back, just doing a little bit: “Ah, that’s not right, let’s go back…” And yeah, I could see myself falling into that. But I want to live a life. You have to get to a point where it’s just like, “This is enough now. You’ve sacrificed so much for this – let’s just take what we’ve learned, wrap this up, and put all those learned experiences into the next thing”. Because I also don’t want to just have one game attached to me, over ten years.
“I think that, left to my own devices, I would probably still be polishing this game way into my 50s”
It sounds like you’ve started thinking about what you’re making next.
Yeah, always. I have this backlog of ideas, and holding them off is hard – I don’t want to live with that forever. I want to get those things out. These long games, it’s too much. I would love to make a game inside of two to three years. I think that would be wonderful. But I have to be really disciplined to take the time, post-release, before we get into any of those things. We’re going to have a decent post-mortem period, sort out our processes, and then in the background be kind of slow boiling these new ideas, to see what rises to the top.