PORTING A STEEL SKY
Beneath A Steel Sky was originally released for the Amiga and DOS computers, and it was made available as freeware for the PC in 2003. The game was also remastered and released on the IOS App Store on 7 October 2009, keeping its memory alive. “I’d received a call from Apple and the person said he thought our games would work really well on the iphone,” says Revolution boss Charles Cecil. “We’d just produced Broken Sword: Shadow Of The Templars – The Director’s Cut on the Nintendo DS and we agreed that a handheld version of Beneath A Steel Sky would be perfect.” Its appearance on the iphone revived talks of a sequel. “Dave Gibbons had actually written a script about a year or two after the original Beneath A Steel Sky,” Charles reveals. “But this was now in the mid-to-late Nineties when the only way to get a game developed was to find a publisher to fund and distribute it. “The publishers had become obsessed with the idea that the adventure [genre] was dead and they were more interested in commissioning interactive movies,” Charles continues. “I was also being told that the PC was dead which of course seems laughable now but it meant the sequel had been put on indefinite hold.” Rather than get straight on with a sequel following the IOS appearance, Revolution worked on publishing Broken Sword: Shadow Of The Templars – The Director’s Cut in 2010, following by Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror. “Both were successful and we’d come from a position of being financially weak to slowly building ourselves up and it was just fantastic,” Charles says. “Dave Gibbons remained loyal throughout and we maintained that relationship. We kept talking about a sequel to Steel Sky but the creative and commercial opportunities did not exist until recently.” The original plans for a sequel would have been a 2D title. Revolution had seen a mixed reception when it moved to 3D with the third Broken Sword game, The Sleeping Dragon, in 2003. “It split the community,” says Charles. “A lot of gamers new to the series played it and loved it but many fans from the previous two games didn’t.” It proved to be a learning experience. Although many prefer to cast 2006’s Broken Sword: The Angel Of Death from their memories and despite a 2D revival in 2013 with Broken Sword 5: The Serpent’s Curse, Revolution is embracing 3D with Beyond A Steel Sky. “We’re being more skilful in the way that we’re using the opportunities offered,” Charles affirms.
Joey, however, was a deliberate addition and crucial to the adventure, driving the narrative and aiding the creation of some of the puzzles. “Joey added an extra dimension because you could get him to do things,”
Charles explains. “Clearly in television and film you often have a pairing because you need to convey the exposition. A good way to do that is to hide it within a conversation happening on a different level. You can say what you want to the gamer and do it through an exchange that appears to be about something else.”
Some of these characters and ideas were added during the development of the game and a few became more important than others. “The beauty of writing a game back then was that we could be much more flexible,” Charles says. “One day we were trying to work out a puzzle and someone said [spoiler alert!], ‘Oh my god, LINC is Foster’s dad” and suddenly these dominoes fell into place. We could change the whole emphasis of the game and it worked extraordinarily well.”
That could never happen with Beyond A Steel Sky. With this game, Revolution has created two documents that always stay separate from each other. One is the story and the supporting information that rolls on for hundreds of pages. The other clearly spells out the design.
“They are kept separate very deliberately because they will affect and inform each other,” Charles explains. “Puzzles will feed back into the story and the great story moments will feed back into the puzzles, and the reason we’ve been so diligent in detailing this world is because we want consistency. When somebody asks, ‘Oh should this be here?’ it can become quite clear what the answer should be. When you have consistency, it means the storytellers don’t have to explain everything.”
It also means the method of creating the puzzles is different and it’s perhaps prudent to explain that Beyond A Steel Sky is not a straightforward 2D continuation of the original story but, rather, takes the game into 3D which can force a different approach. Beneath A
Steel Sky is a traditional point-and-click and its methodology is familiar to anyone who has played such games before.
“Beneath A Steel Sky was driven by the inventory and the inventory alone,” Charles says. “So therefore you had to have puzzles that required unusual uses of your inventory.” While Charles believes the puzzles were “broadly quite logical”, they could certainly leave gamers stumped at times. None were in the same category at the infamous goat puzzle that featured in Broken Sword: The Shadow Of The Templars in 1996, however.
“Any of the solutions in Beneath A Steel Sky, once you stumbled on them, would have made you think that you should have got it which meant you didn’t feel cheated,” Charles says. Even so, coming up with puzzles that made sense was no easy task. “Generally, you have a small number of really good puzzles with a lot of filler but we worked hard to strike a balance,” he continues. “Frankly, it’s very, very easy to come up with loads of cheap puzzles but much harder to create those that fit within the context of the environment and the logical behaviours of the characters as they exist in the world.”
Revolution is not taking the same approach with Beyond A Steel Sky, which is being created from the company’s studio in York’s historic Shambles and assisted by an external developer. “We’re not having puzzles that require unusual uses of your inventory because there’s always a risk it can create contrived gameplay,” Charles says. “I’d like to think that players of Beyond A Steel Sky won’t get stuck because they’ll spend longer exploring the environment for a solution, looking at the behaviour of characters and the systems. In a point-and-click adventure like Beneath A Steel Sky, you could resort to using every inventory item on every background [object] because you’d think the solution could be illogical. There was a hope that you’d stumble on a solution in the end.”
One crucial thing Beyond A Steel Sky is continuing, though, is the use of its Virtual Theatre engine, created by Revolution cofounder Tony Warriner. It debuted with Lure Of The Temptress and was used in Beneath A Steel Sky, allowing non-player characters to wander Union City, interact with the surroundings and make the world seem more natural.
“It was used for one character in the original game: Gilbert Lamb,” Charles recalls. “We’d found having characters walking about in Lure Of the Temptress caused a problem because they’d wander a fair old distance and players never knew where they were at any one point. They’d have to go looking for them and it could take a long time.
“So we limited the Virtual Theatre in Beneath A Steel Sky and concentrated on Gilbert Lamb: he’d wander around, go in the lift, go down, go to his room and then back again. What this allowed us to do was introduce a nice puzzle where you could go into the LINC system and take away his priorities so he couldn’t enter the lift and had to give you his card. It struck me as a really interesting use of Virtual Theatre.”
In Beyond A Steel Sky, around four of five characters are restricted to a specific area, and so players can see where they are, eliminating the chase and a sense of having to wait for them to turn up. There can be interactions, as with the previous game, allowing Robert Foster to communicate with other characters.
“It remains a cerebral game,” Charles insists. “Just like the original, we’re not drawing on a player’s manual dexterity. What we want, as in Beneath A Steel Sky, is for the player to evaluate the environment and get them to put several steps together to work out how to overcome a puzzle. Sometimes it’s just an inventory item; sometimes in the new game it’s in conjunction with hacking objects and the behaviour of characters. If you enjoyed Beneath A Steel Sky, then you’re going to love how we’ve moved it on.”
“PUZZLES WILL FEED BACK INTO THE STORY AND THE GREAT STORY MOMENTS WILL FEED BACK INTO THE PUZZLES, AND THE REASON WE’VE BEEN SO DILIGENT IN DETAILING THIS WORLD IS BECAUSE WE WANT CONSISTENCY”
CHARLES CECIL