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The Night School team was forced to overcome challenges with how to pace dialogue, and making sure vital narrative points weren’t lost without taking agency away from the player. Those two things will just go together like chocolate and peanut butter.’ But in reality, it became a massive challenge” “On the surface, we felt was a pretty simple thing, like, ‘Oh, it'll be like Limbo and The Walking Dead mixed together. But we were like, ‘The biggest challenge that might be cool for us to try to overcome is just marrying those two things,’ and going, "All right, let's do something more naturalistic where the player doesn't ever get taken out of the ‘gameplay’ and put into a cutscene. And that's fine, that's a great, perfectly fine, more passive experience. “So it's usually like, I'm walking around, I'm solving a puzzle, I'm doing things, doing whatever, and then I walk into a trigger, and now suddenly I'm watching this cutscene where there's subtitles, but I'm choosing from these subtitles. “The first big one was when you look at those games or a lot of branching games, the moment of actual communication is very divorced from the rest of the gameplay,” Krankel explains. Part of the way Oxenfree tries to improve the adventure game experience is by blending exploration and conversation. “We definitely know that we're standing on shoulders a bit and using things that they've perfected over the last few years,” Krankel says, “and we kind of went, ‘Okay, well, let's not try to completely redefine those things, but let's try to find ways that our studio and our mindset can improve on it or modify it.’” Gameplay is just as important and, in a genre that has become synonymous with Telltale Games, pushing narrative gameplay forward became a big goal for Night School. Of course, story is only one part of Oxenfree. So we thought, ‘I wonder if we take some of those true events and some of the things that were happening in that time and put our kids in a story that is dealing with some of the ripple effect of that and tell it in a supernatural way.’” “It feels like ancient history to most people, but in reality, 1943 is not that long ago at all. And one, which is not talked about very much, but one fired a rocket into a Little League field in Oregon in like 1942 or '43 at night, and luckily nobody was hurt, but that got really close. And there were actual Japanese subs getting extremely close to the shore. “So we started to do some research…actually there are a bunch of de-commissioned military islands off the coast. “There would be grown-over radar stations and then we went, ‘Oh, well, that's interesting, was this just American paranoia or were these actual functioning things?’” “Adam and I went up to this 30-year reunion party thing that they did for The Goonies, and went on a bunch of hikes when we were there and started to find some really weird stuff like in the trees,” Krankel says.
The idea to set the game on Edwards Island, home to a decommissioned military base, was partly inspired by another 1980s film, and some real world history. Things don’t go as planned, and what follows is, as Krankel describes it, “a coming-of-age story where the player gets to determine how their character comes of age.” In Oxenfree – written by Krankel’s cousin, Adam Hines, who also wrote the critically-acclaimed graphic novel Duncan the Wonder Dog - players take control of a teenaged girl named Alex, who sets out for an evening of fun with her friends and her new stepbrother, Jonas. The game has been so personal and everybody's sweat and bled over it for the last year and a half and it's been pretty much inside of that studio, and now for it to get shared with the entire world just feels awesome, it's really exciting.” “I am on pins and needles because we're hours away from launch,” Night School CEO Sean Krankel told me when he spoke to yesterday. While players will be experiencing the teen-thriller adventure game for the first time, this is the end of a long journey for the game’s creators. Today is launch day for Oxenfree, the first game out of independent startup Night School Studio.