Review Fix chats with Uni Dahl, creator of The Silent Age who breaks down the new version of the game, currently available on Steam, which features all-new character voice overs and Ultra HD graphics. Already a massive success on mobile platforms, “The Silent Age” appears ready to take the point and click genre to some cool place on Steam and eventually, consoles.
Review Fix: What are the main differences between the mobile and PC versions?
Uni Dahl: For the PC version of The Silent Age we added a couple of new features. My favorite and most noticeable is definitely the voice-over on the characters. Anders, our writer has done an incredible job organizing, casting and directing this and I’m extremely happy with the result. Owen Thomas also does a really good job as Joe, but my favorite must be the bartender, voiced by Adam Harrington.
But we’ve also done some more subtle changes to the game. All the graphics have been redone in UHD resolution, making everything so clear that you can now read things in the various scenes, which was previously lost on mobile due to the resolution limitation. Especially older phones or smaller screens. For example, I was surprised when I finally read Joe’s surname on his “Employee of the Month” award. So there is a lot of new information to explore in the visuals now.
We have also added new animations to the game, such as Joe using a chainsaw. We use a lot of the same animation for Joe’s interactions with the environment, but we felt that using a big chainsaw is quite epic, and so made a separate animation for that action alone. We did this in a couple of places, like using the katana, and Joe falling to the ground and standing back up after traveling to the far future where his time machine explodes.
Review Fix: What has the development process been like on the PC?
Dahl: All through development of the mobile version, we have had the game playable on PC. We are using Unity3D to make The Silent Age, and it was one of the best choices we made, because it allows us to switch target platform so easily. The work on PC could focus on improving a game that already worked. Our biggest challenge was actually the time difference between Los Angeles and Copenhagen. Our voice recording was done by Somatone Interactive, and Anders would sit in on recording sessions, scheduled often with moments notice. Morning in L.A. are well into the evenings for us, so communication was slow moving. But they did a fantastic job and I think the quality is amazing. Funny little anecdote (spoiler alert) is that we originally forgot to record Joe actually coughing. As you know it’s quite an important part of the plot, but because it was not part of an actual conversation, we never wrote down that line, so 5 days before launch we had to rush Owen back into the studio to cough into the mic.
Review Fix: Any particular hurdles?
Dahl: I think the biggest hurdle was recording voices with a studio so far away. That said, I’d probably want to use the same studio just for the quality of the acting.
Review Fix: What games inspired this one?
Dahl: I think Thomas, our designer, would be best suited to answer this one. But the inspiration has come from quite a few places. Thomas played The Secret of Monkey Island on an airplane once, and of course as all of us he got stuck a lot. Stuck on an airplane for several hours without access to a Youtube walk-through certainly has had an influence. This is reflected in the design of The Silent Age and its puzzles. The time-travel mechanic came from urban exploration, which Thomas loves to do. Exploring old abandoned buildings and imagining what they may have looked like in their heyday. And of course, a lot of 70’s Sci-Fi movies, which both Thomas and Anders are huge fans of.
Review Fix: What makes this game special?
Dahl: I think the players would be best answering that. What we hear is that they love the unique atmosphere. Visuals, music, story and puzzles all work very well together to create a memorable experience.
Review Fix: How did winning the 2013 Casual Connect Indie Prize help you guys?
Dahl: Any kind of exposure is a great help for a small studio like ours. Our biggest problem has been that many players don’t know that episode two on mobile has been out for months, and winning awards or being nominated helps get that message out. The press gets a lot of emails daily, so being picked up depends heavily on what other news there is the day of your launch. That’s also why the Steam version of The Silent Age is the full game, not in episodes.
We have been nominated at many award shows next to some incredible games such as Limbo, Hitman, and latest at Nordic Game we were in the same category as Wolfenstein, but the Casual Connect Indie Prize was the first price we actually won. Competing with multi-million dollar budgets can sometimes be a challenge, so the recognition is great for our moral.
Review Fix: How do the voice-overs help the game?
Dahl: The voice-overs bring the characters to life. They get a much deeper personality, because you can get more nuance into the words then when writing them.
Review Fix: What’s next?
Dahl: Our next goal is to get The Silent Age out on consoles. I would love to see it on the big screen.
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