Interviews

Arberth Studios is based
in rural West Wales on the Celtic fringe of Britain. The company consists
of the husband and wife team of Karen and Noel Bruton and Karen’s
brother Richard Lee. Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches
is their first game.

Having had the opportunity
to play the game since this interview was conducted, I can wholeheartedly
recommend Rhiannon to anyone who enjoys a good adventure game. It
is indeed an impressive first effort from a talented development team.

• Rhiannon:
  Curse of the Four Branches is Arberth Studios first
  game. Was the experience of developing a game everything you thought
  it would be, or was it worse?

What Randy, you don’t
allow an option for it being better ?

The main thing we didn’t
know when we first played with the idea of writing an adventure game
was how long it would take. That has been ‘worse’ in some
respects, because it’s taken just over two years, which meant
it was a slog sometimes. Another thing that took some of the fun out
of it came when our US publisher, Got Game, gave us a sharp reality
check – we had naively thought we’d take a leisurely stroll
toward Christmas 2008 and launch around then – but Got Game
reminded us that ‘Rhiannon’ was essentially a ghost story,
and that that really we should put it out in the run up to Halloween.
And the retail stores would need to be sure even sooner, that we could
deliver. That meant we had to cut more than three months off the development
time and we only signed with Got Game in June. It was doable, but
stressful at times.

The question of enjoying
what we’re doing has given us something of an insight into the
nature of work. It’s too easy in life to get completely sucked
into an activity or a job or a way of making a living simply because
it’s convenient, or you’re reasonably good at it, or because
there doesn’t appear to be an immediate alternative. But what
we’re doing here is in effect, turning our hobbies – i.e.
the things we choose to do when we’re not
making a living – into an output end product and then hopefully,
into something we do for a living from now on. To do what you want
to do in life, rather than just what you must – that’s
not an opportunity that everybody gets and we’re grateful for
it. That alone makes it way better than expected.

On top of that, there’s
been our conversion from enthusiastic amateurs in designing interactive
media, into something beyond that. This is our first game, and we
were aware that there was a risk of it seeming amateurish. To produce
a commercial product, we had to set ourselves some standards and have
performance expectations of one another. That’s why we had to
take a course shift around a year ago, increasing the graphical resolution,
adding new characters and puzzles to better explain the plot, changing
the game engine for something more suitable. Sure we’re newbies,
but the player still expects and deserves the best we can create at
this stage in our development. That transformation to a new profession
caused a few sleepless nights, but ultimately was quite spiritually
rewarding.

In other words, it is even
more fun than we imagined – and now, when we read the appreciative
things written about ‘Rhiannon’ by people who’ve
played it, well, that’s just the cherry on top as well.

• What was each person’s
  contribution to the game?

We all contribute to plot
and story. We have brainstorm sessions, then one of us will take the
task of typing it up, fleshing it out and resubmitting it to the others
for refinement.

Our long-term adventure
gamer Karen gets to compose and write the sort of game she loves to
play. She is now doing, for a major part of her waking day, a fun
activity that before, she used to only do when she had time. She’s
responsible for much of the detail, many of the puzzles, the in-depth
research that makes the game story come alive. She also has a major
influence on the nature of the player interface.

It was on Karen’s
insistence, for example, that ‘scenes’ in the game are
actually ‘rooms’ and that the play would be in the first
person. In most locations, there are four views, which for development
purposes we call ‘North’, ‘South’, ‘East’
and ‘West’. So although it’s 2D point-&-click,
when the player is in a given position, more often than not he or
she can click to turn left, right, back, sometimes look up and down
and either move forward or zoom in to a closer view of what’s
ahead. And we do this by moving to a different view rather than rotating
the scene, because we hear other players agreeing with us that real
rotation can be somewhat nauseating.

Richard designs the scene
graphics. He models them from scratch in a 3D environment on his brace
of Macintoshes. He adds the textures and all the lighting, then produces
2D renderings of views available within that scene. He also does a
lot of the objects the player can interact with. Sometimes he asks
Karen or me for an outline of what functionality an object should
have and then he invents it. It can be quite magical to see that happening.

And I get to compose music
and be heavily involved in writing fiction, two activities I’ve
only ever dabbled in before. I’ve been a guitar player for years,
but with ‘Rhiannon’ I’m composing for a chamber
orchestra, a jazz combo, even a brass band and I love it. I get to
try a slightly different approach to game music. In ‘Rhiannon’,
the player is not constantly accompanied by incidental, atmospheric
music. Instead, there are chapter and character themes, reveals and
so on. These are all stand-alone pieces. It’s more of a ‘soundtrack’
approach I suppose. You may not get to hear the whole of these pieces,
depending on how you play the game – but there’s always
the Hi-Fi in the living room.

I also do all the programming.
That’s been an adventure in itself, because I’d never
done any object-oriented coding before. Whole new way of thinking.
I’m grateful for all the patient help I’ve had from others
writing for the Wintermute game engine, the platform we use.

• What were all of you
  doing for a living before you decided to create your own game development
  company?

Karen and I have a little
IT service management consultancy and training business. I’m
the IT man, so I design and deliver the services, and Karen’s
the business manager and administrator. Along the way we’ve
produced books and press articles and a few websites and years ago,
I used to throw out the odd line of program code. We’ve also
done a bit of fiction writing in the past – a thriller novel
and a couple of screenplays that got some TV interest.

Richard is a design illustrator
by profession, so I guess he’s the one most closely using his
professional skills for Arberth Studios. Typically, he’ll get
a commission from a company that, say, has a design for a hotel lobby
and need an artist’s impression of it. He does that with both
IT modelling and brushes. But his work in our team is different, in
that he’s modelling completely from scratch instead of illustrating
others’ blueprints. He likes that, because it gives him more
freedom of expression.

• Considering that everyone
  is family, how difficult is it to not let personal issues carry
  over into work issues?

By gum Randy, you know
how to ask them !

We’ve all been great
mates for twenty-five years. Richard spends a lot of time at our house.
We know each other ‘warts and all’ as they say. It’s
more that we help each other along than get in each other’s
way. Of course Karen and I have the odd tiff, but what married couple
doesn’t? And what we get from being together is way stronger
than the occasional strain. She and I have always been a good team.

There are some stylistic
differences – for instance Karen would prefer me to work the
way she does and deal with everything at a steady planned pace, but
I usually prefer the buzz I get from skating closer to deadlines,
because it increases both my productivity and output quality. My doing
that drives her potty sometimes. But then it always has and we always
get there in the end.

But Richard – he’s
so cool and collected, talented and competent, nothing fazes him and
we can never get upset with anything about him. And then we all have
a huge amount in common – similar tastes in music, wine, entertainment,
humour, people, food, worldview and ambitions for our relationship
and latterly, for our new business. There’s always somewhere
we can meet that would completely outshine wherever we may have differences.

• The game’s central character
  is fifteen-year-old Rhiannon. Are you attempting to attract the
  Nancy Drew crowd or is she just the catalyst to get things in motion?

Karen likes to play the
odd Nancy Drew game, and there’s a soupçon of that style
in some of the puzzles, but there are significant differences. Rhiannon
can’t help you, as she’s no longer there when you arrive.
And you’re exploring alone in the first person – there are no
witnesses to question, no conversations and no voiceover to your conclusions,
so the presentation differs from the Nancy Drew way.

There’s plenty that
Nancy Drew players could get from this game, of course. Looking on
the forums, there seems to be no ‘typical’ Nancy Drew
gamers – they seem to be old and young, male and female. What
they have in common is that they like a solid, first-person, ‘figure-it-out’
adventure, which essentially describes ‘Rhiannon’. They’ll
recognise the need for deduction and looking for clues, for combining
information and objects to make some new revelation – though they
may find ‘Rhiannon’ somewhat darker and rather more sinister
than Nancy Drew. After all, in ‘Rhiannon’ the player is
completely alone. Dear Nancy, but I doubt she has ever come up against
a lunatic Welsh sorcerer with a vicious history who has been dead
for over 900 years; and who must be defeated by turning both modern
technology and classical magical elements against him.

• From the screenshots
  it seems as though the game is first-person perspective. What character
  are we playing as in the game?

The game’s central
character is not Rhiannon, but the player, playing in the first person.
We’ve given you a name – ‘Chris’, deliberately
not gender-specific – but that’s only so the game has
a way to refer to you in messages you will get as you play.

In any case, by the time
you get to Ty Pryderi (pronounced “Tee-Pruh-derry”, the
haunted Welsh farmstead where the game takes place), Rhiannon has
become too traumatised to stay there and her parents have taken her
away. It’s down to you. We’ve not tried to impose a personality
or character on the player. The player will draw conclusions and solve
puzzles from their own efforts, imagination and personality in any
case – and so, we reason, no need for them to do it by proxy.

You will have exchanges
with other characters but not in the form of conversation. They’ll
send you emails and voicemails, or they’ll have left papers
and clues around. You will see several ghosts and they will try to
communicate with you in various ways, but more to assault, insult,
threaten, warn or prompt you to action.

You play yourself, but
your ghostly foe has laid down his challenge in the form of magic,
and ultimately, it is through magic that you will prevail –
not the wand-waving, abracadabra, sandal-wearing kind of magic, but
more in the form of using supernatural, pre-technological forces and
other tools, both mechanical and essentially 21st Century.

• Can you describe the
  story for us and why it is important that Rhiannon is the central
  figure?

Rhiannon’s mother
Jennifer is originally from Arberth, the main town near Ty Pryderi,
and she has persuaded her husband to buy the estate and restore it.
They bring their teenage daughter Rhiannon – but having left
her friends behind and moved to this isolated spot, the girl soon
begins to suffer from loneliness. To fill her time, she researches
the history of the house and encounters the connection with the Welsh
legends. At that point, her haunting commences. Her parents seem to
dismiss it at first, before finally realising that their daughter
is going insane and needs to be rescued.

You will discover that
an ancient battle between a twisted sorcerer and an ambitious nobleman
still continues in the afterlife, infecting the house and grounds
of Ty Pryderi. There is a reason this is happening now. You will find
that others have been tragically impacted in the past. You will reveal
those tragedies, come to understand why others who have tried to defeat
our villain Llwyd Cil Coed (pronounced ‘H-Loo-uhd-Kill-Koyd’)
have failed.

As to why Rhiannon is the
central figure – not wanting to give too much away, I can say
though that Llwyd sees Rhiannon not just as an individual, but somehow
as a representative of history – and therein lies his weakness.

• Is the game linear in
  that one puzzle must be solved in order to advance or is exploration
  encouraged?

We designed ‘Rhiannon’
to be far from linear, and our players have told us that’s the
case. By the way, I’ll just take a moment here to salute and
thank those players and testers – it was great working with
them.

There are chapters to the
story, so there is a beginning, a number of acts and an end, so there
is a storyline. With each chapter, new locations open; however no
locations close. There are items you will examine in Chapter One that
you won’t use until much later, so we have to allow for the
player to wander widely. You cannot take an item to inventory just
because you’ve picked it up. It would be impractical anyway,
because you can interact with some 200 items – your inventory
would become unmanageable if we let you take everything at first sight.
So we have a rule that you can only take an item to inventory if you
have seen somewhere you could make use of it. This contributes to
the game’s non-linearity on one level, but it’s not the
only one.

This also means that it
is not straightforward to try to complete the game without understanding
the clues. You can’t just pick everything up and hope for the
best. You really must have a reason for picking it up. In one respect,
you’re not completely on your own. You’ll occasionally
get nudged in the right direction, sometimes subtly, sometimes more
overtly. And there may be an Email from Rhiannon’s mentor Jon
Southworth, or a voicemail message, or a new arrival on the doormat
to give you a hint.

There is a plot delivery
device running through all the main chapters in ‘Rhiannon’
to stop it from becoming too linear. The way it works is that each
chapter has at least three ‘threads’. Two of these threads
are about collecting items – they are conceptually but not actively
related and they are non-linear – you can go through either
thread in any order. At the same time, the third ‘thread’
is guiding you and revealing the story to you. Any linearity is thus
hidden in the plot structure, it is not in the gameplay. But it’s
true that you will, on occasion, meet an actual or the gameplay equivalent
of a locked door, so yes, there are puzzles that must be solved in
order to advance. Follow the clues and don’t always presume
your assumptions to be correct.

• Are the Welsh legends
  and folklore that the game is centered around actual legends, or
  were they created just for this game?

The ‘Four Branches’
are documented legends, sitting right at the heart of the Welsh collection
of stories known as the ‘Mabinogion’. There’s more
about them at Wikipedia.
We didn’t make them up. The sequence of events and the key artefacts
in the ‘Four Branches’ are central to our story.

What we did make up is
how the events have spilled over into the modern day at Ty Pryderi
and how you might use your wits and the things around you, including
modern technology, to resolve the consequent disturbances.

The Mabinogion is pretty
important in Welsh culture. The stories are fantastic, and in them,
the line between history, myth and magic is magnificently blurred.
We’ve tried to be faithful to this in ‘Rhiannon’.

• Are you aware of the
  similarities between Rhiannon and Amber:
  Journeys Beyond? Both are haunted house stories
  featuring paranormal research developed by husband and wife teams
  who created their own companies. It’s actually quite spooky.

And let’s not forget
Karen and Jeff Tobler, another husband and wife team who did ‘Riddle
of the Sphinx’ and ‘The Omega Stone’. Legends and
the paranormal offer a rich and fertile ground to the adventure writer
and husband and wife teams can use how their personalities enmesh
to egg each other on in the creative process. Can’t say for
those other couples, but that’s how it has worked for us. But
Arberth is not really just a husband and wife team, because we’ve
got Richard, and he’s at least as important as either of us.

• Welsh folklore, haunted
  houses, ghosts – sounds like you guys have the makings of a good
  horror film!

Hmm, there’s a thought.
But I’ve heard Ridley Scott is already busy next summer .
Is ‘Rhiannon’ horror? There’s no gore and you can’t
‘die’ in the game. There are some shocks and surprises
and the story is pretty creepy. If ‘ghost story’ and ‘horror’
are synonymous, then I guess the word ‘horror’ would fit.
I like to call it a ‘supernatural mystery adventure’,
but I realise that straddles genres, so I’ll leave it to players
and commentators to draw their own conclusions.