Over the last few months we've been delivering a behind-the-scenes look at Alone in the Dark, the latest update to the classic survival horror franchise. In the past, we discovered the inspirations that drive the game's themes and a bit about how it intends to break genre conventions. Now, Lead Designer Herve Sliwa turns the spotlight on the game's technology, the (re)iterations of the engine, and of course Central Park.

If you missed the first and second entries of the developer diary, check them out!



Technology

To build all this variety of gameplay elements and features into Alone in the Dark we built our own technology. There is a full R&D department working on the tool we use at Eden... it's an in-house tool called Twilight 2. The interesting thing about Twilight 2 is it's the same tool we used for Test Drive Unlimited. It was so flexible that with updates on it we can make all that we need for Alone in the Dark.

There is another technical team working on the game engine, specifically for all the different platforms to run everything in the game. We had the chance to develop a very open engine to bring together everything in the game -- I don't know if it would have been possible with another engine. The great thing for the designers is that everything has been thought of like Lego blocks, so if you have an idea you can pick a little part of the engine, add another part, meld them together and you have what you expect to have. After that you can play with it inside the game and build some specific situations or puzzles. The designers were able to prototype the game mechanics themselves and the engine helped us a lot to do that.


Build It, Test It, Destroy It, Rebuild It

How we managed to balance the innovation with fun is by working nights (a lot), and the key word is iteration. You don't have any other method. If something was never done before you need to build it, test it, see what goes well, what goes wrong, and you need to improve it and improve it, test it, improve it. We do this for all the features in the game, lots of iteration, iteration, iteration.

It was fun because when we talked together about some gameplay situations after some discussion we realised that nobody in the development team played the same situation the same way. Sometimes we talked about it and someone would say "we need to improve that because when you use this object to fight these monsters and..." I would say, "but you used that object to fight these monsters? You're supposed to do something else!" "No, no, you can combine this with that and it gives you this result," and I'd realise that yes, it's logical. We had lots of unexpected situations just from the creativity of the player -- that was really, really interesting.