"What happened to me had a profound effect on my life. It's a strong, central theme in the game that I'm not going to shy away from." Adam Orth, who you'll know best as the man behind the hashtag #dealwithit, is clearly not one to shy away from his troubles. The ex-Microsoft employee was pilloried, left his job and forced into a period of recovery as punishment for that single hyperlinked portmanteau (delivered, if you've forgotten, as a riposte to those complaining about the rumours around the pre-release Xbox One's always-online requirements). His return to the industry, with the small indie studio he's founded, seems to be more a part of the process of engaging with that sudden turmoil than a way to distance himself from it. "When I was going through the fallout from that episode, I seriously considered leaving the game industry. At many points, I believed I didn't have much of a choice about that. It permeated my entire life so that there was no escaping it. And the story of the game revolves around a similar sequence of action, consequence, and redemption." We might not know the true story of those events, but the game itself definitely gives something away through that poetic echoing. Placing you in the confines of an astronaut's helmet, Adr1ft's a first-person exploration game set entirely in zero-gravity surroundings, where you are the only human investigating a derelict space station. It's about loneliness, piecing together broken elements of a whole - you get it. Crucially, though, it's also about dying in space. "The enemy in Adr1ft is your environment," explains Orth. "The dangers of space are absolutely something we're bringing into the game. Radiation, space debris - all of that is going into the stew of how we present this environment. I would say that most of our research right now is about movement. How objects behave in space; how bodies and large objects can be the same under that physics." 'Physics' is a term bandied about by unscrupulous writing sorts (i.e. us) a little more frivolously than perhaps it should be, but it seems appropriate here, given what makes Orth tick as a designer: "I have several friends at NASA, and I would say much of this comes from my own interests and my touch points in that community. "I don't know if there's a slider between 'realistic' and 'realism', and if so, I'm not sure where Adr1ft might fall on that spectrum. It is a science fiction game. Our foremost concern is making a game that is a fun and unique experience to play. So, while we're trying to be as faithful and accurate as possible, we're also willing to let some of those things slide in the spirit of making a great game." That final point's perhaps the most important revelation - Orth might be making his game in reaction to personal events, but he's not lost sight of what games are for. He's dealing with it, and you get to play the results. We're in. Interview: Adam Orth on the art and craft of zero gravity Unlike in exploration, space was pretty much gaming's first frontier, meaning we've become familiar with it over the last few decades. For Three One Zero, that represents a unique challenge - how do you present space in a way people aren't already used to? It feels as if this is one of those games where you have to totally nail the setting, as that's where everything else in the experience springs from. That's absolutely important - and it's a lot harder than it sounds. You can't just throw in a planet, some stars and a destroyed space station. It's how you lay that environment out, because it's an open-world experience. How you lay that out, it's really - well, we're still learning. All that little stuff you see floating around, I obsessed over where to put those things. But they float around in space, so it's very difficult for me compared to doing traditional level design, where you have walls, and places where you can't go, a floor. It's a challenge - but it's a fun challenge. Is it the case that you're having to learn new ways to design to meet that challenge? Or are there tropes you can rely on? Well, what we're doing is building little pieces and learning little things from them, putting them together and applying those lessons to bigger things. I've been telling people that it's incredibly freeing and incredibly limiting to be working with VR. There are no rules, you have to find that spot where you know you're doing enough or not doing enough. It's fun! It's like it makes you feel young again, everything's new again. The team behind Forza have talked about procedural audio before. How are you thinking about audio in Adr1ft? Sound design and audio are just a huge, critical thing for this game. We're right in the middle of mapping out how we'll do all that stuff. The whole game takes place inside a helmet, so we're trying to do some interesting things with audio. One thing we're struggling with now is: "Is there sound in space?" In Gravity there was that scene where she was touching things and she could hear and feel it in the suit. Do we do that? How does that work? It's exhilarating to figure out where to go. We purposely don't really have any rules. We're trying to make the coolest thing possible, tell a good story, to hopefully give gamers something different. Source Total Xbox.
