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Casebook Trilogy: Special Edition - Sam Clarkson interview

Casebook Special Edition
Casebook Special Edition

It’s always nice when something we like gets a polished new edition. It could be a book being reprinted with a heap of author's notes, or a movie that gets a shiny DVD version filled to the brim with bloopers, deleted scenes and audio commentaries. Sometimes it can also be a game, released with extra goodies or key enhancements to the original production. Areo’s Casebook series was already a personal favorite, thanks to its gorgeous FMV and gripping noir stories, so I was even more excited to lay my hands on the brand new Special Edition of the first three episodes (plus the free Episode 0: The Case of the Missing Urn) now being released.

As soon as I rejoined Detective James Burton in his investigations, I was naturally pleased to see that the dry humor and compelling plots are still firmly in place, but I was even more thrilled when I discovered that the promised enhancements indeed add a whole new layer to the experience, providing some much-needed additional challenge and adjusting the aim of two entire segments of the game, the Scientific Analysis and the Evidence Folder.

 

Image #1One of the original issues I had with the games, especially the first and third episodes, was the repetitive nature of the scientific analysis – the segment where, after collecting clues from the crime scenes, the player has to process this evidence with the help of a forensics expert. This usually involved a series of pretty mindless mini-games which were repeated dozens of times during the course of a single investigation. In this edition, it’s clear the developers heeded such complaints. Most of the mini-games remain unchanged, and the fingerprint identification mini-game has only been slightly altered by adding a progress bar, but Areo has added two more types of "lab analysis" this time around.

The new DNA test is more a matter of reflexes, as players only have to press a button when the right molecule is under the microscope. The other addition, however, involves luminous rays and a series of mirrors to rearrange and rotate to get the ray moving from the source to the receptor, which plays like a full-fledged puzzle of the kind many of us are so used to after years of adventuring. This mini-game, while still fairly simple, will now force you to think your way through the process, and it's undoubtedly more satisfying than the previous alternatives that simply required randomly clicking through the screen to get the result of each test. Then again, if you'd rather skip the thinking altogether, or find yourself stuck at a particularly overwhelming challenge, there's now the option to skip a mini-game entirely.

 

Image #2The Evidence Folder has undergone an even bigger overhaul. When having to link two pieces of evidence together previously, the game automatically highlighted the pair of clues, rendering the whole process a bit superfluous. This is no longer the case, as now you’ll have to ponder like a real investigator to put each piece in its right place. It’s even possible to fail a link – not that failing one has any real consequence in the game, but like trying an impossible inventory combination, it's nice to have the option to make an incorrect guess, something that wasn't available before.

More importantly, the game doesn't tell you anymore what clues need a link, so you have to listen carefully to what's said after the analysis and think about your other evidence. Is there anything that can be used to link a suspect to a particular crime scene? Is there a match for the traces of DNA you found on a brush or hair? Can you deduce what characters were present in a given room at a given time with the details you’ve discovered? The whole process is now more intriguing: trying to make connections between such things as places and footprints, chemicals and their criminal uses, now feels like real detective work. The result is that the investigations require a lot more creative thinking and thorough reasoning, the type you’d expect from Temperance Brennan or Seeley Booth.

The only segment that has remained the same in the enhanced trilogy is the Exploration phase, and this still suffers from the same issues. Sometimes the objects to find are so small that they’re hard to identify, perhaps forcing you to use the Intuition Key to highlight them. But this opens up another surprise: the game now keeps tracks of your efforts, and after the investigation you will be ranked. While your score adds nothing to the outcome of the game itself, a perfectionist might want to avoid the Intuition Key at all, or use it only in moments of dire need. It's a nice little addition, though it’s somewhat wasted due to the sheer difficulty of the exploration. At least if you take your time to carefully scour every location, you will be rewarded by the sarcastic comments of Burton and your forensic helpers about the useless junk you photograph. The tongue-and-cheek humor is as amusing as ever, and I was surprised to stumble upon some pearls I somehow missed the first time around. I won't spoil them for you, but look for some juicy nods to classic adventures, including a hilarious cameo by a certain talkative skull.

All in all, I can't help but recommend this Special Edition. If you missed the Casebook games when they were originally released, you'll find a trilogy of engrossing mysteries enriched by a stunning FMV presentation (I haven't said anything about that, but you can read all about it any of our original reviews). If you played and enjoyed the original editions, chances are you'll dig this enhanced release even more, considering the improved challenge presented by the mini-games and the revamped Evidence Folder. It’s not free to upgrade for existing series customers, but it’s available for a heavily discounted price from the official website. And if boxed games are your thing, the trilogy will at last be getting a much-deserved full retail treatment in the coming months, though publishing details are still being finalized.

With the first three episodes now better than ever, my anticipation for the fourth installment is now even greater. I can't wait to see what's in store next for Burton and his silent assistant: the cliffhanger ending of the third episode is bound the whet your appetite, and it's a testament to the quality of the characters and the plots that you can't help but want more as the closing credits roll. We’ll need to keep waiting for that, unfortunately, but more is exactly what’s in store right now, as to mark the occasion of today’s release of the Casebook Special Edition Trilogy, we’ve gone behind the scenes with Areo’s Creative Director Sam Clarkson for some insider insight about the past, present, and future of the series.

Adventure Gamers: Tell us about Areo and how a little indie game company formed itself in New Zealand. What projects were you involved in before Casebook, and how did this series finally come about?

Sam Clarkson: Areo is short for Areograph, which is what we call the process used to create the photo-based environments seen in Casebook – as in, "The crime scene set is prepped and ready, let's Areograph it."

My friend Luke Reid had come up with an idea for making games using photography-based graphics, so we formed Clocktower Games (now Areo) in late 2006, and did some local fund-raising (mainly off dairy farmers – we have a lot of cows here). Once we'd convinced investors that our crazy idea would work, the engineers set about building a way to capture the images while the rest of us came up with a game design that would work within the confines of the technology.

Sam Clarkson

My background is in short-films, and I worked on documentaries for National Geographic and the Discovery Channel for about five years, so I was brought on under the broad title of 'Creative Director'. For a number of reasons we thought a casual(ish) episodic game was the thing to do. This meant we had to keep the game small enough to download, which meant we couldn't feature many environments, so we settled on forensics as a theme, seeing as you could spend a long time in each environment, scouring every corner for clues.

We brought Henry Feltham on board as writer, who like the rest of us had no experience making games, but loved playing them as much as we all did. Henry and I threw around a dozen stories until we settled on a modern riff on Hansel and Gretel (aka Harry and Greta - the kidnapped children in Casebook Episode 1).

Once the game design document was complete, we had a small team of programmers and artists building the game, and a production designer built our crime-scene sets while I planned for the first film-shoot, which I would be directing. We knew that each episode would feature a preview of the next episode, so we had to write and shoot the second episode straight after Episode 1 was shot.

AG: The first Casebook game surprised us with its original use of life-like 3D environments the player could scour high and low. What can you tell us about the Areograph technology developed for this series?

Sam: Over ten years ago, Luke (now CEO of Areo) had a vision of capturing real-world environments for use in computer games. Originally he built a little robot out of a speaker box and attached some wheels to it. It had a camera mounted on it facing upwards, above which was a reflective, curved dome, so that he could move the robot around the room in increments and collect 360-degree photos. I'm not sure what happened to that little robot, but about five years ago, Luke and his brother Justin decided to build a more advanced version of the same concept, and this time he turned out looking more like Number 5 (from the Short Circuit film), due to his tank-like design.

Our robot could be programmed to a grid pattern, and then you'd set it off and a few hours later you'd have hundreds of photos of a small area. Though one major problem presented itself: the robot could see itself. So when you walked around the captured environment, you could see a robot under you if you looked down... clearly this needed some re-thinking, but the general idea worked.

So once we had some funding, we built a massive, grid-like structure which could be lowered down onto the top of film-sets. Attached to the ceiling grid was a camera at eye level. This camera could be set to do a sweep pattern of the room, collecting thousands of photos. The hard part was deciding what to do with all that data once we had it. But eventually the playback software worked nicely, and we were ready to capture our crime-scene sets for integration with the game.

AG: Why did you choose to have the evidence processed via mini-games? Was it a conscious attempt to appeal to casual gamers? What do you think of the traditional puzzle dynamic in point-and-click games, and why did you decide not to incorporate some of those?

Sam: Our approach was to combine two game models that we thought would go together nicely, and which would complement the 'crime show' feeling of Casebook; namely the “episodic” model, in the vein of Telltale, combined with a more “casual” play style.

When we looked into forensics, one thing really stood out: it involves a lot of repetition. The forensic scientists working on homicides have a lot of work on their hands when presented with a crime scene, particularly one that has seen a lot of human traffic. For example: if a muddy shoe-print is found, that alone means they have a ton of work to do. In real life this could involve having to collect footwear from everyone who's a suspect, which could mean photographing and logging anywhere between 5 to 50 pairs of shoes. Obviously we reduced the amount of 'busy work' that's inherent in real forensic investigations, but I thought we should try to reflect the reality of the job, which is all about being extremely thorough. I felt that mini-games best represented this process.

Regarding traditional point-and-click puzzles, we mainly avoided this out of a desire to simplify the exploration and collection of evidence. After playing several CSI-type games, one thing stood out to me: I was spending a lot of time trying to figure out which collection tool I should use to pick something up and it wasn't particularly fun. So I decided that evidence collection in Casebook would mimic the crime scene photographer’s job. Admittedly, we were taking some artistic licence with this approach, but it meant that the evidence collection process could be fairly streamlined. Then, inside the mini-games themselves, the relevant forensic tool (swab, dusting, etc.) would be automatically selected – because I felt using the tool was far more interesting than choosing the tool.

The Special Edition's Evidence Folder (where players link evidence items and suspects) used to be almost entirely automated in the previous edition of Casebook, but the new version is essentially an old-school inventory where you must figure out which items can be combined, which makes Casebook more like classic point-and-click adventure games and encourages more lateral thinking than it used to.

AG: The series walks a thin line between games and movies. What do you think of the 'interactive movie' label, and do you think it accurately describes Casebook?

Sam: The idea of 'interactive movies' is fascinating, but I've yet to play one that truly taps into the massive potential of the merging of games and film. I like to think that Casebook is a step in the right direction, but you need massive resources to record enough diverging story paths to truly create the feeling of an open-ended interactive drama – something which was beyond our means. So I wouldn't define Casebook as an interactive drama, mainly because your actions don't often influence how the dramatic cut-scenes play out. I see Casebook as an adventure game which is given its atmosphere and emotional depth through the use of cinematic elements... something which I personally feel can't quite be achieved with polygon characters just yet – but clearly many gamers wouldn't agree with that.

Obviously something like Heavy Rain has achieved a very cinematic feeling through the combination of motion-captured performances, combined with a pretty good understanding of film conventions, and I hope this means more developers will explore this game-meets-film territory. However, I still can't help but agree with some reviewers who felt the action scenes reminded them of interactive animations like Dragon's Lair. But perhaps Heavy Rain is only limited by the way we interact with games right now, namely with a controller... we may not really experience a truly immersive drama until we can control them in a way that feels more human, but who knows what form that will take.

Adventure Gamers: No doubt you’re familiar with some of the great FMV adventures of the past, like The Beast Within. Did they serve as an inspiration for your game? Outside of those adventures, what were your greatest influences?

Sam Clarkson: To be honest, we never consciously said "we are making an FMV game." We felt we simply had no choice. The game’s environments were real, so we had to have real human characters. Placing polygon or cartoon characters inside our photo-realistic crime scenes would have just looked really bizarre – so we are only an FMV game through necessity. Though I'm honoured to have been compared to the Tex Murphy games and the like, we didn't play through them for research. Of course we had a look at them, but once I saw what they were about, and that they shared some similarities to Casebook, I decided it would be best to not play through them, as I wanted to keep a singular vision in my mind and not be influenced by past games.

I would say that the two biggest influences on Casebook were Columbo and Twin Peaks. Columbo showed us that the protagonist needed to be a pretty interesting guy to carry a show for multiple episodes, while Twin Peaks just had such a weird atmosphere pervading it that it sort of cast a spell over you. These two elements were our priorities: providing the players with characters that were quirky and interesting, along with a strong, pervasive atmosphere.

AG: The series features a silent playable character, yet they often feel like James Burton’s investigations. Why not just have Burton be the main protagonist?

Sam: The simple answer is that I liked the idea of creating a friendship between the player and the protagonist. Not only does James Burton act as your guide, he is your partner and friend... it's a subtle difference, but I like the idea that when you are watching the cinematics, you are watching your friend going through this experience, rather than watching yourself, which would mean there is an inherent level of abstraction – because in real life you can't watch yourself while you speak to people.

Of course, it also provides us with situations where you – the player – can influence Burton's actions (such as the interrogation scenes where the player can give advice to Burton as to how physical or psychological he should be with the suspect).

AG: What can you tell us about Detective Burton? Julian Temple does a great job portraying this rough-and-tough investigator, and the character's arc through the first three games is really interesting. Did you plan his whole story from the beginning? If so, what can we look forward to in the future?

 
Julian Temple as Detective Burton

Sam: Detective Burton started life as a female character who's a bookworm, with a background in Zoology and Criminal Psychology. Clearly this changed significantly by the time we made Casebook. During the casting process, I wasn't satisfied that any of the female actors we'd auditioned were appropriate for the part, so at the last moment we decided to try casting men in the role. We saw a few, but they weren't right for the part either. Then Luke bumped into Julian (who is hard to miss, being a 6 foot, 6 inch guy) and said he should try out for a small role, given he had almost no acting experience. But Julian surprised us and said he wanted to audition for the lead role.

Julian is a musician and he'd been playing the night before the audition in a town several hours’ drive from where I live. So on his drive back, he practised his lines with his band-mates. He strolled confidently into the audition and stated "I am Burton." Then he sat down and just knocked it out of the park. He wasn't kidding... he really was Burton.

So we cast Julian, and re-wrote the part removing the specific references to being a female, but we consciously kept in aspects of the original personality, because we didn't want an all-testosterone leading man; we wanted someone unusual, who was more than just a grizzled tough guy. The Zoology thing stayed in too; hence all of Burton's animal analogies: "Can I tell you something about Pea-cocks?".

We planned Casebook as a six-part season, and we knew Burton's basic character arc, which involves a career shift mid-season, and a fundamental change to his life at the end of the season... but we left ourselves open to organically changing the specific crime story for each episode.

Episode 4 finds Burton without a badge to hide behind, which fundamentally changes the way he operates... he becomes far more reliant on "alternative means" for solving the crime. This leads Burton into some serious trouble by the end of the season, placing him neck-deep in a situation which he may not have a way out of.

AG: The Casebook series is halfway through its planned six-episode adventure. What's the status of the series at this point?

Sam: We are a small indie developer and we would love nothing more than to continue making new episodes of Casebook. Unfortunately, making games costs quite a bit of money, so we can't say for certain how many more Casebooks there will be. At this point, we plan to finish Episode 4 (it's already been filmed), and we have some cool ideas for Episodes 5 and 6, but our first goal is to reach a broader audience with the Casebook Special Edition Trilogy.

AG: We’ve covered some of the highlights of the new version already, but what can you tell us about the enhancements, and what prompted those changes?

Sam: The changes are a result of two things. Firstly, there comes a point in a game's development life where you have to stop adding features and just focus on refining what you've got so you can release it. Which left behind a list of features that I hoped would make it into future episodes. Once we'd built these new features (after making Episode 3), we realised that it would be silly not to let the previous episodes benefit from these changes, so we went ahead and retro-fitted them to Episodes 0 - 3.

The other reason was that Casebook was far more embraced by hardcore adventure gamers than it was by casual gamers. So we listened to the criticisms by the reviewers (and the fans) and made some changes in an effort to make Casebook a more engaging experience for seasoned adventure gamers, while trying not to alienate the more casual gamer. It's a fine line to walk, but we're really happy with the results. Hopefully the players feel that way too.

AG: For now the trilogy is still available only as a download, but a boxed version of the Special Edition is definitely on the horizon, correct?

Sam: Yeah, the deal is being finalised now and a release date will be announced as soon as we have one. They are a pretty big publisher, with an impressive resume of games, so we are very excited to have them get behind Casebook.

AG: Now that you have three episodes of Casebook under your belt, looking back, what were the biggest challenges you had to face, and what were the biggest rewards you got from the experience?

Sam: The biggest logistical challenge for us was that we were making an episodic series of games which featured hours of cinematics, while simultaneously inventing a photographic capture technology to create the game environments. This meant we had to build a computer game while we put together a film-production schedule, and also build and test the capture robot, all of which over-lapped each other. We lost a lot of sleep through this insane period in our lives, and looking back on it I think we were totally insane to make our first ever game be an episodic series featuring a totally unique graphics engine, but I'm glad we did it. It was a crazy time, but it was awesome.

The biggest reward is really simple: reading a positive review or hearing from a fan that they appreciated the experience of playing Casebook.

AG: Aside from the Casebook series, do you have any other plans for future projects?

Sam: We have different versions of our Areograph capture technology in various stages of development. We've done a proof-of-concept for a photo-realistic driving game, and we've just started looking into doing a Counterstrike-style FPS, which would contain real-life environments and non-polygon characters... but it's too early to give specifics. Ultimately, we feel there are countless game genres that could benefit from our graphics engine and we are looking forward to exploring them.

AG: We appreciate your time in answering our questions, Sam. Here's hoping the Special Edition trilogy does indeed reach a wider audience, because we hope to see THREE more Casebook episodes in future!

Sam: Thanks for giving me an opportunity to share the Casebook story with your readers.

 

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