Greg Ward's Animation Blog: Case Study

Alan Wake is one of my favorite games of recent years, it is a horror/thriller game which draws inspiration from twin peaks, the twilight zone and stephen king to name a few and clearly wears this on its sleeve. The game follows fictional writer Alan Wake who goes on vacation to the beautiful rural town of Bright Falls with his wife to help overcome his writers block however what follows is a series of nightmarish events as Alan must fight to stay alive after a horror book he doesn’t remember writing begins to come to life. The enemy creatures in the game are shrouded in darkness and alan must use light to help him defeat them, the battle between light and darkness plays a heavy role in the game both metaphorically and in a real way. The creators said that they wanted to play with how light and darkness can evoke emotions in the player, Oskari Häkkinen head of franchise development on the game said “Stimulating emotions is what good entertainment is all about. It’s apparent that we worked with components such as light and dark for instance. We felt they are emotional touchstones that can be used in a wonderful way in a thriller – we all have a primal instinct where light entails safety, while darkness and creeping shadows evoke fear.”[1] These are themes that I also plan to play with in my own project.

My Alan Wake Mood Board

Sam Lake creative director of the game said that when coming up with the game they “look for sources of inspiration in pop culture in general. It's very important for us that, when it comes to storytelling, we don't look into other video games,” says Lake. “We'd rather look into other mediums – movies, television series and books – for sources of inspiration.”[2]

"The TV-series Twin Peaks is one of our sources of inspiration. The location in the game is similar, an idyllic small town in the state of Washington with something threatening waiting under the surface. The TV show also had an excellent nightmarish atmosphere. The works of the author Stephen King is another source of inspiration. He has used the idea of a writer whose life turns to a nightmare in several of his stories."[3]

Alan Wake opens with the following quote “Stephen King once wrote that nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations. They’re antithetical to the poetry of fear. In a horror story, the victim keeps asking why, but there can be no explanation, and there shouldn’t be one. The unanswered mystery is what stays with us the longest, and it’s what we’ll remember in the end.” which I feel not only sets up and explains the game to some extent, it also rings quite true and maybe something to keep in mind whilst creating my game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnHx6YVoqek

When developing alan wake members of Remedy (the games producers) took close to “60,000 photo references” as they felt it was important to “get a baseline of reality”[4] Having the game clearly set in a realistic environment allows the player to get more invested in it and so it makes the scares scarier as it feels like a realistic place where these events could happen. When producing my level I will take inspiration from first hand photos that will inform my production and make the environment seem more real and hopefully more frightening because of that.