You're in The Movies - Development

Development

Zoë Mode, who had previously experienced with camera games before, conceived the idea of the game from their V-screen technology they had used in their previous games. They were thinking how this technology could have its best use, and they thought a movie game would be a perfect fit. Andy Trowers, the lead designer of the game, stated the following:

"This is obviously something that hasn't been done before, so there are a lot of challenges getting the technology working and in terms of the game design as well. You've got to make games that are fun. At the same time, you've always got to have one eye keeping an eye on the movie side as well, ensuring that you have fun games that give you the actions that you need for the movies. So that was really challenging, but a really enjoyable aspect of the development. There were two main things: the segmentation technology and the creative aspect of it--coming out with things that are fun, coming up with enough variety. We've got loads of genres in there, from horror movies to sci-fi movies. Coming up with all of those different things and coming up with the games as well, making the two things kind of intermix, so keeping an eye on that, the management of that, and making sure everything worked was a challenge."

The developers first had to prove that the game all worked. They made what's called a "vertical slide" of the game, where they made one movie and they thought about all the games that would make the actions. Trowers said that they "wanted people to be able to share movies" and "give people the freedom to do what they wanted."

All of the movie themes and mini-games were conceived by the creative-design team, which they decided the movie themes would have an old B-movie feel. Trowers notes the making of the mini-games to be "quite an organic process": "Sometimes we'd have a movie and we'd say OK, we want the player to do this in the scene, which is the action we want, so try to think of a game idea for this. But other times we'd be thinking, "Oh, you know what, we got this great idea for a game and these are the essential actions we can get out of it, how are we going to use it in movies?" So it was really a three-way process, trying to figure out what we could get people to do, what would be fun, how it would fit in the movie--it wasn't just one process of doing it, it had to go both ways." There had also been a few more movie ideas, but they were left out of the game.