Indigo Prophecy Post-Mortem

I always love to read a good post-mortem on a game, and today we have a lengthy one on Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit (PS2, Xbox, PC) hosted by 1UP. The piece was written by David Cage, CEO and founder of developer Quantic Dream and writer and director of the studio's Omikron: The Nomad Soul (PS1, DC, PC) and Indigo Prophecy. Cage discusses the challenges in creating a game that is truly driven by storytelling rather than simply putting it in cutscenes, while balancing player choice with a degree of linearity.

Writing the full game design document took me about a year to complete. The final script is about 2000 pages and integrates absolutely everything; story, characters, gameplay, structure, branching dialogs, horrible sketches, maps and storyboards (I am terrible at drawing), instructions to remember for acting and directing, indications about music and sounds and much more. With the experience of another very complex game (Omikron), I have established some rules for my game designs in order to put all the possible information in there while keeping them clear (I hope). This document was the master document for the whole production. It was truly our "bible", the absolute reference for everything.