This is a story about serendipity and probability.
Nicole met Arnaud De Bock while waiting in line for the bathroom at a GDC developer party in 2019. She was Giving a talk on voice technology in art and games, based on her work as a creative technologist, her portfolio is full of interactive projects such as the Tinder bot for true love, Friends of the garden, IMPROVE.COMPUTER and Soylent DickDe Bock was working on the Reigns series and Card shark for Nerial, and ending Pikuniku on the side.
Technically, he wasn't invited to this particular party, but Monkey out Co-creator Maxi Boch included it clandestinely.
“There, in the queue for the bathroom, I met Arnaud,” he told Engadget. “We started chatting, we were mutual fans of each other’s work and talked about collaborating on something. A few months later, we were trying to work on this other idea he had with his collaborator Rémi (Forcadell) from PikunikuThat idea never materialized. But at the same time, Arnaud and I were obsessed with this reality show called terraced house.”
terraced house was a Japanese reality television series that aired from 2012 to 2020, featuring a rotating cast of six strangers, mostly young professionals, who lived together for months at a time. Episodes followed the contestants as they navigated work and relationships, and it all had a calm, relaxing vibe, even during explosive arguments about eating someone else's steak. Though the cast members often ended up dating each other, you could tell that terraced house very demure and very self-conscious, especially compared to Western reality shows like Island of love either Too hot to handlewhich are based on the themes of bikinis, lust, betrayal and neon lighting. Product placement.
Inspired by terraced house and reality shows from the 90s like The real world and Room RaidersHe and De Bock began to create a game called The crushed houseNerial joined the project: the study was ending Card shark and co-founder Francois Alliot saw this reality show project as an opportunity for their team to flex their storytelling muscles.
“At some point, we made a major shift in terms of writing, we just went from this quiet stage to the next one. terraced house “It has to be a relaxed, everyday, trashy style, essentially,” he said. “For example, the dialogue has to be much more engaging. It has to be funnier and more daring, more exaggerated.”
That's when programs like this come along. Island of love and The ultimatum entered the production conversation. In its final form, The crushed house falls into the space between terraced house and Island of loveIt takes place in a bright mansion by the sea (with an infinity pool, of course) and stars four characters as they form strategic friendships, have heated arguments, and kiss each other between commercial breaks.
The crushed house The story is set in 1999, before smartphones allowed for a call-and-response relationship with viewers, but the audience still plays a pivotal role. Players are the on-site producer and cameraman, and they have to respond in real time to the demands of different categories of viewers — such as drama queens, foodies, fishing fanatics, divorced dads, and men with butts — while also appeasing advertisers and mysterious network overlords. Capturing the right footage, playing ads at the right time, and appeasing executives makes for a surprisingly intense gameplay loop. There’s a sprint button here for a reason.
One of the most intriguing aspects of The crushed house It’s the replayability. There are 12 cast members to choose from at the start of each playthrough, and each has distinct personality traits that complement each other in unique ways. There are classic reality TV archetypes, like the himbo, the naive girl, and the pretentious girl, and their interactions are driven by procedural generation.
“Everything you see on screen, the dialogue, is generated,” Alliot said. “We have a system called rigmarole, which is a system that combines character traits with what we call sagas, which are like story templates. For example, if you have a love triangle, you have a number one, a number two, a number three, they will have different traits that we will combine with the characters. If we have a combination, we play that story and then it plays out like this, with possible outcomes that can be different depending on the character you’ve chosen. And this system allows us to have a very broad or very narrow type of narrative.”
He and the developers at Nerial wrote around 50,000 lines of dialogue for the Crushed house tangle system. With 12 characters to choose from and four characters in each game, there are a total of 495 possible character combinations in the game. Basically, The crushed house It had to be generated procedurally.
“We have logical elements, but it’s never 100 percent super structured,” Alliot said. “It’s kind of vague, a loose narrative that fits very well with reality shows. So you can play the game basically forever, combining different characters, and it will still surprise you.”
The crushed house For a long time, it was all a jumble of random dialogue and code before her procedural generation systems had enough information to produce a rational and powerful experience, He said. Alliot warned her that this would be the case and encouraged her to be patient and watch for when everything would fall into place. In the end, that’s exactly what happened.
“For a long time it was chaos,” he said. “But when we got to the point where everything came together, we had enough writing, the technical side working, the animations working and all that stuff happening. It’s like something just clicked and it became magical.”
The crushed house It still surprises He, even after years of studying his code and iterating on his results.
“I had this experience just yesterday while playing the game, where there was a very sweet and romantic scene between Veer and Alex, and then in the next scene, Veer says something that is really cruel to him,” he said. “And that just struck me. I mean, I can see through the veil, I know how everything works, but it’s really amazing to have that effect.”
The crushed house is available on Steam for PC, developed by Nerial and published by Devolver Digital.