Doing REC it live

Lights, camera… gameplay? Erica is a feature-length thriller following its titular character as she becomes embroiled in a conspiracy stretching back to her father’s mysterious death during her childhood. It features talented actors and excellent cinematography. But she never makes a decision without you having some input. Erica’s creator, Flavourworks, is a game developer, not a movie studio, tucked away in a cosy games hub in London.

Following Jack Attridge, the studio’s co-founder and creative director, around the labyrinthine building full of props from the set, it’s impossible not to keep an eye out for juicy development secrets. Then we sit down to chat. “When we’re just walking around the building now, we’re not thinking about traversal. We’re not getting stuck on a corner of a plant pot,” Attridge says. He’s right.

“We knew that doing film, we’d lose something, which was that ability to walk around the environment, to traverse,” he continues. “When we start making a game it’s usually about exploring 3D space. Unity being a popular game engine that people use, you can put the 3D cubes down, then you’re like, ‘how do I move this around the environment?’ And it means that all of your ideas come from conflicts in traversal, or how your relationship with that environment changes as you’re moving something around.”

MOVING PICTURES

“WE WANT TO MAKE SURE YOU NEVER FEEL LIKE YOU ARE LACKING CONTROL.”

While Attridge acknowledges the influence of FMV games of old, he doesn’t like to think of Erica within those confines. The main thing that interests the studio is making games strictly based around narratives, in the same vein as the likes of Until Dawn or Detroit: Become Human. “We felt that before we’d even said ‘We’re definitely going to do live action,’ the thought was, ‘If we weren’t doing live action, would