She goes on to say that Lemoore had a vision of the chemistry he wanted to capture, and in order to do that, Howard and Gabel dug “a little bit deeper,” which she describes as a fun process. Howard recalls that there were some parts that were “somewhat improvisational that we would spontaneously come up with because it was all rooted in this place of character. “There was quite a bit that they brought in language, tone - there were moments where we completely rewrote large portions of the dialogue to fit the characters. “It was a cool, collaborative process,” says Lemoore. Of the recording day, Lemoore recalls that each of them had the script open in Google Docs on their respective iPads, and he would Skype into the session from his house in Nevada. Howard was sent a recording kit and performed her lines for Maquette over the course of a day at her house in New York, in her garage, “where I keep all of my fancy dresses,” laughs the actor. Visual art of the game was the “ultimate selling point,” she says. The script came later, but at that point, Howard already had an understanding as to who the people were. She goes on to explain that the fact that Lemoore provided the backstory for her and Gabel’s characters was something that Howard hadn’t really encountered professionally. “It was really informative, because this was ahead of receiving any kind of script, and it almost felt a little bit like an exercise in character development at drama school,” says Howard. In the early stages after taking the role, Howard was sent a character bio by Lemoore with images and “sort of venn diagram” of the relationship between Kenzie and Michael. The story was weaved in during development as an “unexpected pairing” with the world he had created, which eventually featured local Bay Area musicians as a way to inspire the sound of the game and give more of a local feel. “I thought about the idea of copying that really complex, almost random behavior, onto multiple levels of recursion.”Īfter much experimentation with puzzle ideas, Lemoore realized that there was “a really cool game there” and showed it at the Game Developer’s Conference in 2011. “I thought about how physics is so chaotic with a physics simulation you can knock an object and you know it’s going to tumble, but you don’t know how it’s going to tumble,” says Lemoore, using the example of bowling pins going all over the place. “Something set me off about trying to do in 3D with physics,” Lemoore tells THR, a concept which was “way beyond” his initial thought to do a 2D game featuring a world within a world. This is the debut game for Lemoore at Graceful Decay, and he first conceived of the idea while exploring the architecture in his neighborhood in San Francisco ten years ago. “It’s an interesting archetype, the hipster, and there’s this inherent sense of irony,” she adds.Īs things progressed, the idea was to have the characters’ dialogue feel conversational and modern, as if they were two people in a real world, but with a bit of a heightened element as well. Though brief, it’s punctuated by memorable moments both good and bad, each its own tiny representation of the larger picture.The role of Kenzie was described to the actor by director Hanford Lemoore as a “San Francisco hipster.” But performing the role required some balance, Howard says, because Kenzie was “interested enough” in that scene, so that the story could move forward, but wasn’t so earnest that suddenly she’s no longer a hipster. More than most can claim about their relationships, Maquette also recognises its natural end and sees value in closure. There’s less romance in comfort and routine, and it can make the sore points feel that much more sore, but it’s never any less rewarding. Like a burgeoning romance, Maquette’s earliest moments are full of new and exciting experiences that eventually give way to a comfortable rhythm as it matures. A host of vocal tracks bookmark critical story moments too, with a sampling of Gábor Szabó’s San Franciscan Nights setting up a rousing opening. There were some odd bouts of slowdown in areas, and the physics of placing objects in a handful of puzzles can be frustratingly unwieldy, but it’s overall a fairly slick production. It’s a case of art over technical wizardry, as is typically the go with these things, but it’s got some great little details and makes good use of text and sketch overlays within its world as part of the narrative. On the PlayStation 5 (where the game will also be free to PlayStation Plus users for the month of March), Maquette scrubs up a treat.
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