Life Is Strange Part 1 Chill Gameplay No Commentary
12Following the critical and commercial failure of their 2013 action-adventure game Remember Me, French game developer Dontnod Entertainment was forced to restructure and reinvent themselves. Dontnod CEO Oskar Guilbert explained "Before, what we wanted to do was make big games with large teams and long production cycles... So we had to change that, do something smaller with smaller teams. We didn’t want to do just a small game; we also wanted to bring something new to the market."
Life Is Strange was conceived around the rewind mechanic, a concept which had already been briefly explored in Remember Me. The protagonist of the first game, Max Caulfield, was created with the ability to rewind time to supplement this mechanism. Development began in April 2013 with a team of 15 people, with further people added as the collaboration with Square Enix began. Before signing with Square Enix, Dontnod imagined Life Is Strange as a full-length video game similar to Remember Me that Dontnod would self-publish; however, Square Enix realised it would be more successful as an episodic title, both for creative reasons, financial restrictions and marketing purposes. This allowed them to tell the story at a slower pace.
Development began under the working title What If, before being retitled to avoid confusion with the film of the same name. It was Dontnod's second title with a female protagonist, and most prospective publishers were unwilling to publish a game unless it had a male protagonist. Guilbert also challenged the idea at the start. Dontnod Creative Director Jean-Maxime Moris explained that Square Enix was the only publisher with no intention to change this. "Square [Enix] is basically the only publisher who didn't want to change anything about the game... we had other publishers telling us to make it a male lead character, and Square didn't even question that once.
For the first game, the Pacific Northwest was chosen for the setting to convey a nostalgic and autumnal feel, with the team eventually settling on Oregon as the location of the fictional town of Arcadia Bay. It was decided early on that most of the budget be spent on the writing and voice actors.The story was originally written in French by Jean-Luc Cano, and converted into a game script by the game's co-directors and design team. This was then handed over to Christian Divine and Cano to be fine tuned in English. Recording sessions were done in Los Angeles, California, with the French developer brought in via Skype. The textures seen in the game were entirely hand painted, adapted to achieve what art director Michel Koch called "impressionistic rendering". Sources of inspiration include the visual novel Danganronpa, in terms of balancing gameplay and story, and the novel The Catcher in the Rye, whose protagonist Holden Caulfield shares a surname with Max, the first game's lead character. For the sake of realism, the supernatural elements were designed as a metaphor for the characters' inner conflict, and experts were consulted to tackle difficult subjects such as teen suicide.
Following the release and rapid success of the first Life is Strange, publisher Square Enix chose American developer Deck Nine to develop a prequel game focusing on the life of Chloe Price, while the Dontnod team began developing a direct sequel. Development on the project began in 2016 with assistance from Square Enix' London Studios. Ashly Burch, who voiced Chloe in Life Is Strange, was replaced by Rhianna DeVries due to the SAG-AFTRA strike. However, Burch and Hannah Telle, who voiced Max Caulfield, both reprised their roles for the bonus episode Farewell. The project went under various working titles during development. The writers researched memoirs and psychology to understand Chloe's grieving process, and the script for the game was over 1,500 pages, written by lead writer Zak Garriss and a writers' room. Prior to its official announcement, images had leaked online indicating that a prequel to Life Is Strange was in development. Square Enix revealed Life Is Strange: Before the Storm on 11 June during Microsoft's E3 2017 presentation.
Join this channel to get access to perks:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWwxyeAGINU3btvPvT6ADGg/join