There is a quote by American Poet Audre Lorde that could be used to sum up the gaming industry in 2013, ‘There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them’.

And while in some respects it is true, it’s certainly not meant as a negative as it’s often these new ways of making a game that can feel like something new entirely.

At this year’s Eurogamer Expo it was the Indie Arcade that held the most interesting new ways of making games. One of them that caught my eye was ‘Master Reboot’ by Wales Interactive. I managed to grab Dai Banner, Managing Director, and Rich Pring, Technical Director, for a chat about the game, the company, and how they have found working with PlayStation.

What is Master Reboot about? 

(Dai): The basic description is it’s a psychological adventure game with puzzle elements, it’s been labelled as a gorgeous indie horror. The game is set in the not too distant future where something exists called the Soul Cloud. You can upload your consciousness to it, it’s a way of defeating death and saving your loved ones so that you can visit them. The game starts with an upload but something goes wrong, you have to piece together who you are and your life.

So the memories that you play through are they the players or other peoples?

(D): They are a bit of both, but the majority are the players, but there is also information, facts, that drive the narrative. The first part of the game is linear, but once you get into the hub then it becomes more open so not everyone will have the same experience playing the game, depending on what they have found, or haven’t found. There are 34 environments, it equates to about 8 hours of gameplay depending on your level.

In the level I played I was being chased by a possessed looking Air Stewardess, is that something that happens in each level?

(Rich): Without giving too much away the antagonist is the man behind the curtain, but the creature you encounter is more the manifestation of the program. She’s protecting the system, and as you go through the game you find out her motivations and who’s controlling her.

The game is being promoted as the first Welsh Language console game, how did that come about?

(D): We make games to sell around the world, games are localised, but Welsh would normally be overlooked. We’re based in Wales so it’s important that we localise the language of the country we are in, so it’s in English and Welsh. In Wales a lot of young people leave the language as the things they interact with, TV, music, games etc, stop using Welsh. We’ve been working with the TV Company S4C to make the game work well in both languages so one isn’t an afterthought. We’ve got a welsh script worker that we work with closely to adapt the text. The Welsh Game title is Enaid Coll which means Lost Soul as there is no translation in Welsh for Master Reboot.

Is this Welsh Interactive’ First Game?

(D): Rich and I created the company, we’re Wales’ biggest games company, we’ve won Bafta Cymru awards and we put together a show like Eurogamer each year, but this is Wales Interactive first major release.

(R): We have another title coming out soon called Gravity Badgers. It’s based on the nostalgia of Saturday mornings Kids TV shows, it’s the cartoon that never got made. It’s a game designed with touch controls so we’re looking at an iOS release, and we’re also Nintendo developers now so we are looking at bringing it to Wii U.

Who came up with the idea for Master Reboot?

(D): Sarah Crosby, our lead designer, it came from a tearful conversation about life and things going wrong and it developed from that. Sarah and I came up with the concept, but the way it looks and plays is all down to Sarah.

When you start the game it’s very peaceful and tranquil, then once the upload goes wrong it’s fragmented, so it’s given the feel of shattering a pane of glass. That’s Sarah’s vision of it, if I had gone away and visualised it then it would have been different, the style suits the game.

We made it look the way it does, we’ve tried to be unique with the style of the game, but people always try and compare, visually we’ve been compared to Day of the Tentacle and Thirty Flights of Loving.

What platforms will the game be coming out on?

(D): Well it’s Steam and Mac, but we’re also developing it with PlayStation, so we’re hoping the console version will release around the same time. It’s fully playable PlayStation 3. Our offices are based in the PlayStation manufacturing building so we’ve had a lot of support and access from them. We’re also hoping for a Wii U and PlayStation Vita release to.

Sony have made a big deal of courting indie developers for the PlayStation brands. How have you found working with them?

(D): We went up to Sony headquarters about 18 months ago, not to sell them anything, but just to show them what we were working on. We showed them an early version of Master Reboot and instantly their body language changed. The next day we got an email from them and they were calling it ‘The Dead Girl Game’. They said they’d give us dev kits, and if you make it then we’ll have it to publish on the PlayStation 3 and Vita.

(R): They’ve been very transparent to work with as well, any questions we’ve asked they’ve answered them. We send them builds and they send us detailed reports about what they like and don’t like. They’ve really opened the door for us as indie developers and it’s been really positive.

Master Reboot will launch on Steam on 29th October 2013, with a PlayStation 3 release shortly after.

The trailer for Master Reboot is below, but you can find out more about Wales Interactive by visiting their site. http://www.walesinteractive.com/

© 2013 – 2014, zero1gaming.com. All rights reserved. On republishing this article your must provide a link to this original post