There's a certain game trailer doing the rounds at the moment, and few are really very sure where it has come from.
Quite out of the blue, a new start-up called Theory Interactive has posted
a teaser trailer for Reset online, and it is quite spectacular, both in visuals and in cinematic direction.
Gamasutra delved deeper, and found that
Theory Interactive consists of writer and artist Alpo Oksaharju and musician Mikko Kallinen. The duo has previously worked at Futuremark on first-person shooter
Shattered Horizon, and both share the game design work on
Reset.
The studio's first game focuses on story and atmosphere, with the main goal to travel back in time and co-operatively help yourself out -- a "single player co-op" title, as it is described.
Oksaharju told Gamasutra exactly how he aims to deliver atmosphere through
Reset's expansive world.
"The game world has dynamic day and night and weather cycles that create unique moods for every player," he said. "Player movement in the game is fully proactive, so one must read the world to understand what has happened and will happen."
Free-roaming and exploration are essential, noted Oksaharju, and the puzzles in the game can be tackled and completed in a non-linear order.
As part of the game's development, the team created its own proprietary technology called Praxis, which is rather stunningly shown off in the aforementioned trailer.
"The trailer is made entirely of in-game material," Oksaharju said, "and I mean all assets, effects, everything, period."
"We would be poorly allocating resources if we'd make huge amounts of extra stuff just for a trailer," he continued. "So in a sense the trailer is a byproduct of the development. We wanted to have full control over the visuals and gameplay elements and Mikko is quite the guru when it comes to tech."
"We knew that we couldn't achieve the right kind of atmosphere using third party engines. And of course DIY stuff is cheap when working with a bootstrap budget," he said.
The team is not yet ready to speculate on when
Reset will be ready for public consumption, instead telling us that it'll be ready when it's ready.
