How one studio produced FMV game Dr. Dekker on a shoestring budget

Full-motion video is a game design tool that’s seeing a small renaissance at the moment, what with Night Trap getting a rerelease and games like Her Story cleaning up at the IGF awards. 

With that in mind, we were excited today to check out The Infectious Madness of Dr. Dekker, a full-motion murder mystery from British developer D'Avekki Studios. And to learn more about the game’s production, we invited developer Tim Cowles on to explain the game’s production. 

As it turns out, Cowles and his wife Lynda have been in the full-motion video business for quite some time, and have a lot of experience making a lot of video happen for little money. If you’re interested in making these kind of games, you should watch our full conversation and stream of Dr. Dekker, seen above. 

In case you’re on set right now and don’t have time to watch the full thing, you should quickly know that one useful trick the D’avekki team put into play was to shoot all of the game’s footage at 4K resolution, and make editing choices in post-production by clipping out portions of that footage to create close-ups and panning shots. 

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