#HIDDEN AGENDA MOVIE#

WeвЂ™ve been trying to make an experience for people who arenвЂ™t necessarily gamers.

Harris: Because youвЂ™ve got a hidden screen. For this kind of plotting-against-each-other gameplay it work really well. You look down on your device and see different cards with different playersвЂ™ names on them and you pick one. It might ask, вЂњWhoвЂ™s the bravest in the room?вЂќ You vote on that secretly. In story mode, the game at times just asks which of your friends represents a certain quality. TheyвЂ™ll actually receive secret information, which is something we couldnвЂ™t do so easily with a controller. That player will move around randomly as you play through the game. In the competitive mode, the game is based around a group of friends playing, and throughout the story, one of you will receive a hidden agenda, a secret objective. In Hidden Agenda you have a couple of modes, story mode and competitive mode. GamesBeat: How did you incorporate PlayLink? WhatвЂ™s easier for you this time around if you have something like PlayLink integrated from the beginning?Дoyle: ItвЂ™s really hardwired into the gameplay weвЂ™re doing. ItвЂ™s great to see the acting come across in the fidelity weвЂ™ve got.

Everyone in a crime story, everyone has their own secret motivations. Ten years ago you werenвЂ™t getting that out of computer game characters, but now we feel we can stack up against more traditionally accepted forms of media.Дoyle: It fits very well with the crime thriller theme as well. A lot of that comes from connecting with human characters, which we get from those performances and those facial expressions and all the rest of it. WeвЂ™re trying to make something thatвЂ™s not off-putting to people who donвЂ™t really know games. Using that top-end tech, although itвЂ™s just cool as well, itвЂ™s there for a reason. A lot of that comes from the fidelity of those characters and performances we get. Harris: Again, with what Until Dawn did, and what you were mentioning about groups of players - a lot of non-gamers really embraced it.

Centering the game very much around story choices, rather than specifically moving characters around and so on fitted really well, and certainly fitted what PlayLink is trying to do. We wanted something that wasnвЂ™t off-putting. At Supermassive we do pride ourselves on making really visually attractive, cinematic stories. We wanted to create something where you could invite your friends round who donвЂ™t normally play games and theyвЂ™d get a lot of enjoyment out of it. Does that seem to work well with a movie-like experience?Дoyle: We wanted something that was really accessible to everyone, whether youвЂ™re a gamer or not. It happens that their game is highly realistic. There are some interesting components that go along with PlayLink. GamesBeat: I talked with the Planet of the Apes game director recently. Similarly, that seems to be a top end number for those types of products as well. Six feels like a decent party size.Дoyle: Also, during development, we had board games and card games on our mind quite a lot.

#HIDDEN AGENDA MOVIE#

ItвЂ™s there to be played instead of a movie night. Hidden Agenda has always been about replacing a movie night. From a UI perspective, going much higher than that would have caused us some difficulty. For various reasons in development we settled on six.

But we were always keen to push it as high as we were able to go. Jez Harris: I think in part, the logistics of supporting any number of devices - I donвЂ™t actually know offhand precisely what the maximum number of PlayLink devices we can support is. GamesBeat: How did you settle on that number as the ideal?

Hidden agenda