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The buttons and handles of Alien Isolation

· 2 min read

Interactors are surprisingly hard to get right.



It was recently announced that a sequel to Alien Isolation was in development at Creative Assembly. I'm a firm believer that the team at CA deserved a worthy follower, after what was their first survival horror. It's a game with plenty of narrative issues, especially on the length and pacing of the game, that are not so surprising when it's your first big narrative-driven game in licensed franchise. But it's still shines in the quality of its execution. It's a remarkable feat to achieve such consistency in its "vibes" in every area of the game, from the superb art design to the gameplay combat subtleties.

"Immersion" is a big buzzword surrounding this game in particular. For the sake of the argument, I define an "immersive" game as a game where the feeling of presence of the player in the world of the game is part of the experience. The expression "feeling of presence" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that vague definition, but it encapsulates the challenge of talking about design characteristics targeting the subjective cognitive experience of players.

One aspect of the game that contributes a lot to the immersion in my opinion are the interactors. In human-computer interaction science, one would describe them as actuators, but in the context of game development it's all the little white dots, highlighted props and prompted spots where the player is invited to press a button in order to act on the target of the interaction. Pickup an item, open a door, ... many games offer those contextual actions, available when you're close enough and looking right at it.

It's an area core to a game, which is maybe why we continuously stumble onto this topic. Creating a coherent language of interaction across all interactors, from button mapping to camera animation, is surprisingly difficult in a AAA environment, despite the collective experience of a good team.

Here is a little video benchmark of many interactors in the Alien Isolation which I found inspiring in that area, that I prepared when starting on Star Wars Outlaws.