When Mike Bithell showed me his then-untitled second project at July’s Develop In Brighton conference, I told him that the press will just end up calling it ‘Metal Gear meets Minecraft’.
Bithell is happy to indulge those comparisons. “I gave up and started feeding the Metal Gear Solid-Minecraft thing [to the press]… I thought it’d be best to get it out the way,” he tells me today.
It might be a little reductive, but that shorthand is still relevant. Volume, as it’s now known, is a stealth game which also gives the player the chance to build their own stages and share them. Bithell has not only already shown it to plenty of the games press, but also Sony’s president of Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida. It went well. Don’t be surprised to find Volume appearing on a Sony platform first, though Bithell can’t officially comment on his release plans for the game right now.
Volume is clearly very different to Thomas Was Alone in terms of its genre and that player-creation aspect, but in its combination of abstract aesthetic and a real, ‘human’ narrative, it still shares some of its component parts. Just as Danny Wallace’s voice acting helped bring Thomas Was Alone to a broader audience, Volume will play host to some well-known voice talent, too. “I’m really excited about the cast,” says Bithell. “I’m still putting them together, but there are some great voices lined up.”
That cast, plus more detail on Volume’s themes and plot, will be revealed by Bithell at October’s GameCity event; they will be integrated into the game whether the player tackles the game’s predefined stages or opts to take on the user-generated challenges. Players will also, through the game’s creation tools, be able to define their own plotlines.
“The game tells its environmental story through story nodes, floating icons which put up text when you pass through them,” explains Bithell. “I’ll tell an initial story through these, but the hope is that players will remix and rejig these as they want, to tell their own stories in the world… I really want to facilitate that kind of storytelling for players. If you create your own story stuff, you can then share that with anyone who wants it. Hey, maybe your version will become the definitive version!”
Bithell has enlisted what he calls “a team of gods” to create this second, more complex game. David Housden, composer of Thomas Was Alone’s soundtrack, returns to write the score for Volume, meanwhile four experienced industry names have joined Bithell to create Volume’s concept, character and environmental art. “I’m really lucky in that thanks to my career up to this point I’ve encountered some massively talented people, it was a lot of fun bringing them in to join me on this project,” says Bithell. “Dave [Housden] and Daz [Watford] both worked on Thomas, with Daz defining the colour scheme for that game. Kris [Hammes] is a very cool character artist who’s credits go from triple-A games to Simon Roth’s Maia. Wayne [Peter], the lead environment artist, is a veteran of industry, with work going back past the PS2, he’s the massively talented, super fast rock who’s brought this world together.”
Volume has a bigger team and is part of a very different genre, but Bithell is still handling much of the game’s development himself. He describes making Volume as a natural evolution of his skills. “Volume is built in the same engine as Unity, and there was really a sense when putting it together of consolidating that knowledge and experience I’d built up to make something special,” he tells me. “Though Thomas looks 2D, it is to all intents and purposes a 3D game viewed from a 2D camera, so making that leap to 3D wasn’t too scary tech-wise. Design wise, it introduced a lot of fun challenges.”
Bithell’s talents don’t stop at creating games; since Thomas Was Alone was released he has steadily built a profile in both the press and throughout game development as an honest, enthusiastic creator, be it through Twitter or on panels at trade shows. Volume might have been introduced today as Metal Gear meets Minecraft, but if its creator’s star continues to rise, it’ll be known simply as ‘Mike Bithell’s second game’ when it is released in 2014.
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