Howard was sent a recording kit and performed her lines for Maquette over the course of a day at her house in New York, in her garage, “where I keep all of my fancy dresses,” laughs the actor. Visual art of the game was the “ultimate selling point,” she says. The script came later, but at that point, Howard already had an understanding as to who the people were. She goes on to explain that the fact that Lemoore provided the backstory for her and Gabel’s characters was something that Howard hadn’t really encountered professionally.

“It was really informative, because this was ahead of receiving any kind of script, and it almost felt a little bit like an exercise in character development at drama school,” says Howard. In the early stages after taking the role, Howard was sent a character bio by Lemoore with images and “sort of venn diagram” of the relationship between Kenzie and Michael. The story was weaved in during development as an “unexpected pairing” with the world he had created, which eventually featured local Bay Area musicians as a way to inspire the sound of the game and give more of a local feel. “I thought about the idea of copying that really complex, almost random behavior, onto multiple levels of recursion.”Īfter much experimentation with puzzle ideas, Lemoore realized that there was “a really cool game there” and showed it at the Game Developer’s Conference in 2011.

“I thought about how physics is so chaotic with a physics simulation you can knock an object and you know it’s going to tumble, but you don’t know how it’s going to tumble,” says Lemoore, using the example of bowling pins going all over the place. “Something set me off about trying to do in 3D with physics,” Lemoore tells THR, a concept which was “way beyond” his initial thought to do a 2D game featuring a world within a world. This is the debut game for Lemoore at Graceful Decay, and he first conceived of the idea while exploring the architecture in his neighborhood in San Francisco ten years ago. “It’s an interesting archetype, the hipster, and there’s this inherent sense of irony,” she adds.Īs things progressed, the idea was to have the characters’ dialogue feel conversational and modern, as if they were two people in a real world, but with a bit of a heightened element as well.

The role of Kenzie was described to the actor by director Hanford Lemoore as a “San Francisco hipster.” But performing the role required some balance, Howard says, because Kenzie was “interested enough” in that scene, so that the story could move forward, but wasn’t so earnest that suddenly she’s no longer a hipster.

Maquette guide