A Coffee Break with: Fred Yang, The Other Half
Sometimes, a game comes out, and without much warnings, grabs you, swallows you, and spits you out like you’ve just been inside a washing-machine high speed tumbler.
Those games aren’t common, and when done right, should be cherished.
And that’s how we feel about The Other Half, a 2h long experience that serves as an electroshock, delivering its message as a fist once you’ve gotten comfy with its light Soul-ish gameplay and fantasy world.
We’ve interviewed Fred Yang from Studio Egg Roll, and this time we had to do it differently.
Firstly, there are many SPOILERS, so I greatly encourage you to play the game before reading its creator’s explanations.
Secondly, for a message as strong as the one delivered in The Other Half, we had to take more time to dive deep into the psychological research that’s been required for such a game.
Now, if you’re ready, grab a cup of warm coffee, get comfy, and learn the making of an unique game!
*/!\ Beware, Spoilers ahead! /!\*
Continue reading at your own risk and peril ;)
Hi Fred, and welcome to our Coffee Break!
The Other Half is a harsh and dark game, it wakes difficult emotions behind its top-down look and light Souls-ish gameplay.
How did that idea come together?
It started back in fall 2015 as a mechanical prototype of a circle in the middle of the screen whirling another circle around to whack fast moving enemies. I mainly just wanted to capture the elegant feeling of mastering spacing in fighting games. It was okay, but after playing around with it a bit, I moved on to other things.
Months later I began putting together an allegorical narrative about inner conflict and self-forgiveness, and I realized that I could reuse that mechanical prototype. In order to fit the more reflective theme, I added the blue weakpoints on the enemies to drastically slow down gameplay. I then researched the Souls series for combat design, and realized I really liked how they conveyed their narrative through fragments of environmental storytelling. I decided to ditch bonfires and the maze-like level design, and instead doubled down on the story by making fragments with fully narrated flashbacks and environmental changes.
Early playtests showed that interweaving combat and narrations worked well as long as players can walk without getting physically blocked, so the levels must be stretched out based on how long the narrations are. In other words, the narrations ended up driving all other aspects during development. And so despite it starting out as a mechanical prototype, the game ended up becoming a heavily narrative driven game.
What was the work behind it? Did you have to research symbolism and psychology to get this right?
The entire concept was based on the two chair technique of Gestalt Therapy. I’m not the most qualified to talk about all this, but the basic idea is that when I commit a mistake and feel awful about what I did, I split myself into two halves, a punisher and a punished, creating an irresolvable inner turmoil within me. The two chair therapy technique tackles this by having me, the client, switch between sitting in two different chairs, each time role-playing as the punisher and the punished, verbally and explicitly expressing their perspectives in order to have a dialogue with myself.
The goal is to dig out the truth of what really happened, reach a mutual understanding between fractured selves, and merge them back together to end inner conflict.
Hopefully this managed to get captured in the game.
I started with a research paper called “A Therapeutic Model of Self-Forgiveness with Intervention Strategies for Counselors” by Cornish and Wade, and branched out into more psychology references from there. It also talked about rationalization being a big blocker in reaching true self-forgiveness, and I captured that idea in Carleton, whose boss name is literally “The Voice of Rationalization”, who excuses Daniel and doggedly blames Annalise for what happened.
In terms of other media influences, the biggest one is the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. It starts off pretending to be a relatively normal story about big robots punching aliens, but slowly spirals out of control into a very raw and sexual analysis of dysfunctional human relationships. Another influence is the novel Lolita, how it contrasts the ugliness of child sexual abuse with beauty and elegance of the prose, which we tried to mimic through visual and audio means in the flashback narration moments and Annalise’s warm clinic (a big thanks to Maryyann for making that whole beautiful building).
Finally, I was influenced by the album The Glow Pt 2 by The Microphones. It’s a concept album that dramatically swings between moments of soft intimate acoustic guitars and extremely violent dissonant noises to capture the intense rollercoaster of a dysfunctional relationship, which I tried to mirror in the game’s pacing of flowing between the intimate narrations and the gory combat.
There’s a moment in the game where us, players, became witnesses. Witnesses of the slip in morals, and it’s quite painful.
That electrochoc feeling, what drove you to design it? And what were your feelings when you did?
The first half of the game tried really hard to pretend to be a normal dark fantasy game, but with ambiguous clues slowly building up throughout that there’s something dreadfully wrong underneath. But by the moment of the assault, which I called the “rave scene”,
the game needed to be extremely clear that it’s not a fairy tale about magical fires and slaying demons anymore; it’s a story about sexual assault.
It needed a complete immersion break from the fantasy world in order to make that point, so that’s where the jarring surreal visuals and the modern music came in. The scene aimed to metaphorically capture this overwhelming, wild, and perverse celebration of the repulsive male sexuality’s victory over both Annalise and Daniel’s better judgment.
The visuals were actually heavily inspired by the instrumentality scene from The End of Evangelion, how the whole world becomes this intense filthy brew of chaos and passion, and I felt that mapped well to what I needed the scene to convey. In terms of music, Julie drew inspiration from psychedelic music for the vertigo of the first half, and for the final climax I asked her to smother me with an overwhelming wall of sound like My Bloody Valentine does. Hopefully those combined nicely to form this intense overwhelming experience.
Since the rave scene was the most important moment of the game, when I tested the prototype on playtesters and got visceral reactions out of them (some of which were extremely negative push backs), was when I finally knew (after a year and half of development) that I had a chance of landing the message. A huge relief that was!
The Other Half plays like a mix of twin-sticks shooter and Souls-like gameplay — even some sound effects are very reminiscent of the Souls series.
What led you to those particular mechanics?
One aspect I stole from the Souls series is how players, through methodical memorization of timings and visual cues, will slowly get to know the enemies almost as if they’re a part of themselves. This matched the theme of the Hunter and the demons being fractured aspects of Daniel himself. To combine this with the sexual aspect of everything, the mechanic encouraged players to memorize and trace the contours of the demons with their fire, really feeling them up from top to bottom, violating them in a brutal vengeful way. I aimed for the combat to embody the visceral way Daniel wished to be punished in.
To add onto that, in the game the blue weakpoints on the demons are called “spores”, but they’re actually testicles, abject pieces of masculinity growing where they’re not supposed to and must be purged with fire, in Daniel’s eyes.
In terms of sound design, both Julie and I are big fans of the Souls series, so we definitely drew a lot of inspirations from there. Sometimes I did that to a fault; for a while I wanted the spore-popping sound to be more like the weapon impact sounds from Dark Souls III, except their weapons are metal, and this game’s uses fire. Thankfully Julie vetoed me there!
Players might be surprised with the top-down view. And it’s a real top-down, with quite some height distance!
What’s the explanation behind this unconventional choice? Does it represent the distance between conscious and subconscious?
There were two main reasons. First I wanted to put distance between players and the Hunter. The Hunter is Daniel’s ideal of himself, a perfect version of who he wants to be after the assault. The Hunter exists only to punish, so they’re someone who cast aside all the weaknesses of being human, such as having sexual desires and feeling shame, in order to help him cope with what he did. But of course this ideal doesn’t exist; it’s just a lie Daniel tells himself. Thus he could never truly understand or become the Hunter, always feeling like he’s chasing after someone in a hazy dream.
I wished to mirror this feeling for players by making sure they could only see the Hunter from far away, and couldn’t make out what their face looks like or even what they’re thinking.
Secondly, that height distance placed more emphasis on the environment rather than on the characters. This allowed for the emotions and the narrative to be more conveyed through environmental details rather than character animations. This allowed for more interesting and surreal metaphors as the story progressed. Also it gave me a whole other dimension for the visuals to work with, as any 3D movement strongly stood out, especially during the rave scene.
The length of the game is just perfect: it’s a short but strong experience that left me shaken. The narrative’s rhythm was very precise, if it’d been longer it would have diluted the experience.
How did you know when to end it?
Thank you! Since I based the entire narrative on the Cornish and Wade paper about the steps of self-forgiveness, I had a rather good structure to follow. So once the Hunter, and thus Daniel, has accurately gathered all the memories of the past, he goes through fighting rationalization, having remorse, and eventually accepting responsibility and committing to reparation and change. Once Daniel achieves all that, self punishment is no longer necessary, and so the Hunter’s job is done and the game ends.
Of course there’s more to the story; there’s the entirety of Annalise’s perspective, and how she responds to him at the end, if she even chooses to acknowledge him at all. But because this game takes place from entirely within Daniel’s inner world, it’s extremely unqualified to accurately tell her half of the story.
You used Unity to create The Other Half. What were the perks of this engine, compared to some others?
It’s the only one I know haha.
It offers solid options in both 2D and 3D physics and graphics, so I could blend the two for the more stylistic feel of the game, although it did get hacky at times. For example, the game completely uses 2D physics except for the little moving curtain in Annalise’s clinic, which is a 3D Unity cloth, and thus required the player to be both a 2D and 3D physics object.
If you could give advices to peers developing indie games, especially strong narrative ones, what would those be?
Narratives themselves require so much iteration, like the rest of game design.
For example, the ending of the game, after Daniel’s boss fight, went through at least eight different iterations. I’ve always aimed for the scene to be about Daniel taking responsibility of what happened as a human being. However, there are so many other factors that drastically impact the interpretation. Initially I had Daniel walking away deeper into the mountains, finding his own path without needing the Hunter or the demons anymore.
Playtesters complained that Annalise is missing from the picture. I didn’t want the game to be prescriptive of what she would say in response to him, because she can range from accepting his apology to not even acknowledging his existence at all, so I added her in physically without dialogue.
However playtesters then complained that Daniel has no right to get her attention to begin with. At a playtester’s suggestion, I turned Annalise around to not face him, but then complaints came in about how dare he approach her from behind after what had happened.
So I added a huge space gap between them where he stops, and he waits a long time to show his commitment to taking responsibility. People then complained that Daniel only claimed he will take responsibility but showed no action to prove it, so I had to make Daniel absorb every demon into himself to heal the land. The particles I used for that was glowing on the first pass, and people complained that that made him feel too much like a hero, so I had to turn them darker and murkier.
There were more changes in other aspects, such as making Daniel taking a step back at the end to show his fear of seeing Annalise again, or how he will actively walk forward on his own if players keep hitting him after the boss fight to show his determination for taking responsibility regardless of what the punisher does, but we eventually settled on the mostly acceptable ending of today.
That was a lot of iterations for just two minutes of a two hour long game!
Now The Other Half has been released, what have you learned from this experience? And do you have something else in the works?
The game has sold only about a hundred copies so far, so there’s a lot I’m learning and trying still, and I’m unsure where it’s all going.
Most of the feedback I’ve gotten has been positive so far, which I’m really grateful for. I expected pushback regarding the subject matter of sexual assault, especially being a story told from the perpetrator’s perspective and in the form of a game, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Overall, I guess what I’ve learned is that I don’t know anything still?
As for future works, I’m taking a break from game development in general for now. I did think about perhaps making something more episodic in the future, so I can release content out in shorter intervals, rather than holing up for two and a half years and hoping it goes well in the end.
Thank you for answering our questions!
Before we leave you, bonus question! Coffee, tea or beer? ☕🍵🍺?
Coffee, it is the embodiment of getting a warm hug on a cold sad morning.
The Other Half is out now on PC, Mac and Linux, and is available via the official website or Steam for purchase:
store.steampowered.com/app/917920/The_Other_Half/
The Other Half is the work of three persons, under the name
Studio Egg Roll:
Fred Yang: Designer, writer, programmer and artist.
Julie Buchanan: Composer and sound designer.
Maryyann Landlord: Artist.
If you’ve enjoyed the game, please consider talking about it around you :)
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