The Foglands: Spinning An Interactive Tale
By Sam Warner, Game Director
The origin of The Foglands’ narrative lies in the American Pacific Northwest, where my partner in creative leadership, Marcus Meler, and I are from — but we wouldn’t cross paths until we traveled somewhere much further south. We met as students at Chapman University in Southern California and bonded over our shared love of where we grew up (and also cowboys), which ultimately led to a cinematic and prototype for our thesis project: The Foglands. At a student game competition, we were told our idea was too big to become a ‘real’ game… so of course we decided to do the only sane thing and build a game studio right out of college that could one day make it a reality, recruiting some of our fellow classmates and friends along the way.
Seven or eight years later, Well Told Entertainment has had the incredible opportunity to bring The Foglands to life as a PlayStation Partner. The prototype was originally in third-person, but when Well Told received a free HTC Vive it felt like an opportunity to explore a heightened level of storytelling immersion. Our players could experience greater agency and better connect with the characters in this medium: so we made the switch to VR (and first person!). This was the start of many transformations to come for this dream project of ours!
Initially our story was very simple: a terrible beast threatens your home and you have to kill it. However, as production moved along, it felt necessary to look introspectively at the traditional ‘man versus nature’ story and its roots in the Westward Expansion movement across America. Together with my amazing team, including Lead Narrative Designer Cam Riach and Lead Writer Anna C. Webster, we reviewed the history, psychology, and origins of the Western genre with Natalyn Daniels, our wonderful sensitivity reader and writer for the game.
The world, plot, and characters of The Foglands were properly built out from there with newly-recruited Runner Jim Womack as the protagonist. As a novice Runner, Jim learns about the world of The Foglands at the same pace as the player. He’s cornered into making a deal with a mysterious Stranger to save his underground community known as The Hold from what seems to be a great beast at the start of the game. He has to fight people he’s been told to hate, and trust people that carry ancient (and justified) grudges. Jim may wield many weapons on his journey, but his most powerful tool is his curiosity and eagerness to do the right thing. With that tool, he will challenge the status quo, journeying to where few have gone in the Foglands to become the hero he wants to be.
After re-tooling the narrative, I can proudly say that The Foglands now belongs in the subgenre of the anti-Western. That is, it’s a Western which actively challenges many of the ideologies and mainstays of traditional Western content like rugged individualism and a fear of the ‘other’. The Foglands explores what it takes to understand the differences between the peoples and creatures that inhabit this strange world. It is full of characters that can help you pull a quasi-family together out of disparate parts (if you win some of them over first, of course). More community and inclusivity, less colonialism and superfluous violence.
…But there is still violence. With the stakes as high as they are and danger around each corner, you’ll have to protect yourself as you seek the truth lost out there in the Fog. Saving your home and surviving your deal with the Stranger will require as much mettle as it will mercy!
Perspective is everything. I discovered along our journey of development that we had to transform The Foglands into a Western that could bring a fresh take to this kind of story, that included characters descended from typically silenced groups who were there in the historical era and location associated with the genre. That’s why our cast is as diverse as the West itself, and why each character has their own story to tell you as you get to know them better.
Our animation director Jen Re worked closely with our narrative and engineering team to develop our own style of enhanced facial capture that mixes seamlessly with high quality hand-animation to make our characters feel like people that belong in the comic-book-meets-Pixar world of The Foglands. On top of that, we wanted to bring warmth to the characters in their cold, underground home world, which is why each character is fully voiced. Our voice actors, like Thomas Copeland Jr., Gianni Matragrano, Zane Schacht, Lauren Choo, Sabrina Saleha, and even a few members of our own development team, really brought their performances to life.
The PSVR2 gives us the ability to create one-of-a-kind feedback to further support deep narrative immersion. From the very beginning of The Foglands we wanted to explore both gameplay and character interactions with the unique features provided by this awesome piece of hardware. Engaging with characters isn’t just pressing buttons; you meet characters eye to eye and their performances are tied to eye-tracking. They can even lock eyes with you — that kind of thing is only available on PSVR2.
Thank you so much for reading! The Foglands is now available for preorder on PSVR2 and PS5, and remember: no VR required!
