Hey! I’m Scott, part of the Night In The Woods team! I’ve been asked to give you some information on our game. We’re gonna hit some frequently asked questions! Let me pull up a few and see what we have. Hold on… Here we go.
What is Night In The Woods?
Night In The Woods is an adventure game where you explore a world and a story and a bunch of characters and people seem to like it. We hope you do too. It takes place in a town called Possum Springs, an Appalachian rust belt town full of secrets, citizens, and no shortage of closed storefronts. It concerns a woman named Mae who has just dropped out of college for reasons unknown and returned home. All she wants to do is rekindle her old life of petty vandalism and hanging out, but she finds things have changed while she was gone. The leaves are turning. The days are growing shorter, and the nights longer. And up past the burned-out basketball court at the edge of town, there’s something in the woods.
What kinds of things do you do in Night In The Woods?
Run, jump, chat with friends and family and strangers, break stuff, steal things, stab lots and lots of skeletons, chat some more, eat pizza, generally try to get by and have a decent time doing it. You’ll hang out with old friends and meet new ones. You’ll dance and run over rooftops. And you’ll feed rats. Did I mention the rats? There are rats. Hungry, hungry rats.
I heard there are extra games in this game?
Included in Night In The Woods for Xbox One are two smaller games we made during the development of NITW. They’re sort of tangents off of the main game, made as we went along to explore ideas and techniques, and they ended up being pretty cool in their own right. They are gathered here on console for the first time, and we’re excited for you all to play the whole thing as one package.
I heard this whole thing started on Twitter?
You heard right. In 2013, Alec Holowka, who you might remember as the co-creator of the award-winning game Aquaria and the composer on Towerfall, randomly tweeted at me asking if I’d like to make a game with him. We were originally thinking a small iPad-focused game. After a summer of kicking ideas back and forth on that, we weren’t super into what we had. One night I was watching “Return Of The Living Dead,” which is a masterpiece of cinema, and thinking about the punks I hung out with growing up, and also about the places my wife Bethany and I had lived. I quickly dashed out some character sketches and a basic idea of a game. I sent it to Alec, and he was really into it, and we sent it back and forth refining it and got to building it. Then we did a Kickstarter and that went well, and then three years and three months later, we released a game.
Who all made this game?
Well, there’s Alec, who I just talked about. He’s a super great developer, he co-directed the game, coded it, and did all the music. There’s a lot of music in the game. The soundtrack is three volumes. Bethany co-wrote the story and did lots and lots of research, as well as running a lot of behind-the-scenes things. I co-directed, co-wrote, did art and animation, lots of stuff. We all wore a lot of hats. Em Halberstadt did the sound design for the game, and it’s really something. Charles Huettner did additional art and animation here and there. And our publisher Finji kept things running and helped all over the place (Adam from Finji was the lead developer on Demontower). You’ll find out about Demontower once you play the game. We all live in different places, some in the United States, some in Canada, and the core team has only been in the same room together a half-dozen times or so.
Wait a sec, why are they all animal people?
Honestly, it’s because I can draw those pretty well.
Why didn’t you just learn how to draw regular people?
Uh, next question.
Why don’t the animal people have tails?
Why… what… ok, we’re done here.
Ok, is there anything else I should know?
Night In The Woods is a big weird heartfelt game that we poured ourselves into for 3 years. We really hope you dig it half as much as we loved making it.
See the rest of the story on Xbox Wire
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