It’s time to make the ultimate sacrifice! We chat to Xiotex Studios about Caretaker Sacrifice

The stars are going out, the fate of humanity rests on your shoulders. Caretaker Sacrifice is a sci-fi adventure game where you play as Commander Andy Carolan, sent on a mission to discover why the stars are disappearing.

We were given the opportunity to interview Byron Atkinson-Jones, the developer of Caretaker and owner of Xiotex Studios, which he says sounds big but “it’s really just me”.

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GameWatcher: Could you tell us a bit about Caretaker: Sacrifice?

Byron Atkinson-Jones: Caretaker is actually a collection of three games and this is the first one: Caretaker Sacrifice. It originally started out as a Doctor Who script, but I couldn’t get anyone from the BBC to commit to it so I thought, ‘let’s make a game out of it!’. The funny thing about it was that it was supposed to be a very small game that was supposed to take about a month to make. While I was making it I was watching Stargate Atlantis on Netflix in the background. I heard the actor from it and the voice in the back of my head was saying ‘he would sound excellent in the game’. But how do I get in contact? I have no idea. So anyway, the first person I show the game to (no one else has seen the game apart from my wife), knew the actor personally and introduced me to him! He said ‘do you want to be introduced?’ and I said ‘yeah, go for it’ and he sees the game and says ‘I want to be involved with this’. So it went from a month long game to a year-long game.

I started this back in November 2014 and we are in 2016 now - it ballooned massively. We’ve got a massive script and lots of voice over recordings. I went over to Toronto because he’s in Stargate so, you know, it went massively big. It’s now three games! It started out as one small game and it’s now three games. This one tells the story of two astronauts who discover why all the stars are going out in the universe. They get into the device that is causing it all and they decide to try and stop it. It’s called Sacrifice because they make the ultimate sacrifice.

GameWatcher: What inspired the story?

Byron Atkinson-Jones: Like I said, originally it was Doctor Who. The premise was ‘what if the Big Bang was an artificial thing’? What if it was created by somebody rather than being a natural thing? How would they power a Big Bang? What would you do? They make a device. How do you do it? Well you use all the energy from all the stars in the universe, and that’s where the story came from. So the idea is that all the stars are going out and people go up there to find out why. The final game which is what the original game is supposed to be, is called Caretaker: Retribution. This is Sacrifice, the next one is Retribution and that one is all about revenge. The stars are going out, we need to get our revenge.

GameWatcher: How has designing with VR been, because obviously it’s a VR game…

Byron Atkinson-Jones: It works in VR but it also works without VR. The funny thing is, I sent an early build of the game to Oculus and I came home to a mountain of Oculus Rifts. When I walked through the door of my home there was a large stack of Oculus Rifts, I was like ‘what the heck is going on here?’ thinking they were going to send one of them, but they sent multiple because they thought a team were working on it, but it was just me. I was a real VR sceptic, I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t really think it was going to take off, but I tried it and I went ‘Yeah, okay, this is really good’.

When you launch the game it will go into VR mode for you, but it will work without it too.

GameWatcher: Did designing with VR in mind change the way you designed the game?

Byron Atkinson-Jones: Yes, massively. The big thing about VR is that it’s very new, obviously. So when people first try VR you’ll notice that they are flying around, they aren’t really doing anything much. It’s because they are getting used to being in VR, and they also want to explore. I gave play-testers an early build of this game and I found that they weren’t actually doing what I wanted them to do; they were just exploring. They would go to a small corner and go ‘what’s there? I want to look behind it. Is there anything else underneath there? I want to look down there as well’. It became a bit like a walking simulator, something like The Witness where you walk around and think ‘oh, that’s interesting’.

So when you are designing for VR you have to design for the VR experience in mind as well as the gaming experience. So what I do in this one, especially in this demo here, they don’t know it yet but if you don’t shoot you can explore the entire thing, and nothing will stop you. As soon as you start shooting it’ll go ‘yeah, okay, you’ve started the game now’ and it’ll start trying to kill you, but that’s one design consideration. Another design consideration is to stop motion sickness. The world is six-degree motion and it’s designed in a certain way that there’s a horizon at all points so you don’t feel sick. It doesn’t always work but it’s one thing I’ve noticed that can help people. Your body is telling you that you are on solid ground, your ears are telling you that you are on solid ground but your mind when you are in there is telling you, you are anywhere, and usually your body’s reaction to that is to throw up.

GameWatcher: What do you think makes this game stand out from other VR games that will be coming out soon?

Byron Atkinson-Jones: Well most other games that I’ve seen are very much grounded in the real world, so on the Vive Pre, for instance, it came with golf games (mini golf) which is fun but it’s not really imaginative. I wanted to do a VR game that threw you into a totally alien environment; I’d like you to do something that you don’t usually do. So in here you are flying. You can’t see the sense of scale but if you try it, that thing is actually thirty meters down. So you are flying and you see this huge expansive thing below you and you get this real sense of depth. You can’t fly normally, and that’s like a dream come true. When I showed this at Comic Con, most people said ‘you’re able to fly! That’s amazing!’ and they spent ages just doing that. We should be pushing the boundaries. We were bound before by realism. Like first person shooter controls, you are on the ground, you are running around. What if you took that away? With VR you can be anything. You can do anything.

GameWatcher: That’s really interesting. I haven’t thought about flying around…

Byron Atkinson-Jones: It’s like a dream come true. You can be like Super Man or whoever you want to be. You can be in the water if you want to. I mean, Blue, one of the demos on the Vive Pre, has you in a wreck looking at a whale coming past. You obviously can’t do that unless you’ve got diving equipment on, but now you can. And you could do that before with traditional games but it’s on a 2D screen, you weren’t really there. With this, you’re there. You’re in the world. You’re part of the world. You’re experiencing it. Try not to throw up at the same time, but, you know.

GameWatcher: I suffer with motion sickness actually, so that’s a concern for me.

Byron Atkinson-Jones: Yeah, I did originally as well. One thing I found is that you get very acclimatised to VR very rapidly. It gets to a point when I’m working thinking ‘is this actually still fun anymore?’ But it’s because you become so acclimatised to it. It’s like watching 3D movies. If you go watch something like Avatar, for the first ten minutes you’re really going ‘wow, 3D!’ but after that you get so immersed in the story that you forget the 3D is there.

GameWatcher: You mentioned this is part of the Caretaker Chronicles, and this is the first one. You mentioned Retribution as well. When will that one be coming out?

Byron Atkinson-Jones: Chronicles is all three games together. The third game is still to be, well… I haven’t figured out the name just yet. Retribution was meant to be coming out this year but I realised it is a much larger game - it’s going to take me a year to make. I also realised there’s a part in the main story, which is where this game comes from, as it’s kind of mentioned in the main game but not really explored. So I thought there’s a prime opportunity to get a smaller version of the game out which is what Sacrifice actually is, so I can explore the idea a bit. At the beginning of this, there’s a movie by David [David Hewlett] explaining not in the outside of the game, but in the context of the game of what’s going on and explores the story a bit more. This one is out… laughs supposedly April. So once I finish the show here tonight I’ll be back home working like crazy, just in time for Rezzed [EGX Rezzed]. So I’ve said the 6th April and Rezzed is on the 7th April. So I’ll either be doing a first day one patch while at Rezzed, trying to upload a build on my mobile phone, but I don’t know. April is the aim anyway.