Still, those measly two hours saw ”good sales” but publisher Lexis Numerique is re-launching Amy. We play Lana who’s borderline zombie, helping a little girl.
Amy is inspired by Team ICO’s landmark PS2 game ICO as our protagonist leads a little girl around a dangerous environment. Our character, Lana, has been infected with a zombie strain and must stay in contact with Amy in order to ‘heal’ and resist the virus.
”For the sales, it’s very simple, because we actually sold the game for two hours. So we had good sales for two hours, but we haven’t sold since the restoration, so for us it was really hard,” said Lexis Numerique marketing director, Djamil Kemal.
”Honestly, Sony did a great job pushing us, and they did a lot of banners to launch the game, and we’re currently re-launching it. What we’re really pleased with is the great reviews; the few people who bought the game really loved it.”
Holding hands with Amy has the controller ‘thump’ to her heart beat, which helps us develop a new level of connection with the little girl, says Kemal.
”…so when you hold her hand you feel the heart beat in the controller going “Thump-thump, thump-thump” and when she gets frightened it beats faster, but the hard thing is that holding the hand of a character while running in real time is, technically speaking, really hard.”
”We were wondering why nobody had done it and it’s because it was so hard. If we had known it before we wouldn’t have done it. But now, of course, we have,” he added.
Programming the AI was a challenge for the studio. ”It was path-finding, plus AI for instance, among other things. We loved Ico for instance, but we wanted Amy, the little girl, to look like a child because if you don’t care about her, the game has nothing to give you.”
”So we needed her to have an emotional reaction: fear, hesitation, when she sees a corpse she’ll go slowly, she’ll go back, and having that issue, having the path-finding and having anything at any time, running in any direction and not having the arm going in any direction it was really hard.” He says they accomplished the feat and that it ”really works well.”
Amy is survival horror and closer to what Silent Hill’s experience is, but Lexis Numerique doesn’t enjoy labelling it in such a way.
”If you really want to talk about the genre there are two things: action horror, like Resident Evil, Dead Space, and there’s inner horror like Silent Hill and Amnesia.”
”We’re closer to Silent Hill, for instance, because you don’t have much action and so on but we didn’t want to have a label,” continued Kamel. There are two factions in the game: zombies and soldiers. We can get them to fight each other he says.
”…or you can use stealth because a big part of the game is based on the fact that Lana is infected so if you don’t heal her, she dies. She doesn’t die, but she loses control, she becomes a zombie.”
”When you’re a zombie you’re on the other side, you don’t attack other zombies, so you can be like among them, walking slowly while hiding. But you’re always frightened to lose control. That’s what we’re trying to do here.”
Amy is re-releasing on PS3 but Lexis Numerique and Vector Cell have plans to bring it to Xbox Live Arcade and the PC in the future.
