Community Central:Sandbox

VISUAL PROTOTYPE

After several years spending on relatively confined world of New York, the team was excited to work on open natural spaces and they spend several months developing a new engine to support large open world environments.

They used a strong fantasy theme to test what was possible at that time in a custom create AAA engine. The idea of a fantasy theme resonated quite a bit with the team. The fantasy concept art also focused on a charismatic, well dressed lead character and ominous fantastical enemies.

The team played with this concept for a while, but like a year of work they ultimately decided against it and moved on to another idea – bringing the literary and film genre of the Psychological Action Thriller to the interactive realm. Drawing story side inspiration from  Stephen King and David Lynch, in particular Twin Peaks

EARLY BEGINNINGS OF ALAN WAKE

A couple of years before work commenced o Alan Wake, Sam Lake had written the first rough draft of a movie screenplay called Undertow. It was a psychological thriller, and over the years the team ended up borrowing a lot of material from Undertow into the development of Alan Wake.

Undertow was a thriller about a burned-out character who goes on vacation in a cabin by a lake and strange things start happening. Among other things, Undertow featured a mystical driver lost in a dark place, the witch Baba Yaga and her bird leg cabin, two senile brothers who may or may not be Viking gods, and the Clicker, and old light switch, a childhood toy with magical powers, a toy Sam Lake actually used to play with when he was small boy, spending summers at a cabin by a lake in the Finnish countryside.

KEY ELEMENTS

The team wanted to include several key elements right from the beginning.

They didn’t want the main character to be an action hero, but rather an everyman who has to grow into the role of an action hero. Initially the team experimented with much younger character.

The team was happy with how voice over narration as a storytelling tool in Max Payne games worked and they wanted to use it in their new title as well. This is where the idea of a writer as a protagonist was born.

Very early on, the team wanted an element of Darkness to affect all the living things – bears, wolves and birds. While they ultimately decided not to include the larger animals in the game, they held on the Taken birds, mostly for story and gameplay reasons, but also as a kind of homage to Alfred Hichcock.

Strong theme of light versus darkness

Humanoid enemies that were uncomfortably close to normality, while clearly presenting a sense of danger and eeriness.

SETTING

The team decided to use Pacific Northwest of the United States as the setting for the title. The idea of and idyllic American small town with dark secrets was familiar to everyone in popular culture, but to that point it has not been see n in videogames. The moody atmosphere and cinematic setting were perfect for the psychological action thriller storyline.

Lighthouse, Cabin, Tornado

Building the world of Alan Wake

The studio did an enormous amount of research before they started developing the game. Once they had decided on the setting, the team went on several trips to the Pacific Northwest. The Lead artist Saku Lehtinen and the Lead Game Designer Mikael Kasurinen drove over 2000 miles over a period of two weeks and brought back over 40 000 photographs to capture the mood, the richness and the lighting conditions of the environment.

The team visited places like Astoria, Washington where the film The Ring was made. North Bend, where several shots for TV series Twin Peaks were shot. They visited ghost towns and looked at tornado behavior. They hired landscape artist to ensure environmental quality and even looked at star maps to make sure that stellar constellations are correct.

One of the most impressive places the team visited was Crater Lake in Oregon. This location was so memorable that it served as the inspiration for Cauldron Lake. There is even a lodge on the edge of Crater Lake that became a strong influence for Cauldron Lake Lodge.

Because of the key element Light versus Darkness, the team build a dynamic time-of-day lighting system.

Middle 2005