The People vs: Heavy Rain – part one

The PlayStation community puts its questions to Heavy Rain's writer and director David Cage, and executive producer Guillaume de Fondaumière.

Mature thriller Heavy Rain is the game which has everyone talking - and what better way to find out more about this heart pounding PlayStation 3 title than by asking its writer and director, David Cage and executive producer Guillaume de Fondaumière? That's exactly what the PlayStation community did, so eu.playstation.com gathered some answers for you. Thanks to everyone at the official PlayStation Forums who submitted their questions.

While working on Heavy Rain was it difficult to create so many possibilities and scenarios for the characters based on the player's choices? (Alex_Gard9, Italy)

Guillaume de Fondaumière: It was extremely difficult, and the difficulty starts at the writing stage of the game, because when David creates this story it necessitates the need to write a core story and then all the branches - but you don't want to end up with this enormous thing that doesn't make sense, we always want to keep control over the story because you want it to be good.

David wrote 2,300 pages of script, so he needed to be focused because you want to give as many possibilities to the player so he feels totally in control. And at the same time you need to keep everything within boundaries, and make sure it makes sense. It's a very long and difficult process.

And then adapting that in terms of gameplay is another challenge because it's really important to us to tell a story that you can play. We had a team of four people who worked for three years on the interface, making sure everything makes sense from a gameplay perspective and at the same time is enjoyable and understandable - and also helps drive the story.

What was the hardest part of the game to develop? (pAvax, Netherlands)

David Cage: Pretty much everything was challenging, just because we pretty much did everything for the first time. So writing the script was a nightmare. Alfred Hitchcock said: "writing a movie is mainly three things - a good script, a good script and a good script." And I would say that something like Heavy Rain is pretty much the same thing. Finding the actors was another challenge - shooting the motion capture was a huge challenge of a different type.

But if I had to narrow it down to one answer, I'd say that triggering emotions in the game's scenes was something we were really anxious about, because if you just played the game and didn't feel anything then we've missed everything we wanted to create in the game. And emotion isn't one thing that you can just measure out, it's really a combination of many things, and it comes from the acting, the script, the lighting, the music... you need everything to be perfectly in sync to trigger the emotions you want. So it was incredibly challenging.

The main characters of Heavy Rain look very realistic and natural. The actors' performance must have been a real focus for you, so how long did the motion capture shooting last in total? (bajwanasser, France)

DC: A year from start to finish. There were also retakes, unfortunately, but we have an internal motion capture studio. We try not to overuse it. We were really organised and had to schedule everything, as there was no other way of producing such a big volume of data.

What movie directors or script writers have influenced you personally or the rest of the team during the creation of Heavy Rain? (toolfan2007, United Kingdom)

DC: I really enjoy movies from David Fincher, Ridley Scott, Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Demme, Alfred Hitchcock and many others. None of them really influenced the work to the point of copying anything, but they're part of my culture and in writing, directing and filming things they've had a strong influence on me.

Did you read Choose Your Own Adventure books as a child? (Theshortbaker, Australia)

DC: Yes, definitely. In fact, I started playing text based adventures, and I believe if there's a comparison with Heavy Rain it's with them. Because we tried to do graphically what they were doing with text, discovering what came from the choices you make. Heavy Rain is from a similar idea, but just with a very small granularity - every single action has consequences.

Make sure you also read the second part of The People vs: Heavy Rain where Cage and de Fondaumière discuss some of the future plans for Heavy Rain outside of games, what real life events helped inspire some of its scenes, and why Heavy Rain's Quality Assurance testers found parts of the game almost too much to handle...