The People vs: Heavy Rain – part two

The PlayStation community gets a glimpse into Heavy Rain's creation as its writer and director David Cage, and executive producer Guillaume de Fondaumière answer your questions.

Are any parts of Heavy Rain based on real life events? (Sammellor, New Zealand)

David Cage: There are two specific moments. The initial idea for the game came from when I lost my son in a crowded mall, so that was a very strong personal event. The second moment was when I was a kid I had my two fingers cut... so that's actually happened to me and I know what it feels like.

While creating the game, were some parts of it too emotional for the Quality Assurance testers to handle? (Dogtaro2, Australia)

DC: Yeah, there were many scenes that were really difficult to play for them. One of them was the finger cutting scene. It was really painful to test, because they needed to test every possibility of the scene and check out that everything was working.

Were there any things in Heavy Rain you wanted to include but due to time or cost restraints had to cut out? (Bearskopff, United Kingdom)

Guillaume de Fondaumière: Not really. We've been very fortunate to work with a publisher that understood our objectives and vision, and gave us the means and the time to really create the game that we wanted to create. So there hasn't really been anything where we've been told to cut or change.

The discussions we had were really more at the end of production, where we decided to cut certain scenes out a week or two before the master code - this isn't something common in the industry, but cinema does it all the time. And the reason we decided to cut them was because we felt certain scenes were out of rhythm, and we wanted the experience to feel right.

Will you still be focusing on unusual methods of narration, showing emotion and such for future titles? Do you think about yourselves as the visionaries in the industry? (Grz3chu87, Poland)

DC: I don't pretend to be some sort of visionary for the industry from my side, I just try to do things I believe in and enjoy doing, and hope that others enjoy playing it, that's all. I'm 40 years old, so I hope there are more games for people who are of that sort of generation because they're not as interested in killing monsters - people want something else, and I'm just a bit frustrated at the moment that the industry has very little to offer people who aren't interested in violent actions.

Would you consider adapting the Heavy Rain story to cinema and would you work in the film industry? (SAeNcSA, Spain)

DC: I think my work on Heavy Rain will be finished when the game is released, because the game won't belong to me or the studio anymore, it'll belong to gamers. So I'm sure there will be opportunities to make a movie and there will be interest in the characters and story, and we'll look at this seriously, but at the same time it isn't the dream and if it doesn't happen it's not a frustration. I'm making games because I love making games, rather than seeing it as a step to making movies. So whatever happens I'll be happy.

Heavy Rain is a very mature game, but are there any plans for action figures, T-shirts, or posters made or inspired by the game? (Resetti, United Kingdom)

GF: Not for now, but if the game is very successful we might do it. I'm not sure if the game, characters and environment lends itself to this type of merchandise... but if people want to keep something of Heavy Rain for themselves then maybe we should do it!

We know that there will be no Heavy Rain 2, so what sort of things will you be exploring for the next big thing you're working on? (evelan_pl, Poland)

DC: There are many areas that we'd want to improve on in Heavy Rain, such as the technology and quality of the animations and visuals, so there's no doubt in my mind that the next game will look even better. I'm really interested in exploring how we can deal with non-player characters, how we can make them look like real human beings and behave in a logical way, with the possibility to interrupt and interact with them in a natural way.