In the Drift

Some thoughts on the announcement

Well, it finally happened.For the past few years there's only been about twenty people in the whole world who knew anything about In The Drift, and now there's thousands! My friends have been endlessly encouraging, and I know I wouldn't have made it this far without them, but whenever a friend tells me that they like my work there's always a voice inside me that says "but you're my friend, you have to say that". In the past week we've had lovely comments from real people out there on the internet. Having been hiding in a cave for several years without showing anyone what I'm up to (as well as having pretty much given up on social media), it's been a relief to hear that I've not totally faded away in that time. It's also awoken some strange feelings that I've not felt or thought about for a while now.To explain what I mean we need to travel back to the winter of 2021, with the first spark of what would become In The Drift. We had just released Sable a few months earlier, and with the UK still dealing with the tail end of covid, launch celebrations were somewhat muted. The launch had been an intense sprint to the finish, and I was feeling a slightly dazed sense of grief having come out the other side of it. There were thousands of people out in the world playing our game, writing reviews and comments saying how much they were enjoying it, but trudging along the rain-soaked ridgeway of North London where I went out for my daily walks, those thousands of people felt impossibly far away. The medium of the internet, which made it possible for us to reach so many people with Sable, took the moments of genuine human connection they had with our work and turned them into comments in a feed and numbers on the Steam dashboard.At the same time, it felt like the internet was starting to crack open the world as we had known it. Conspiracy theories about vaccines and 5G, which at first had seemed laughable, felt like the start of something unimaginably darker. We were reaching thousands of people with our little game, while the forces of capital were shaping the lives of millions. I couldn't escape the feeling that the internet might have been a mistake; that it couldn't be fixed. That maybe the best we could hope for was to stop scrolling and try to touch the real lives of the people around us as a colleague, a friend, or a partner.Of course, that's an easy and quite pretentious thing to say, but a harder thing to imagine, let alone actually do. So, embarrassingly, rather than quit my job to go and do something useful in the world, I ended up just making a videogame about someone trying to do it instead. Fast-forward through a few years of prototypes, art tests, story planning spreadsheets and pitch demos, and here we are. A game about fixing the internet in space. Or trying to, anyway.Why am I giving you this whole sob story about how we made a videogame and people liked it and I was depressed afterwards? Well it's been a few years since all that, and there's so much to think about on a new project that before you know it you're writing dialogue and building environments and designing levels and editing trailers and you don't have time to think about what sent you down this rabbit hole in the first place until one day you stick your head back out the hole to show the world that trailer and there they are! The strangers on the internet. Saying lovely things about your work and how much they enjoyed Sable and how they're excited to hear more about this new one and it looks so nice and the music is wonderful. And while it has been a huge relief to hear that people are excited, I can't help but be reminded of those rainy walks in 2021 and the distance the internet puts between us and the world.I don't want to seem ungrateful to everybody (especially to you who've made it this far down such a long and self-indulgent post), so I'm trying to take this strange feeling which is as much a memory of a feeling and channel it back into making something meaningful alongside some incredibly talented and much less self-absorbed people.So speaking of incredibly talented people, the music in the trailer is by Laryssa Okada, who's also writing the full soundtrack for the game. From the very first conversation we had about the project, it was clear to me that she could see the fire burning at the heart of this story. Rather than asking what the music should sound like, she wanted to know what the characters were thinking. What is Cassie most afraid of? What does Luna wish she had the words to say? Questions I sometimes forget we even need to ask when I'm so focused on fixing this particle system or that walk cycle. When I find I'm too tired or distracted to rekindle the embers, I know I can count on Laryssa to keep the fire going. I'm listening to her phenomenal Manifold Garden soundtrack as I write this, which I highly recommend if you need to get yourself into a wobbly, reflective mood.Besides the music, we've also had so many comments praising the dreamy colours, the elegant framing and the subtle expressions, which are all thanks to the work of Inna Hansen, the art director on the team. Inna believed in this game from the very beginning, and has been incredibly supportive not just in the art department, but also travelling around the world as we pitched the game at countless events. When we started working together I was hoping to find a collaborator, but instead I've found a real friend.I also want to give a special mention to Martin Kvale, whose sound design work isn't so prominent in the trailer (you'll have to keep your ears peeled for the full game), but whose emotional support through the ups and downs of the project have kept me going when I otherwise might have given up.Anyway, this has been enough of a ramble, time to wrap things up. I want to try and post regular-ish updates in this news feed for those of you who want to hear what we're up to. Let's see how long I manage to keep that up...Daniel Me and Inna at GDC last year