The Indie Game Magazine November 2014 | Issue 43 | Page 13

this generation just seems to think it means “shooting
all the time, but with scary enemies.”
Pulsetense: Firstly, shooting in Solarix is an incredibly bad idea. Our AI is programmed to detect sound within the
environment, so the last thing you want to be doing is firing a
weapon. The player is provided with a shotgun for those ‘needs
must moments’ but it really should be a last resort. Once you fire
it, anything within the sound radius is going to be attracted to you.
Survival-horror to us means you’re being actively hunted by the AI,
and the story progresses in such a way that makes this believable
(in story context). The story is key to the horror experience, not
just the “jump scares” but the horror of the mind and what being
truly alone can do to a person. We do not want to scare you, we
want you to be scared.
IGM: What sort of strategic options does your open-ended
gameplay provide?
Pulsetense: Early on in the design process we discussed what a
stealth game meant to us, and one of the key factors was there
should always be multiple ways to complete objectives not necessarily the mission. We don’t want to hinder the player’s ability to
be creative when trying to complete a mission.
The game is broken up into twelve chapters, each level within that
chapter is linear in terms of narrative and how the story unfolds,
but the way in which you complete these missions and use the
levels is totally open-ended. This means the player will have to
pay attention to the environment, as there is NO map system in
Solarix. The environment will guide you. We believe this will add to
the stress the player is under, and engross them in the experience.
IGM: What are some of the early influences for Solarix? Either
the story or the atmosphere.
Pulsetense: System Shock 2 and the original Thief games have had
a huge impact on all of the team; it was kind of prerequisite to
people joining the project, as they had to truly understand what
it was we were trying to achieve.
So I would say the story of SS2 and the
gameplay of Thief were the two most
prominent influences on Solarix. We want
to show the younger generation what it
was like to play those games when they
first came out and to not have their hand
held all the way through the game.
IGM: Unpredictable AI is a pretty tough
mountain to climb. How is the small team

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