The factory environments continue to expand in scale and complexity with each release. Can you walk us through your environment art and level design pipeline for building spaces that feel both believable and unsettling?
Bryce Clark: We usually begin with identifying the purpose of the space. Why did Playtime Co. build this space? Was this area built for children? For employees? For investors walking through on a tour? Was it meant to be charming, efficient, theatrical, hidden? Once we understand the original purpose, we can start corrupting it in a way that feels specific and targeted toward the gameplay we want to create and the story we want to tell.
A lot of the magic of the setting is in the balance between the original intentions of Playtime Co. and seeing the horrible consequences of how various figures within the company shaped or strayed from the initial vision of “be the joy the world needs” – the playful, nostalgic, childlike, hopeful elements contrast with the cold, clinical, and cruel ‘progress at any cost’ science and the player experiences the descent into madness as they discover the layers of horrific biological and psychological experimentation underpinning the whole factory.
The process itself is very collaborative. Level design often interprets a script outline into playable spaces, thinking about how the player moves through the world and what objectives and obstacles will decorate the journey. Then environment art, narrative, audio, and gameplay start layering in. Improving composition, adding additional grounding in our lore, and planting the seeds of later plot points, building up tension. We want the factory to feel like a real place with history that the closer to you and the more you discover the more you begin to understand what happened here. Not a haunted house built only for scares, but a company with systems, priorities, branding, secrets, and a lot of things that were meant to keep hidden that players get to discover.
