Opening Credits (Developer Commentary)

The Opening Credits Developer Commentary note is all one note.

"The intro credits scene once was not originally a planned part of the project. It started off as an experiment with no art or tech support, stealing assets from the level and making new objects like coffins and sharks out of simple cubes and spheres. Many of the unique objects you see during this sequence are still actually from abandoned iterations of the levels. For example, the tesla coils in the final hallway are early versions of the virus vat from Window Washing. The rocket silos are from an old version of the Lodge.

"There are certain materials that appears a solid color regardless of angle or lighting. We use these elsewhere in the game for luminous objects like indicator lights or lasers. We created the flat-ish style for credits by applying these types of materials exclusively. Everything is still 3D, and it's especially interesting in VR because your brain still tries to parse the distance and shapes of these silhouettes. They can't, to a certain extent, when different colors are near each other. This allowed us to do little tricks like have something that seemed flat suddenly reveal depth as you move, like the Agency logo, or have objects morph as they rotate.

"This song literally began as me improvising lyrics into my phone late at night. Coming to work and being like, "Hey! Hey Bonnie! Hey Tim! What if we did this, but like, actually good?" We were still bootstrapping at this point, but I approached Jared and Shawn and Mark with the phone-sung song and thrown together visual prototypes. They were on-board enough for us to feel comfortable continuing to experiment. Without them, perhaps this was something that could be unlocked at the end of the game. Jared did his own pass on the lyrics and by fusing the two versions, I got our final song.

"Once the lyrics were close to their final state, I felt inspired on my lunch break one day and recorded myself singing the lyrics acapella, which ended up being pretty much the final melody of the song.

"I and Ben took the lyrics, the original phone recording from Connor, and the melody Bonnie wrote and fleshed it out into a full-fledged song. The first recording of the song was just me and my piano recorded hastily in my apartment at, like, 2 in the morning. Eventually, I made another version of the song with a rough instrumentation of strings and brass with Bonnie singing lead and both of us on the backing vocals.

"In January 2016, we finally showed our credits experiment as 2-year leadership. It went pretty well. It was decided that this would be the first thing you see, which is... a little more pressure.

"Meanwhile, I was working on fleshing out the orchestration more with virtual instruments and made a new demo. I submitted a segment of that demo to the music demo derby in GDC. The feedback we received was that it sounded like a polished demo rather than a final product and that we should look into recording live instruments. We contracted some studio musicians and recorded new vocals with Bonnie and the background singers at local Pittsburgh studio Red Caiman, and then they took care of the rest of the mixing and mastering of all our stems. We ended up with a really great final product. I don't think any of us ever imagined that this would've been possible, but we are all incredibly proud of the end result."