Twitchy interviews Onur Şamlı from Zoetrope Interactive on their upcoming title Darkness Within 2: The Dark Lineage
Hi and thanks for taking the time out to speak with us.
1.Firstly can you tell twitchy.co.uk readers what each of Zoetrope’s team members are responsible for in the development of the game and a little bit of background on each?
Zoetrope Interactive is a small independent game development team of 3 people: Galip Kartoğlu, Oral Şamlı and me, Onur Şamlı. Galip is responsible with our in-house game engine, he also scripts levels and puzzles. Oral and me are doing the 3D and 2D graphic works and preparing sfx and music. Before we teamed up as Zoetrope Interactive, we worked on Galip’s personal project: a 2D fighting game called Dual Blades released for Gameboy Advance.
2.Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder was a big hit within the adventure game community on its release, what aspects were you keen to improve on for Darkness Within 2: The Dark Lineage and how did you think you achieved this ?
We mainly worked on the “freedom” aspect of the game. We got a lot of criticism about the presentation style of the first installment. A lot of people found its pre-rendered panoramic style boring. Thus we decided to improve this by enhancing our in-house game engine and developing the Darkness Within 2 as a fully 3D game. And this gave us a lot more freedom to enrich the game with such features like real-time lighting and usage of physics simulation.
3.Darkness Within 2: The Dark Lineage is clearly more complex in its gaming mechanics, I believe you built your own game engine; can you elaborate on the necessity to do so?
During the development of Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder, we built the first version of our game engine CPAGE because we wanted to make it as lively and interactive as possible for a panoramic adventure game. There were some freeware engines out there but we wanted to have full control over our project and some special features which we were thinking to use. This only would be possible with an in-house game engine and we are now very happy with it 
4.You have moved away from the slideshow style point and click and into a 3d world using the WASD control keys. What other new features have you introduced and how will they have impact on the gaming experience?
The most important feature is real-time lighting support. Players will be able to use different light sources to light their ways in the game. And all the light sources in the game cast real-time shadows. We think that this feature adds too much to the gaming experience. Another new feature of the game is physics support. With this feature, players will be able to interact more closely to the game world. But it has its own limitations of course; we didn’t want the gamer to loose too much time and energy with annoying objects bumping into them. In addition to this, The Dark Lineage features a lot more character interaction than its predecessor.
5.H P Lovecraft theories and conjectures on horror, science fiction, fantasy, weird fiction, gothic fiction, allows for a lot of creativity yet you’ve still remained true to his idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally alien. Do you find that, when developing the story, your imagination can run away with you?
When I read Lovecraft’s works and think about them on my own, some times I find myself delving into deep thoughts. There are really interesting subjects that suck the person in. But in the end, it’s all fiction.. there is a real world to deal with out there.
6.The storyline is excellent do you consider yourselves writers or a programmers primarily?
Thank you! Primarily, we are developers. Other than writing the story, we’re programming, scripting, composing music, preparing sound effects, graphics and animations. We have a lot of things to do and thus we really can’t focus on the story as much as we wish to. But we are trying to do our best and seeing our efforts are being appreciated makes us really happy:)
7.What sort of puzzles can we look forward to and how would you rate them in difficulty?
The Dark Lineage includes various types of puzzles. There are inventory puzzles as well as logical and mechanical ones. Also players will be able to enjoy puzzles specific to Darkness Within series like underlining documents to find out secrets clues or thoughts and combining them to reach new clues or thoughts. I think the most hard to solve puzzles in the Darkness Within series are logical ones. We try hard to implement all the puzzles into the story so that they seem seamless to players. Thus sometimes, figuring out a logical puzzle requires a bit of attention to the story.
8.There was a lack of character interaction in the first episode of Darkness Within. Will there be more this time?
Yes. The Dark Lineage has a lot more characters and also the dialogs are much longer with more dialog options compared to In Pursuit of Loath Nolder. This time, players will be able to learn a lot of things about the story by speaking with characters.
9.Can you tell us something about the inventory? Is there an in-game help system? Will there be any “extras” in the game that can be “unlocked,” such as “Easter Eggs”?
Because we wanted the players with experience of the first installment to feel at home, we didn’t thouch the interfaces of the game. So the inventory and in-game help system, as well as the DES (detailed examine screen where you can examine inventory objects) and Thinking interface (interface where you see the list of the thoughts and can combine the inventory objects and thoughts), still stay the same. As for the extras, the game includes a lot of secrets and Easter Eggs. Even though finding some of them are really hard, they are rewarding gameplay-wise. You will be able to see new aspects of the story and NPCs you speak with if you can find them.
10.Most of the frights in Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder was built up by the atmospheric tension, from some of the preview screenshots released, Darkness Within 2: The Dark Lineage looks to be more in your face scary! Are you confident it will still have the fright factor?
Actually, The Dark Lineage was built on the same logic: efficient usage of the atmosphere, the in-game texts and the sound effects of the game to disturb and frighten the players. But, thankfully to our enhanced game engine, there are a lot of spooky moments in The Dark Lineage that were not easy to implement with a pre-rendered style engine.
11.Just to finish off what are your all time favorite games and why?
My favorites are: Morpheus, Sanitarium, The Dig and Symbiocom. I love these games because they have good puzzles, graphics and most importantly great storylines. So I can say that they really suit my tastes.
Thank you for your time as I know it is a busy time for you with the Darkness Within 2: The Dark Lineage release date fast approaching.
We thank you for this opportunity!
