Chris Bischoff: STASIS is a 2D Isometric Adventure Game, set in abandoned research ship in a decaying orbit around Neptune.

STASIS is born out of a love for Science Fiction horror, drawing heavily from worlds like Alien, Sunshine, and Event Horizon. But at its heart, its a classic Adventure Game. Finding items, combining them in various ways, and using them to solve puzzles to move through the world.​

Professionally I am an architectural artist, running a company called BURN, with my brother.

I have always been interested in game development, from making my own boardgames as a kid, to trying to create clones of my favourite games! If you were involved in the Star Control community a few years back, you may remember a game called Outworld, and later changed to AlienME, which was a game heavily inspired by the mechanics of Star Control 2.

Graphically, I have always loved 2D isometric games. There is something just magical about a highly detailed 2D world that I feel just can't be matched by 3D real-time engines. Working on a project like this would be a dream for me as an artist - but living a continent away from any large game development studios meant that I had to go at it myself!

STASIS started off as a side project during my December break, and slowly evolved into what it is today. It really is a story of 'accidental development'. I never intentionally set out to create this story, but as it grew and grew I fell in love with the project and the world.​

The RAMA series had a big influence on me when I was younger. I loved the idea of exploring a truly alien world, which is why my stand out games tended to be focused on that concept. When I started development on STASIS, I read quite a few books that focused on the themes of the story. Greg Bears 'Hull Zero Three', Michael Crichtons 'Sphere' (still, in my opinion, one of the best opening acts to a SciFi story ever written), and even Orson Scott Cards novelization of The Abyss.

I've been a massive lover of Science Fiction ever since I saw Star Wars at the tender age of 4, so to pick any specific influence is very difficult! STASIS is the amalgamation of all of those experiences.

As far as RPG's go, their biggest influence on me has been less thematic, and more visual. Fallout was the first CRPG that truly captured my imagination from a visual standpoint. The entire world is so beautifully crafted in that game, I would spend hours and days just walking around, hunting down new areas. From there, I moved onto the rest of the Infinity Engine games. Icewind Dale is one of my favourites graphically!

Crusader No Remorse was also a huge influence on me as an artist. I remember playing the game, and taking screenshots of it frame by frame to 'rip' the explosions and characters and use them in my games.​

I am a very family oriented person. My brother is my best friend, and we are partners in a business that we have run together for close on 11 years. The theme of familial bonds is something that is very tightly wound into the fabric of STASIS.

On top of that, I have looked to the 'classic' Science Fiction themes of corporate greed, and the evils of humanity. I have a rather morbid fascination with how humans can dehumanise each other. If you look at Nazi war crimes, and the horrific events of Japanese experimentation during World War 2, its difficult to wrap your mind around the fact that people are actually capable of doing that to each other. At what point is someone considered 'evil', and do the ends REALLY justify the means?​

Puzzle Design has changed so much over the years. In the older days of hint books, long weekends, and 'limited' choice (of available games) , getting stuck on a puzzle was almost a pleasure. I spent about a week on the Homing Beacon puzzle in Space Quest 6, and it was far from a frustration. But recently, when I played Dear Esther, I felt cheated because I didn't actually 'do' anything to move forward in the game.

I think that modern day Adventure Game designers have to balance a very fine line between those two extremes.

What I have tried to do with the puzzles in STASIS is to keep them very grounded in reality, and make certain that the solutions are things that John himself would be able to do. For instance, if he is trying to stop a conveyor belt from moving, he isn't going to remove a panel from the control box, and rewire it - he is going to jam a wrench into the machinery.​

I think that they are very important, and I wish I could have more of it in STASIS, but as this game has only one person working on it, I have had to make the game into a more linear experience. Where the game does open up, is that in each chapter the areas you can explore are relatively large, spanning multiple rooms and areas on multiple levels. How you move through these spaces is up to you. There are areas in the game that narrow you down to a more linear path, but these are few and far between.

I would love to experiment, as a designer, with multiple endings, and more choice and consequence - but for my first large scale game, I thought it better to go with a well thought out and planned story. The game is very much rooted as a linear narrative - with multiple story threads being tightly woven into the ending.​

The inventory should be very familiar to anyone who has played an Adventure Game. In the game world, the inventory is actually an Emergency Medical Kit, which was created to be deployed to soldiers in the field of battle. The kit can store multiple objects, and combine them together (the idea being that medicines could be mixed 'on the fly' when needed).

There are NPC's in the game. Your main ally throughout the story is another survivor, who is trying to get off the ship. Te'ah Hensley is a young botanist, working in the BioMe labs on the other side of the facility. She will help guide you through the ship, as long as you help her with her preparations to get out of the Groomlake!

As you move through the ship, you will find audio logs, and lots of written diaries detailing the crews life on board the ship. You will browse through medical reports, photographs documenting the experiments being carried out on the ship, and uncover what exactly happened that lead to the Groomlake being (mostly) abandoned. System Shocks influence is definitely felt in the security recordings: holographic re-enactments of certain events can be accessed, and watched.​

HR Giger is my favourite artist. My home is like a creepy museum of his work. But generally, I have a large collection of 'art of' books, from Halo, to one on Pixar Short films. The production artists and concept artists that work in AAA games, and Blockbuster films amaze me.

Of these, I would have to say Feng Zhu, Ryan Church, and Raphael Lacoste are right on the top of my list - but its a VERY long list!​

My profession is currently an Architectural Illustrator. It would probably be seen as a marriage between the best and worst parts of Architecture and Advertising, and as anyone who has worked in either field can attest to, deadlines are soul killing things!

You have to be able to produce top quality work as quickly as possible. I've been running a company doing that for 11 years, and in that time we have created a very effective pipeline for creating work quickly.

In my personal work, I take a very similar approach to my professional work, even including a very similar server style setup in my home office.

Working fast, with good results is something that I deal with day to day, so applying it to something like an awesome fantasy project is a dream!​

I think that text is very important to Adventure Games, especially ones on a tight budget. The old adage of a picture being worth a thousand words doesn't really ring true in the world of micro development!

With Adventure Games being so heavily focused on story telling, to not put attention onto the most basic form of story telling we have is criminal!

That said, as an artist, there are things that I can 'show, not tell' much easier than some other developers, so I use that to my advantage. STASIS really provides a happy balance between the two. There is a fair amount of reading in the game, but the text generally serves as a way to augment the story, not necessarily tell it.​

I think that voice acting in RPG's can be rather restrictive, because you often have multiple writers working on those large scale projects, who's scripts have to be locked in at a certain point - sometimes before the game is even in a playable state.

Something like an RPG should allow the designer to remain as fluid as possible, throughout the story - allowing for story changes and switches as the game design progresses.

For characters though I think that there is something magical about having a voice actor bring written words to life. In Adventure Games, where you take control of a character, and not an avatar, this can serve as an additional bond between the player and the character. Where in RPG's you can create that bond through customisation, and really making the character 'your own', I think that Adventure Games have an issue with creating as strong a bond - so having a voice actor can really help in that regard.​

When I first started STASIS, I fully expected to hand the sound design and music on to someone else, but through production I have found that the sound design process is by far my favourite aspect of the experience!

Sound, specifically in the horror genre is extremely important, and I have treated it with the utmost care. I often 'listen' to movies while I work (www.listentoamovie.com is just awesome!), so I know just how powerful sound can be.

Sound also has huge advantages as a small developer. I can add in sound to a scene, adding in detail that isn't really there. Instead of actually having to animate the bones being broken on a cadaver, adding in a sound paints that picture MUCH more effectively than a few extra pixels.​

When I started STASIS I never wanted to put a new spin on the Adventure Game genre - I wanted to create something that truly was in the traditional mould of the games I grew up loving to play.

One thing that I have tried to bring into the game is that element of maturity that I feel became lost with many Adventure Games. The current adventure revival seems to be more focused on capturing the more 'light hearted' aspect of the genre. The players of the genre grew up, and not many of the games grew up with them. I loved Day Of The Tentacle, but as a 30 year old, something like The Dig appeals to me more.​

STASIS is well over halfway complete, with a good chunk of the remaining pieces of the game completed graphically. The final scope of the game, in terms of story and core gameplay won't change with the funding. The game's story, and the environments have been planned and remained locked for a long time now, and I don't want to fall into the trap of 'feature creep', or bloat the storyline for the sake of it.

What will change is the overall polish of the product, as well as how fast I can get it out. Currently, I spend most nights and weekends on the game after a full work day. As I own my own company, sometimes those work days extend into work nights, and weekends are usually only 1 day, or even a half day off. Being able to put all of my energy in STASIS would accelerate the project massively!

The addition of a professionally composed Sound Track is also something I am looking forward to. Having another artists take on the world will be a very interesting experience for me!​

I think that crowdfunding for smaller projects will be around for a long time, but I can't see publishers ever going out of business as a result of it... at least I hope not!

If you look at the size of games like Grand Theft Auto, or Assassins Creed, there is no way that a crowdsourced game could get to that scale - and those are the games that really drive the technology forward. If it wasn't for publisher funding, we would never have the technologies that are now common place in engines like UNITY or Unreal - technologies that allow small developers to keep pushing their craft forward.​

People have been talking about a resurgence of the genre, but I don't know if the genre ever truly 'died'. I think it just didn't grow as rapidly as the others. It still has a HUGE support base, and this has definitely come to light in the past 18 months.

I appreciate the fact that small teams are getting together from all over the world to create these games! Artists from all over the world getting together online, and with just a shared vision, creating something amazing. It really is an awesome time to be involved in game development!​

I would love to see a more open ended and fluid way of actually playing the game. I know that its rich coming from a person who is creating a very linear game, but I know that other designers and teams have the means and manpower to really embrace the open ended nature of story telling that I think Adventure Games offer.

These games are much less reliant on technology, but I would love to see the same level of production design that goes into a game like Mass Effect, or Halo in an Adventure Game. Those concept and production artists are essentially on the same level as major film production, and to see that level applied to an Adventure Game would be amazing!

As for where it 'should' evolve, Adventure Games are almost like a shark... they haven't really changed because they are at the top of their evolutionary life cycle! The minute you begin to incorporate other genre ideas, they get muddied, and start to lose a bit of the 'magic' that makes them. While I don't think that its a bad thing to cross elements of different genre's, it mustn't come at the expense of what makes Adventure Games so special and unique, and that's their almost singularly focused vision of 'Story'.​

Oh man, making a fully fledged CRPG would be amazing! Currently I don't think I have near the experience needed for something like that, but I would love to create some experimental Adventure Games with the same level of freedom that an RPG gives you.

But, if I had the experience, time, and balls of steel, I would definitely visit one of my favourite genres... a Post Apocalyptic world, and then mix it with something strange, like ancient Japan. Roaming Samurai in steam punk style armour, swords and cross bows instead of machine guns and plasma rifles.

But let's first get off the Groomlake... ​