Her Story dev Sam Barlow on how the innovative detective game found an audience

we're here at Pocket Gamer connects in Helsinki if you'd like to introduce yourself I'm Sam Barlow and I recently released the game her story which is available on the App Store it's a game somewhat different game which you have access to a police database video footage all concerning a series of interviews with a woman about the missing husband so it's kind of a police procedural cold case game experience so it is a really different kind of an experience the fact that the narrative isn't linear you can get to well there isn't an ending though it is kind of a circular narrative very groundbreaking I would say in terms of how video games get made especially video game narratives how on earth do you get that

in front of the right people I initially before I kind of start developing the game I knew I wanted to make something in the kind of police procedural space because that felt like that's such a big deal in TV books films not very well represented in games so it felt to me like there was an audience out there for something like this and it just needed the right kind of angle on it so I think with her story once i had this key idea which was a combination of using real life video and the game mechanic being essentially googling the story you type in search words and that returns clips in which they're spoken once i had that idea it felt like that was an idea that was accessible because it was this kind of metaphor people would get everyone Google's everyone uses their phone to search for stuff everyone watches video on their phones and consumes video in a way that is

somewhat nonlinear you know you kind of surf stuff and that's the way people kind of get their information there so it felt like although the game is quite innovative in its structure it felt like actually the wrapper of the crime the police procedural and these kind of simple mechanics would make it very accessible and there was a little part of me as well that felt that if an audience was browsing the App Store or looking at the games website or just you know watching video channels about video games the very fact that we had this aesthetic of the real life video would instantly make it stand out against you know the kind of retro retro pixel look kind of beautiful 2d artwork 3d game graphics just you know seeing this video of a real woman sat in a room talking would instantly pop on a website or they're kind of browsing the App Store and so that I mean that that was as much as I kind of thought about how this game

with fine its audience I need to be honest making the game itself was somewhat of an experiment you know to see can kind of make a game like this will it find an audience where is that audience is it going to be on desktop computers is it going to be on tablets it going to be on phone and you know once it released and I was somewhat lucky but I could pretend it was a deliberate thing I'd released the game the week after e3 so there was this kind of huge vacuum of mutant no one else was announcing games releasing games and doing anything that week because that all happened the last couple weeks so there was a bit of a vacuum and you know just once the game was out and people start to talk about it play it review it it became a kind of mini viral thing and I think naturally because the game has this element of mystery about it has you trying to determine the truth from your own perspective there's a lot to share their a lot of people to talk about so you know that kind of fueled the social media on a buzz around the game and you know back you know the launch

week just had this really good thing where we were trending on twitter we featured on the App Store just created a nice kind of buzz around again so you're talking about word of mouth no this this elusive k-factor idea and talking about the press there are especially within mobile within tablet there is this trend a little bit to think about whether or not the press has that much of an influence anymore obviously you're working in paid is there still a place for the games press within paid specifically on tablets and mobiles it's a really weird things like if you look at the data you can kind of draw the wrong conclusions so you know if you if you look at the sales graphs if you have a big story on a certain website or in the print press I'd lot coverage in newspapers and a couple of TV channels and stuff you you can't always see this noticeable spike like you kind of you know the old days would imagine wow we were the you know game of the month on this website we've got the gold award

here or whatever you'd expect this kind of big spike and you don't see that you know the sales graph is ninety percent the correlating with where you are on the store how big is your banner on this store you know what position are you on the top tens I don't have to scroll to see you're gaining that is how much you're selling but I think what that doesn't show is that kind of built in knowledge of people have seen your game get all this awesome coverage on the kind of games press then when they see you on that store page that kind of click through rate that you know are they going to click on your game oh I recognize this game I read about it somewhere else that I think is this kind of hidden factor which really drives cuz you know I didn't do any kind of paid advertising or any kind of marketing around the game other than speaking to the press and kind of doing shows and things like that so you know that and as well you're obviously that media buzz as well leads to things like getting featured on the App Store which is critical it puts you

you know on the steam store you know it puts you in kind of Valve's head head likes you know there's an awareness around your game I'd go through green light on desktop so you know all these things i think contribute to people just knowing about your game so that when they do see it on the store page there's an extra kind of incentive to actually click through and by the gate there has also in terms of our space been a lot of talk about people moving away from mobile and going more towards steam seeing success there has that been the case with with with this game the thing that I did that I think it's a bit different so it wasn't what people were telling me to do was I released her story simultaneously on Steam pc and mac a couple of other pc wedge stores and on the app store and that was the same day because a lot the logic told us you know launch on one platform first make that work for yourself and then port and kind

of play off that buzz but i think for me you know and whatever device you're playing the game on you're still on the same social networks are still contributing to that overall buzz so for me getting it in front of as many people as possible from day one as well I didn't know saying I didn't know where the audience was going to be so it was important that that initial burst of excitement reach as many people as possible and I think like as of last time I checked the numbers it's a bow and its sales wise it's about sixty percent is the desktop version and forty percent is the mobile version so it's kind of fairly evenly balanced and that's continuing it potentially the kind of App Store version might slightly longer legs but yes so you know that that's a really nice balance for me that you know I think because of the way the game works because it has this kind of accessible mechanic and it's a bit different I think it's been able to work for both those audiences you know it

doesn't feel like it was designed for one over the other it doesn't have that kind of awkward balance so yes it's been a really good strategy for me and the last thing I wanted to ask you about was because the narrative doesn't go through this typical linear goes from this to this to this to this and it focuses very much on the experiences of a woman the narrative has been compared to feminist narratives to some of the more more sort of forward thinking maybe from the 1940s 50s 60s feminist critics and writers and so forth the word that we're writing English literature and so on it around that sort of time first of all was that a was that a deliberate thing and second of all do you feel like it's a risk to make a game that's not simply for the 13 to 17 year old boy demo I think going

into the game I knew that it was a kind of neat proposition anyway which wasn't really an issue for me because I think that's that's the beautiful thing about digital is there is such a huge audience out there that you don't have to be shooting for lowest common denominator you know you can make something that's quite a specific thing and I think in some ways that really helps to have a much more specific proposition and in terms of you know it being called her story and prominently featuring a female character I think that that was something that just arose creatively from the stuff i was looking at reacting to and kind of how my research led me to make this particular game and so there's partly at naive part me that wasn't really thinking that there was anything special or different about it's like I think foremost in my mind was that this was a experimental piece of narrative and that was that was the thing that was

going to turn off teenage boys so yeah I guess a huge amounts of naivety on my part in terms of not worrying about stuff like that and just going this is a cool thing on making and that was coming with focus so you know going into it without really thinking too hard about those ideas