Last month, a new game from Night School Studio and Telltale Games called Mr. Robot:1.51exfiltrati0n.ipa [$2.99] (or simply Exfiltration for sanity's sake) made a big splash when it hit the App Store. Designed as a companion experience to the first season of the award-winning Mr. Robot TV series, Exfiltration put you in the role of a hapless citizen who happens to find a smartphone on the sidewalk and, upon opening and investigating the phone, gets sucked into a crazy hacker plot. The game plays out entirely through a faux text messaging application interface as you discover new information and plot your way through by communicating with all sorts of people, some who are actual characters from the show.
It plays pretty similarly to something like the Lifeline series, but one important area where Exfiltration has received a ton of praise, including in our own review, is in the way they made the conversations in the game feel so natural and believable. Lifeline and its ilk are great, but it's hard to shake the feeling that you're simply talking to a computer who is programmed to pretend to be a real person. In Exfiltration, it feels like you're talking to actual people, and the way they converse and their mannerisms are all very believable. So how did they do it" In a nice feature over at Gamasutra, Night School's Adam Hines and Kevin Riach go into their design process in making the conversations in Exfiltration and how they went about making them seem so real.
Night ...