Frogwares explains how The Sinking City helped shape Sherlock Holmes Chapter One

All told, Frogwares has developed a dozen games and is in the process of finishing up its lucky number 13. How has the studio evolved in its development process and products over the past two decades or so?

Kobylinskyi: Looking back at the last 21 years, it is insane how much we evolved. Not just as a studio, but as people, too. We needed to evolve based on external things that were happening, such as technology changing, consumer tastes developing, and going in different directions (3D graphics, preference for maturity, open worlds, adoption of consoles, new type of players), and, of course, the mentality of the people within the industry changing too—we do not crunch on our games; it is something we feel strongly about. Seeing how tech has leapt in power and functionality is astounding. It is so much easier and quicker now to create high-quality products. The speed of change on that front is mind-blowing. 

The other thing that dictated change is ourselves, the need to get better at making games, both personally and as a collective. You might say we were an internal agent for change, too. One of the things that we wanted to do is be quicker and more agile as a team. So over the years, we worked on implementing processes that allowed us to be more efficient with the tools that we have. When the pandemic hit, and we needed to go remote, this attitude helped us to transition to an all-remote team. We're good at adapting to the situation, like a microorganism inside a volcano ready to evolve.

We also started to learn new sides of the business, too. We’ve started to become a self-published studio, which means we had to pick up other skills and know-how. Marketing, sales, business development: these are some of the new skills that we added to our studio’s skill tree. 

We are becoming wiser every day, but we still have that touch of naivety that helps us create those little bits of individuality, of Frogwares-ness inside our games.

Why no Watson and how significantly did that impact the design of the game?

Kobylinskyi: Sherlock wasn’t always best friends with Watson. However, we do have a different companion for Sherlock this time around, his best friend Jon.

I guess having no Watson can make some players feel like a little piece of familiarity is missing. However, Jon is also a smart character, very observant, with his own moral compass. We hope that players will warm to Jon as much as we have.

Are there previous Arthur Conan Doyle stories or other literature that inspired the story or setting of Chapter One?

Kobylinskyi: Original Doyle stories are definitely an inspiration to us. After all, we have to have some sort of a similarity to the original character on which our games are based. If we go too far with our own interpretation of Sherlock, we lose the essence of the character, the reasons why people have fallen in love with him in the first place. So, Doyle’s original works are very much a guide block, a benchmark to our stories.

We also get inspired by other pieces of media: movies, other games, and books. It’s hard not to consume all of these creative works and not be influenced by them in some way. We also get inspiration from our own life stories. We remember what it was like to be young and arrogant, thinking you know it all.

What inspirations does Sherlock Holmes Chapter One take from Frogwares’ previous title, The Sinking City?

Kobylinskyi: On the surface, the open world and the no-hand-holding investigation mechanic if you go a little bit deeper with the main character’s troubling mind. With the open world, we wanted to make the island of Cordona feel a bit more alive, with its own districts and people inside of them. We wanted players to feel a social divide in this paradise. To see that depending on where you were born, your life can take a different direction. Wherever there are those that have, there will be the have-nots. We wanted players to feel that through the world that they play in.

We also evolved our no-hand-holding investigation mechanic, which aims to wake up that intuition in players. No quest markers, no objectives; just follow the clues and leads. We also added a new disguise mechanic. By changing your appearance, you’ll be able to gather information from people who perhaps might have not been so keen to share their secrets with you if you looked a different way. A barman at a local sailors’ club might be more willing to give you info on someone's whereabouts if you came dressed as one of the regulars. However, show up in some aristocratic get-up and the only thing you might receive is the directions to the exit. It’s another element that we introduced to make people get into the mindset of a detective.

What elements of Unreal Engine did you find most useful in bringing to life your vision for Chapter One?

Kobylinskyi: Among all the other tools that Unreal provides to make quality games, on this particular project, we used Sequencer extensively in order to provide the highest-quality cinematics for SHCO. It’s a really good editor, and it allowed us to create quality cinematics, cutscenes, and dialogues. For a story-driven game like ours, it’s a godsend. It helped us raise the bar in that area.

Is there any particular gameplay or visual elements of your game’s design you’d like to call out to explain how it was achieved? If so, please do.

Kobylinskyi: One of the things worth noting is our new dialogue system that we created inside Unreal Engine. It was first used in The Sinking City and became a stepping stone for a new, enhanced tool. It takes a multitude of previously prepared camera, light, and animation presets and automatically applies them to spoken lines in accordance with certain tags, assigned to words. These tags can be anger, frustration, joy, disagreement, and so on, and they help the system identify the emotional tone of the conversation and apply the correct presets that fit that tone.

There is the main animation, idle, that is different for each character archetype, and on top of that idle animation, the system automatically adds these specific presets, that includes gesturing, color correction, eye movement, lighting, and even montage. We have probably hundreds of dialogue lines in the game, and this system saved us a lot of time.