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Brave the stormy seas in emotional tale Will: Follow the Light
J
John Walker
It’s immediately very obvious that Will: Follow the Light’s developer, TomorrowHead Studio, was born out of a CG studio. The game begins with you at the helm of a sailboat fighting against an extraordinarily rough sea, and it looks incredible. The surging waves, sometimes looming over you as high as buildings, are breathtaking, as you wrestle with ropes and booms in an effort to survive. It’s also immediately obvious that there’s a passion for sailing behind this game too.
“Many of us on the team have been fascinated by sails since childhood,” says TomorrowHead Creative Director Roman Novikov. “For me personally, the biggest influence was a sailing trip I took around the Azores exactly ten years ago. I still remember that sail under the moonlight; I think it will stay with me forever.”
But it wasn’t just the romance that affected Novikov. “Another moment from that journey changed me in many ways,” he tells us. “Just imagine: you are in the middle of the ocean, there is no one around, and beneath you is an abyss.” After several days with no connection to the outside world, he explains, “all that’s left is to have a conversation with yourself—a deep conversation, and in my case, a very difficult one.”
The realism of the waves also comes from direct experience. Using the Unreal Engine and a plugin called FluidFlux, TomorrowHead then built their own interaction systems to allow for more realistic splashes and sounds, and then made separate tools for creating those enormous waves. “All of these systems together required very careful and precise tuning,” Novikov says, “especially in combination with the engine’s physics. We also spent many hours studying references, including trips to the real ocean, to achieve believable water behavior and realistic movement of objects on its surface.”
This cold open ends abruptly and unclearly. Instead, you find yourself in a cabin near a lighthouse with a list of chores to complete, and that’s before the mudslide changes everything. In the meantime, you need to run checks on the electrics and make sure everything’s in working order around and inside the lighthouse. The building is a motif throughout the game, and clearly signifies something deeper. “For us,” says Novikov, “lighthouses are about mystery and symbolism. At certain moments in life, each of us finds ourselves walking through complete darkness, in the middle of a storm—and in those moments we need that light more than anything. That feeling, that meaning, is what we tried to capture in every chapter of Will: Follow the Light.”
Will’s story is not an easy one. His estranged father is back in town, his long-time work colleague is about to retire, and he’s attempting to raise his young son after the death of his wife. When the mudslide hits the small harbor town, Will has no idea where his father and son have gone, but at least learns that they were together. Seeking them is the impetus behind Will’s constant forward motion through disaster, dangerous oceans, and seemingly even more sinister threats.
Something that really stands out among all this is the quality of the voice acting, and most especially that of the child. In games, male children are often voiced by adult women, and it doesn't always work well, so it’s striking that Will casts an actual young child in the role.
“The voice acting was not easy at all,” says Novikov. “It took many months of work and a lot of rewritten material. At first we recorded an adult actor for some of the child’s lines because we were worried it would be extremely difficult to get right, but deep down we really wanted to capture the real emotions of a child.”
The studio thus made the decision to throw caution to the stormy winds and go against the grain. “In the end, it turned out to be much easier than we expected. We wanted honest, genuine emotions, and no one can deliver that better than children themselves.”
A genuinely heartfelt story appears to have been the core driving factor behind Will: Follow the Light’s development. TomorrowHead began with the goal to “convey emotion,” and believe they’ve achieved this—so much so that Novikov reports there are sections of the game that still bring him to tears. “Because this is our very first game,” he tells us, "and we had no previous experience making one, we didn’t expect Will himself to become so real to us. Over time, he stopped feeling like just a character we had written. He became someone we all understood, someone we cared about—and in a strange way, someone we genuinely believe could have existed.”
You can wishlist Will: Follow the Light now on Epic Games Store.