Beacon Pines Is a Narrative Adventure Where Everything Can Change With a Single Word

ign.com:

In Beacon Pines, the story and decisions made are mapped out on a tree, showing branching paths from single moments that changed the course of the story. For developer Matt Meyer, that was true in real life, too. His path to developing Beacon Pines began with a single, simple, consequential decision made years ago, almost on a whim.

“I worked a corporate job for five years or so in Chicago, and sort of just snapped one day,” Meyer says. “It wasn't really the job's fault. It was the traffic. I was in my car an hour and a half every day…I hate traffic so much. So I just snapped one day. I was like, ‘I'm moving,’ and I moved to Austin, and didn't really have a plan.”

Sans plan, Meyer was hoping to write music, specifically for games. After a bit of noodling around, though, he realized if he made a game, he could put his own music in that. He eventually teamed up with Brent Calhoun and Ilse Harting, and thus Beacon Pines was born…as an RPG rhythm battler.

“It looks cool, and it sounds cool, and the idea was kind of cool, but we never quite found the thing about the design that clicked,” he says. “I tried a lot of different ways of doing it, and it was a functional game, but it didn't have a spark.”

But what stood out to Meyer and the others were the characters that Harting had created, especially Luka: a little deer creature. So the team took a risk: they threw out everything that wasn’t working, and started from almost scratch, focusing on the characters and environments first.

“Which was scary, because it was not only a bunch of work thrown away, but it was like we threw away our hook,” Meyer continues. “A rhythm battle arena game…sounds cool to people. And you tell them, we're making a narrative game. They're like, ‘Okay, but