Telling Lies creator explains how the project came together

I'm in the process of playing Telling Lies right now, and one thing that keeps popping into my head is how insanely difficult it must have been to put this game together. The FMV mystery-thriller follows the lives of multiple characters, and the story is pieced together through various clips that you discover via a computer system. I can't imagine how stressful it was to create something like this!

Creator Sam Barlow is no stranger to this kind of gameplay, having worked with FMV before in Her Story. That said, in an interview with Nintendo Life, Mr. Barlow explains just how much more difficult this title was to create.

The process I kinda developed across Her Story and Telling Lies was to spend a lot of time up front on the research, the character’s lives, back stories, etc. so that when we get into the plot of the game itself we have enough layers built up to support players really digging into it. So that in any given moment there are two or three things happening at once in people’s minds.

With Telling Lies it was important to carefully map out the main characters’ lives over the two years of the story, ensure those stories sparked off each other and were well balanced against each other. I can tell you what each of them was doing for every day of that period! Then we write the scenes and really just do that from the characters’ perspectives, trying to create interestingly authentic, organic moments. Finally, we then have a stage where the computer analyzes the script and points out balancing issues. Scenes with no good searches to find them, words that are over or under used. We iterate and iterate from here, tweaking scenes until the computer thinks things are fine.