Dusk HD started years back as just a reskin of weapons and enemies as a way to showcase the Dusk SDK's functionality. Over the years, it gradually and kind of unintentionally turned into a full remaster covering the entire game, which now gives fans a different way to experience the game. At the moment, there are no plans to use it as the basis for something bigger, but with New Blood, you never know exactly where things will go.
In a sense, yeah. A standalone polished-up version of The Pony Factory will be released in the near future, and since 2024 is the 10-year anniversary of my game, The Moon Sliver, I keep thinking about doing a big anniversary update that would bring the game up to current standards as far as things like compatibility, settings, etc go.
With DUSK HD now released and a separate, sort-of remastered release of Squirrel Stapler currently available, are there plans for a similar treatment for your other titles?
It's been awesome. There are a lot of moving parts, so I'm not always in the loop about everything, but he's gone above and beyond to keep me involved and informed whenever possible, to the point where I was invited to the set for the duration of principle photography and have been consulted during post-production for all sorts of stuff, from edits to music to a few rewrites and even some special effects. It also helps that Mark and I are mostly on the exact same page when it comes to the general vibe and vision of the movie, and even when we disagree on the minutia, it's easy to come to an understanding because, ultimately, we both want the same thing: a really good horror film. It's much the same as when Dave Oshry, Andrew Hulshult, and I were working on Dusk, where there were plenty of disagreements, but it wasn't too difficult to all get on the same page because the main goal was always making good art, regardless of which ideas stuck and which ideas didn't.
Probably the biggest difference between the Iron Lung movie and the games I usually work on is just the number of people involved. Iron Lung is actually a pretty small film, and its creation still involves many, many times more voices contributing to it than I've ever worked with in games. I get the impression that managing people and organizing workflows and stuff like that is as much part of the job of directing creative decisions. That's also true of team-based game development, but it just seems to be so much more so in film.
I think Dusk could work as a sort of grimy action/horror film, but next on my personal list would be Squirrel Stapler. I think a lot of the basic concepts and the tone could make for a really weird and unsettling horror film if done right.
Is there any other title from your catalog that you would love to see turned into a movie?
There isn't much to share YET, apart from the fact that it's modeled heavily off of the Monolith game Condemned: Criminal Origins, with a lot of atmosphere/tone references taken from Rockstar's Manhunt.