About Wales Interactive
Wales Interactive is a video games developer and publisher. It’s been around for over a decade, the last seven of which have involved working on interactive movies where players choose the narrative path. The company’s work is available on consoles, mobile, PC, Steam and Mac.
Video games are our bread and butter.
I wanted to stay in Wales after finishing university here, but there wasn’t much of a video games industry in Wales at the time. After meeting David Banner, we decided to set up our own company, where we enjoy creating interactive experiences, video games and entertaining people.
Our Clwstwr project was about interactive movies, an area we’d worked in for years.
When we first started making interactive movies, we identified a gap in the market: while interactive movie games had been big in the 1980s and 1990s, with games like Night Trap and The X Files Game, there was very little between then and around 2013. Taking advantage of Wales’ strong TV and film industry, we wanted to explore the potential for similar growth and prominence for the interactive movie industry here.
We met someone at gamescom in Cologne who shared our interest in interactive movies. This chance meeting turned into a working relationship and then an incredibly successful interactive movie, The Bunker. There were a small number of companies trying to make interactive movies, but they were struggling to make their games work. Each company was doing things slightly differently, resulting in unique problems or teething points. We took them under our wing to help them finish their games. Afterwards, we realised how much easier it’d be for the industry if there was a standardised way to create interactive movies.
We had some prior R&D experience from developing a tool called WIST.
WIST (Wales Interactive Scripting Tool) enables you to write interactive narratives with no prior knowledge of the technology. It streamlines the entire process and creates standardisation in an area where there wasn’t any. To put it into perspective, we've gone from publishing one game or interactive movie a year before we made WIST to having six in production at any given moment.
Our Clwstwr project came from our want to get our interactive movies to the masses.
Previously, we were offering our interactive movies by direct download (where a player downloads the entire movie, rather than using a physical copy). This worked, but it took a while to download a game and sometimes required a lot of system space on the player’s console.
We wondered if it’d be possible to simplify this by allowing players to stream the interactive movies. It’d be much like you can stream from Netflix or Amazon Prime, but from a hub where people can access lots of games.
We received around £90,000 of funding from Clwstwr to explore our idea.
The main brief was to figure out how to make interactive movies more accessible to people.
One of our areas of exploration hoped to solve the download lag issues; we wanted to see if there was a way to set up the hub so that players only have to download a snippet of the interactive movie then stream the rest. It’d get around having to perform large downloads onto your console, and it’d speed up the wait time between choosing to acquire a game and playing it. We also wanted to explore how we could ensure a consistently high video quality and rich experience for players when streaming.
The early stage involved researching what currently existed.
We wanted to know what was out there and who was making it. Alongside this, we started defining what this concept of an interactive movie hub would be. We worked with our Clwstwr producer Greg to come up with plans for how to structure our R&D, asking ourselves questions and exploring options for ways forward. After a few iterations of the hub, we came to the conclusion that streaming would probably be the best option.
We approached Netflix and Amazon, big players in streaming, about collaborating.
We asked them if they'd be interested in us doing some tests with them. Amazon seemed like the more suitable pathway of the two for us; they were quite open to the idea of an interactive offering. We felt confident because we knew we’d be able to learn a lot along the way. Amazon’s streaming technology runs on AWS hosting and so we knew it would be capable of handling what we wanted to do.
Our tech teams worked out how to put an interactive movie on the Amazon Fire stick.
It took a lot of time and iteration to get videos as seamless as possible with no audio or visual lags, but I'm pleased to say we actually got the prototype out there that worked really well. Once it was out there, we set about gathering feedback and doing more testing.
The reaction to it was simply okay, which wasn’t ideal!
That said, we think this is more down to the fact that the Amazon Fire stick doesn’t have a user base large enough for us to do what we really wanted to. We’re not too disappointed, because our Clwstwr project has created a relationship between us and Amazon, which is great, and we’ve shown that streaming interactive movies can work. I'm sure we'll go back to them in the future to see about putting an interactive movie on Amazon Prime.
We feel really happy with the outcome and the potential future for us in streaming interactive movies. I believe interactive is going to be at the forefront of everything in the future. It’s nice to be at the spearhead of it, even if it does feel like stepping into the unknown sometimes.