Q+A: Chris Olsen, writer and director, Somerville

We previously spoke to Chris Olsen at the beginning of 2022, for E368’s cover feature. As the year draws to a close, we pick things up right on the eve of Somerville’s release. The passing of time quickly becomes a theme of the conversation, Olsen having started work on this project back in early 2014, when he was working as an animator in the film industry. After spending so many years developing it, he is now in the process of letting go, he confesses, and of anticipating the reaction to a game he fully expects to be “polarising”.

After working on this game for so long, initially on your own and then with a growing team, how was the final stretch of development?

It was really tough, the last year. I’m normally the person that, when everyone’s panicking, I’m quite level-headed, and I have a lot of energy to keep going and going. Making a game, especially over this amount of time, it really pushed me to the limit of what I can tolerate. I’ve spent the last year not only working on the game but trying to look at it not from the inside out; trying to change my brain to look at it as a player. I think if I saw this over someone’s shoulder, it would draw me in, and I think I would sit and watch a little bit, and then I’d probably be like, “Don’t spoil that – Iwant to play it”. And that’s kind of kept me sane throughout the whole process, just holding on to that idea. A lot of people aren’t going to see the things that you see, and some people are going to see the things you didn’t. I’ve had to learn to not be so controlling over the over the process – it’s really difficult to give it over.