Firewatch report

Report on the creators of Firewatch

Logo

promotional art for the game

"A controlled burn of brilliance" -IGN

 The Creators of the game Firewatch are  small but scrappy company in San Francisco, California who set out to make games about "interesting people in Fascinating places, There first ever game was Firewatch which was made in collaboration with a software company from Portland Oregon called Panic Inc. the creators of the game all work in the a team called Campo Santo, which consists of 14 people.

The team and what they do.

• Jake Rodkin is a designer and creative writer (credits: The walking Dead, Tales of Monkey Island, Poker Night at the inventory,Puzzle Agent, and Sam∧ Max .)
• Sean Vanaman is a designer and writer (credits: The walking Dead, Tales of Monkey Island, Poker Night at the inventory, and Puzzle Agent.)
• Jane Ng is a environment and lighting artist (credits: The Godfather, Spore, Stacking, Brutal legend, and Return Of the King)
• Chris Remo is a designer, developer, and composer who did music for games like Gone home and Thirty  and Co-wrote The cave and Battlefront Rogue One:X-wing VR Mission.
• James Benson is an animator and designer (credits: Ori, Fable 3, Blind Forest, and project Milo)
• Ben Burbank is a system and Graphics programmer, who recently was the lead programmer at double fine, and started his career sports game for the PlayStation 2 at EA.
• Aubrey Hesselgren is a game play programmer, Aubrey is well known for his Brink's parkour systems, Super Meat Boy Galaxy,and has been working on the The world is Flat between his freelancing gigs.
• Gabe McGill is a producer who has a lot of roles, business admin, and a all round useful person, Firewatch is his first credited game.
• Kathy McElwee helps with the accounting and finance remotely form Portland. She used to be CFO (Chief financial officer) for 3DO and Telltale Games.

Over people credited are 

• Olly Moss
• Patrick Ewing
• Will Armstrong
• Nels Anderson
• Paolo Surricchio.

I went and did a research to find an interview with the people who work in Campo Santo and found one with designer,developer, and composer of Firewatch Chris Remo, where he was asked questions about the setup he uses. What hardware does he use? he said it all depended on what project he was doing, but if he was doing it for making a game he would use exclusively use windows machines, he also runs a podcast show with Idle thumbs (as he co-runs the network). Chris and the other Idle thumbs have been creating a new recording studio which will be shared with Campo Santo which the based of of the sequence conference office from tinker tailor solider spy. "..we are obsessed with it and thought it would be hilarious."

what software does he use? he used Unity engine to create Firewatch which he said was "..a pretty full service game development environment". They augmented it with  various plug-ins and middleware which included Wwise, which is an extremely powerful sound engine,which he used to implement all audio and music playback, and they use Perforce for version control.

What would his dream setup be? When he was asked this question  he answered with " I honestly fell that I am not enough of trained professional in any of my fields to know what my dream setup is supposed to be." he said that whenever he would look at a composer, designer or a podcast persons set up he would think it was impressively better then his. In an ideal world he said have a completely isolated and soundproof room at his house where he would be able to play and record music.

"I always, always want want is for my computer screens to be bigger, higher resolution, and greater in number,Also I hate track pads.

Even the nice Apple ones on MacBooks?

Yes they are all bad. Here is my dream setup: always having a mouse and never a track pad."

Bibliography
https://www.camposanto.com/about/

https://usesthis.com/interviews/chris.remo/