Last week we reviewed the acclaimed Half-Life 2 mod, The Stanley Parable. This week we have the pleasure of sharing a few questions and answers from Stanley's generous and approachable designer, Davey Wreden.

Davey's already done a lot of interviews on Stanley, so we've decided to focus on the development process, and hopefully provide some insight and inspiration for young game designers. We hope you enjoy the interview, and if you have any questions then pop them into the comments and we'll see if we can persuade Davey to stop by and answer them for you.

How was the concept of Stanley born? Do you have a systematic creative process or is it just chance? Did you start by messing with a tool, or did you choose a tool to meet a design need?

I'll be honest, I have no idea where any of my ideas come from.

TSP was the result of a series of coinciding events. Playing games like Metal Gear Solid, Portal, Braid, and Bioshock made me want to explore what kinds of stories games could tell if we changed the 'mechanic' or removed it altogether.

I happened to also play Dear Esther and Radiator around this time and was thus turned onto the Source SDK, which I investigated further and found it to be surprisingly accessible.

These events all happened in the same space, making it hard for me to figure out what exactly came first, except that I knew I wasn't very good at mapping so I wanted to take on a project that would be relatively simple.

I've always liked unreliable narrators, so the idea of a disembodied voice and empty hallways sounded easy enough to pull off.

Up to this point development was very circumstantial, the combination of random influences and resources coming into my life. But once I had this idea for a narrator that you could disobey, suddenly the game began to write itself.

I honestly had no idea where it was going when I set out to make it, I just began to extrapolate outward from this one idea. For about two months I pounded out the design, thinking of every idea I could that would mess with a player's expectations of how stories in video games are supposed to play out, wanting first and foremost to surprise my players. But like I said, the game seemed to write itself, and even to this day I still see new things in it that I didn't see back then.

My creative process is half me working really hard and half random influences that take me in unexpected directions. So I can explain the series of events that led to the game being made, but it's hard to tell you why exactly they work as well as they seem to.

What was your process for designing the levels?

I sketched out the layout of the map first.

I think very broadly, so I wanted to first imagine what kind of experience each playthrough would offer the player and how they would relate to the broader game, and from there I actually wrote it out.

Like I said, first and foremost my question was "how will this surprise the player?" I did all the writing a year and a half ago, but I just recently found my old original sketches of the game. They're back home in the States right now, but I'll see if I can have someone pull them out and scan them.

I also found one of the word documents that I brainstormed some of the monologues on, for example the narrator's speech during the timer countdown and the female narrator's lines. I wrote at least four times as much as is in the final version, and looking back there's actually some pretty cool content that I didn't use.

I definitely start broadly and then narrow it down.

Early draft of a map for TSP, reflecting Davey's original conception of Stanley as "a lusty pirate on a quest for bounty!"

How did you go about teaching yourself Source? How long till you started to feel competent?

I still don't feel competent, haha.

I learned it by downloading the tools, then going to online message boards and the Source SDK Documentation Wiki. Those are literally the only resources available to teach yourself Hammer since Valve doesn't actually support it.

This was very frustrating, so I would just power through until I came to an issue I couldn't resolve, then go to the message boards to get it resolved. Some issues never got resolved actually, so I just left them unfinished, not really thinking anyone would actually play the game.

The game took two years to develop, going solo. What was your work schedule like on it? Was it your full-time gig? Did you just work on it in spare hours?

My answer to the previous question should explain a lot about my work schedule. I would work for months at a time until I came to a problem that I couldn't figure out, get frustrated, quit for a few months, then eventually convince myself to try again and pick development back up.

I probably only spent 8-10 actual months on development. I was in college at the time and my major afforded me a lot of free time, so I just worked on it whenever I was free and able to convince myself that the game was in any way worth finishing. Those two things did not always overlap.

You've said the game felt dead to you after working on it for so long. What made you keep going when you felt like you were working on crap? Why didn't you walk away?

I honestly don't know. Looking back, it shouldn't have worked. I didn't collaborate with anyone, I didn't have anyone else's support to motivate me, I didn't really know what the game was, I left a lot of bugs in the game.

All I can chalk it up to is that I have some latent reflex that prevented me from giving up on it altogether, perhaps it comes from my love of games or my belief in what I was doing, but by the end, I was only working on it just to have it done and off my chest.

Fortunately, I can say that the response to the game has given my work new life and game design is currently the most exciting and magical thing in my life. So it's a Disney ending after all.

Two. Years. You could build a REAL dead-end office and mind-control complex in less time than that.

Why did you do a film degree and not a game degree? Why did you make a game and not a film?

At the beginning of college I thought I wanted to go into film, so I decided to give film a shot.

Turns out I like film quite a bit, but not as much as my classmates, and after two years I was certain that I didn't want to deal with the film people nor the industry. However, I'm very grateful for the exposure to new ideas and individuals that film school brought me, as well as a better understanding of what I DIDN'T want to do.

Going to film school helped me realize that my real passion was gaming. And I actually made several films that deal with similar issues that TSP did, but none of them caused a splash. I suppose that has a lot to do with why I love gaming, the gaming industry still gets excited about things! We're young, there's so much more that's new and interesting. The most exciting and incredible things that happen in the film industry these days have to do with keeping it from dying.

I'm very happy that I've gotten to work in a medium where TSP can get the kind of tremendous response and love that it's gotten, that is what motivates me to keep working on games as much as anything.

We all go into new projects with a vague fantasy of fame and reward. What did you hope would happen when you finished Stanley? What did happen? Was it worth the effort?

Initially, all I hoped was that a few people who were better at mapping than I would want to team up and that we would make more games like TSP. I had planned to build a resume over time that would get attention from a development studio, but TSP turned out to be the entire portfolio!

That was completely unexpected, the response has blown me away by every standard imaginable. Like you said, everyone wants these things, but we all temper our expectations. What ended up happening was not just that TSP has been successful, it's entered a kind of cultural discussion about video games and narrative. To me that's on a different plane of success, an anomaly that shouldn't have happened yet somehow did.

The fact that I've now been placed on this game design path that I'm so happy and excited about is almost scary in how little I planned for it. It was definitely worth the effort, but it still feels way too much like a dream.

You've become by game standards quite famous and successful. What did you have to forsake to reach that point?

I got into this backwards.

Many people who become successful follow a dream through all of its difficulties and trials and emerge successful for the experience of having labored so hard. I worked hard, but I had no idea what I was working toward.

I was actually pretty depressed at the time because I was trying to enter a lot of different fields, working on projects whose focus or intent was not really clear to me. I even thought that game design was dead to me, and by the time I finished TSP I was working on something completely different.

It's hard to say if all the work I did culminated in TSP's success or if TSP succeeded in spite of my random stumbling in and out of projects and ideas. To this day I really have no idea where my work is going, but I think that's good, because it means I'm going to continue to surprise myself, and then in turn whatever audience I'm serving.

So what I've given up is knowing what I'm doing, the certainty of following a specific vision or of having a specific goal. That means a lot of fear and stress about my future, but it opens the door for far more interesting things to happen.

Maybe I'll never have another successful game again in my life, but I would rather be surprised by what I do than know predictably that every single piece I work on will turn out a certain way.

How much time do you spend playing games these days? Is there anything you're looking forward to playing?

Well, unfortunately I left all my consoles back in the States [Davey's moved to Melbourne to work at the Mana Bar] so I'm a little short on games at the moment. But most of the games I play these days are smaller indie titles; I find that most of the time when I sit down to play a AAA title I find myself bored and unmotivated to continue.

Lately I've been really into Binding of Isaac, Jamestown, VVVVVV, and a handful of quirky games that feel to me like a fresh experience. Although I'd definitely love to spend some time with Uncharted 3, I'm really excited about Skyward Sword and Bioshock Infinite, and I have no idea what my social life is going to look like once Diablo 3 comes out...

What about other media consumption? Do you read novels, watch movies, TV, listen to music…?

Games are really my passion, so I certainly consume more of them than anything. But being well-rounded is also important to me, so I'm always trying to make time for new experiences.

Anyone who's played TSP can understand my love of Charlie Kaufman and Chris Nolan films, and Jason Reitman became a recent favorite of mine as well.

I love anime, especially great TV anime like Death Note and Cowboy Bebop, and I've been trying to pick up more books lately. I just finished Portnoy's Complaint, which was fantastic.

And I've been pretty into the underground-indie/electro music scene that's on the rise these days. Melbourne is a great area for that kind of scene, which is wonderful.

I also just spend a lot of time wandering around in cities looking at architecture, getting a feel of the sense of space and the people in that place, eating whatever delicious food I can find. I simply love any media or space that communicates an experience, especially if that experience feels new to me.

Charlie Kaufman's Being John Malkovich. An early draft began with the lines, "Sit. Sit. Sit. Die. Die. Die."

How do you balance the lure of great games, movies, books - with the discipline of creative work? Do you have any struggles maintaining your working routine?

Because of the recent success of TSP I'm just now transitioning into a real game design work schedule, so it's still coming together.

At the moment though my creative work is what keeps me focused since I don't have a lot of other obligations on my table (and a lack of gaming consoles, haha). I'm very happy that my work is so exciting to me that I actively want to do it instead of having to force myself to (most of the time).

But since I just moved across the world, I'm finding new jobs, doing creative game work, finding new social groups, I expect that my balance between these things will shift a lot in the near future. I always feel a little off when the right balance between work/play/exploration isn't there, so I've still got a ways to go, but I'm hopeful that the right balance isn't too far off.

What's next?

My life is very much in transition at the moment, but working on new games has helped keep me stable.

I'm working on the TSP remake, which I'm extremely excited about and can't wait to show people.

But really what I hope that transitions into is a legitimate work environment where I can do game design full time. I hope not just to form a studio, but to actually provide a flow of content over time that people interact with day to day to day instead of once every few years.

So I'm writing the next game that will come after TSP, but I'm also trying to design content that will delight people in between the release of those games, content related to the games themselves or that stand on its own.

In this sense it's about delivering on random and serendipitous ideas that I and my collaborators think up all the time in the course of our work. There are many cool stories that I'm excited about telling, but also just simple experiences that are fun and that challenge you.

More than anything I want my audience to be surprised, if I can deliver that in any way then I'm happy. I wish I could say I knew exactly what that meant or what it will look like, but really I'm just making this up as I go along!