Telling Lies is the new video game from Sam Barlow, creator of Her Story and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. An investigative thriller game with non-linear storytelling, Telling Lies revolves around a cache of secretly recorded video conversations. It stars Logan Marshall-Green, Alexandra Shipp, Kerry Bishé and Angela Sarafyan.

How does it work?

Telling Lies sits you in front of an anonymous laptop loaded with a stolen NSA database full of footage. The footage covers two years in the intimate lives of four people whose stories are linked by a shocking incident. Explore the database by typing search terms, watch the clips where those words are spoken and piece together your story.

Unlike anything you've played before, Telling Lies is an intimate and intense experience. A game where you decide the truth.

What did I do?

After working with Sam Barlow to bring the multi-BAFTA winning Her Story to Android devices, I was excited when Sam told me about his next idea: Telling Lies, at the time it already had a publisher in Annapurna Interactive and Sam wanted me to help him create the game.

Whilst Sam was busy writing the story I got the software side of the project ready, creating the Desktop that you see here, with a system of Windows that could be moved around and resized, a collection of Icons that could me moved around the Desktop, into file folders and used to launch applications. As well as the main Retina application that contained the gameplay loop, a version of Solitaire and a suite of other applications for editing notes or settings and even debug applications for examining the progression and music systems.

By the time filming started I'd broadly completed all the functionality for the system and took a break to fly to LA and watch some of the filming. It absolutely blew me away, the attention to detail was amazing and although already convinced, I understood then how amazing it was going to me. I flew back to the UK to eagerly await the new videos. I fixed any remaining issues, added lots of polish and added the systems which enabled it to be translated into eleven languages!

Player Information and Statistics – View your mood, health and player level. See how much more experience you need to move to the next level and check how many Currants you have in your purse. Watch your character animate in all their finery and tap the screen to make them jump up and down. Careful you don’t make them angry though!

Inventory – View your current inventory including all of your bags and their content. Sort the inventory in a variety of ways; by slot, by category and alphabetically! See the number of items in each slot and get an idea of how much everything could be worth if you wanted to sell. When you do decide to sell you can do it right from your inventory, just tap and  update count and price.

Auctions – Using Auction House you can view the latest auctions or search for an item by category. You can see the latest list of items you have up for auction and for all auctions you can see the seller and get a description of the item.

The main feature I was responsible for implementing on MotoGP '07 for Xbox 360 was the online Pink Slip mode. The game already had a fantastic system for customising your bike, you could store multiple bikes that you may have bought or been awarded in your garage, and you could paint them different colours, fit different upgrades and fit logos over sections of the fairing. What could we do to make more of a feature of the bike customisation? Well, you don't know what you've got till you lose it, so how about you get to gamble your bike with real people over Xbox Live?

So, I was tasked with creating the online Pink Slip mode. Online players would be able to challenge other Live players in a one on one race for victory. If you crossed the line first you would win your opponents bike for your own garage, if you lost the race your bike would be gone forever.

After thinking this over for a while I realised the main issue with this is, put simply: cheating. How do I stop people from just quitting out of the race as soon as they knew they were going to lose? I could remove their bike for quitting the race or pulling the network cable, but the bike was stored in the save game on the Xbox 360 hard drive, so what could I do if they just switched off the box?

The ideal solution would require a dedicated server, when the players agreed to the terms of the race and started the game you would remove the bike details from their garages and save their games. The bike details would then be held on the server which would be responsible for deciding the winner at the end of the race and awarding them with both bikes. This way you have removed the bikes from the respective players saved games before they had even started the race and they no longer have the opportunity to cheat. Unfortunately, as is often the case, we didn't have the budget to implement the feature in this way and it also seemed unreasonably harsh to punish a player by removing their carefully customised bike if they had legitimately lost their network connection during the race, through no fault of their own.

It's a tricky problem but maybe one way to solve it would be to hold the bikes on the server, and allow a rematch whether a player had legitimately lost their connection or not. There would be some design issues to solve, for example what would happen if when a player regained connection their opponent was now in a another race? However, I'm sure it would lead to a nicer experience for the player.