One studio working on a Silent Hill knows nothing about the other projects in development in the series
, by Thibaut
For several years now, Konami has been rolling out one project after another in the Silent Hill franchise. Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill f, and Silent Hill: Townfall were all released in just four years. To pull off this feat, the Japanese publisher had to enlist several different studios.
Jon McKellan, the founder of Screen Burn and director of Silent Hill: Townfall, revealed during a recent panel discussion that his team was kept in the dark about the other games in the series that were in development. Konami deliberately kept the developers in the dark to avoid interference in the creative process.
"We found out about a lot of those projects when everyone else did, when they announced them. Okamoto-san, who’s the series producer, was very keen to not let projects influence each other, and not compromise too much.
And the understanding, I think, was that he and his team would be reviewing everything from all the games, and if they saw something where, you know, something we were doing was maybe a little bit too close to something else then they would step in and say ‘you might want to course-correct here'.
They’d not necessarily tell us what it was, but just be like ‘there’s another thing that’s doing something similar, so maybe veer off from that direction’."
Finally, McKellan stated that Konami grants a great deal of creative freedom.
Source: videogameschronicle.com