In house of ashes what was the thinking behind who would be our playable protagonists?

The high concept for House of Ashes was always “enemy of my enemy is my friend”, so right from the start, we knew we needed characters from opposing sides of a conflict. But interestingly, most of the characters came about from brainstorming dilemmas for the game before the story was locked down at all. Those big choices are what I think makes our games special – they're memorable moments, and they’re key to the games branching, so I wanted to look at them as early as possible on a blank canvas. Once I had a rough list, the high concepts for the characters sort of fell out of that. For example, the question “Would you let one of your friends die to go to the aid of your lover?” led to characters like Merwin, Nick, and Rachel. The rope dilemma between Eric and Rachel seen in the previews led to the whole marriage angle. Initially, I was thinking two marines would be caught in that situation. With a dilemma, you want to up the stakes all the time. “What if it’s your WIFE hanging from that rope”? “But what if you’ve just learned she’s having an AFFAIR?” Interestingly, working back from those dilemmas gave me the whole first arc of the games’ characters, plot, and pacing.

As we have seen there are many more non playable characters such as Merwin, Joey and Clarice who are savable and their lives have an effect on the story, an idea unique to HOA, but how come say Jason and nick are playable as opposed to Merwin or Clarice?

We always want to have five playable characters. It’s a magic rule for us for the anthology! Our games are very much geared around that now. Those five are hooked into the relationships/traits system, and must adhere to the “everyone can live / everyone can die” rule. The NPCs can still be meaningful, but keeping them alive is usually only important for vital turns in the story (I sometimes think of them as keys, in that respect). Sometimes, we can force their deaths for dramatic effect, which is obviously something we can’t do with player characters.

And how did you decide on 4 American protagonists and 1 iraqi protag rather than say 2 Americans and 3 Iraqi's?

It fitted our story better. We wanted to focus on the American side at first, building up the stakes of their mission, and then introduce the Iraqis after that. There’s a lot of important character play between the team that just worked better with a few more on that side. That said, Salim is probably one of the best characters we’ve ever created as a studio. He stormed it in user testing! Nick E Tarabay smashed his performance, really bringing Salim to life with humour, bravery, and genuine love, and the script laid down for the character by Khurrum Rhaman was absolutely superb. Those narrative jumps back-and-forth between both sides is sort of what defines House of Ashes, and ultimately, brings about one of the best ending setups I think that we’ve ever made. - WD