Loveshacks approach to interactive storytelling

In most video games, players are entrusted with performing actions: run, jump, shoot, swing, slash, crouch and curb-stomp. The developer sets the scene, establishes the context and the player is released into the world with an arsenal of actions.

In Loveshack Entertainments Framed, things work the other way around.

Framed is a narrative-based panel shifting game where players rearrange a series of panels to help tell a story. Set on a screen that resembles a comic book page, players push around blocks of minimalist animated paintings. Each panel is saturated in muted pastels, environments and surfaces are given a textured, painterly quality where colors are added in broad strokes, and as the games character leaps from panel to panel, it feels like hes a character trapped inside a comic book.

Developers Joshua Boggs, Adrian Moore and Ollie Browne originally worked at Firemint, an Australian studio best known for its work on Flight Control, Spy Mouse and Real Racing. The trio left Firemint shortly after the independent mobile studio was acquired by Electronic Arts. Within months, they founded Loveshack Entertainment in an effort to get back to their independent roots. They wanted to work in a small team, they wanted to be accountable for their actions and, most importantly, they wanted to make the game that had been fighting its way out of their collective heads — a game Boggs describes as something unlike anything out there right now.

via Framed: putting context in the players hands | Polygon.