As a PlayStation Move game motion controller for the PlayStation 3. British developer
Supermassive Games served as the game's developer. Its existence was revealed after a trademark for
Until Dawn was discovered. The studio began discussing an idea for a new game for the
PlayStation 3's
PlayStation Move accessory, which had a greater emphasis on narrative than Supermassive's previous games, such as
Start the Party!. The proposed game would be a horror game that resembled a
slasher film and it would be designed for a younger audience that publisher
Sony Computer Entertainment had courted with the Move. to write the game's script. They were hired because the team felt the company's British writers wrote in a "parochial" way that is inappropriate for the horror genre. The game was initially exclusive to PlayStation Move, meaning players needed to buy the Move controller to functionally play the game. In this version of the game, the only way to navigate and progress the game is by moving the motion controller. Moving the wand guides the movement of the flashlight held by the characters as players explore the location from a
first-person perspective. The wand can also be used to interact with objects and solve puzzles. In this version of the game, players can occasionally wield a firearm. An early version of the game also supported two-player
cooperative multiplayer, with the studio targeting young couples in their twenties. At that time, the game had reached the
alpha development stage. Byles experimented with the game's
debug camera and realized the potential of changing the perspective to
third-person. This would change the game from a first-person adventure game to a more "cinematic" experience. The game also switched platform from PlayStation 3 to the
PlayStation 4 and expanded the game's scope to include more mature content, Most characters were also recast;
Brett Dalton, one of the actors retained from the PlayStation 3 version, said he believed that the recasting was performed to hire better-known actors. With these changes, the team partnered with Cubic Motion and
3Lateral to
motion capture the actors' performances. The team also needed to change the game's graphics. They used the
Decima engine created by
Guerrilla Games and had to rework the lighting system. Despite the third-person perspective, the game adopted a static camera angle in a way similar to early
Resident Evil games. The approach was initially resisted by the development team because the designers considered the camera "archaic". Byles and the game's production designer Lee Robinson, however, drew storyboards to ensure each camera angle had narrative motivations and prove their placements were not random. Initially,
quality assurance testers were frustrated with the camera angle; Supermassive resolved this complaint by ensuring drastic camera transitions would not occur at thresholds like doors but the team had to remove some scenes to satisfy this design philosophy. To increase the player's agency, the team envisioned a system named the "
butterfly effect". Every choice the player makes in the game helps shape the story and ultimately leads to different endings. Byles stated that "all of [the characters] can live or all of whom can die in any order in any number of ways", and that this leads to many ways for scenes to unfold. He further added that no two players would get the same experience because certain scenes would be locked away should the player make a different choice. Supermassive developed a software that enabled the team to keep track of the story they intended to tell. Due to the branching nature of the game, every time the team wanted to change details in the narrative, the writers needed to examine the possible impacts the change would have on subsequent events. The game's strict
auto-save system was designed to be "imperative" instead of "punitive". Byles said even though a character had died, the story would not end until it reached the ending and that some characters may not have died despite their deaths being hinted at. Some plot points were designed to be indirect and vague so the narrative would gradually unfold. Byles recognized the design choice as "risky" and that it may disappoint mainstream players but he felt it enhanced the game's "horror" elements. The game's pacing was inspired by that of
Resident Evil and
Silent Hill, in which there were quiet moments with no enemy encounter that help enhance the games' tension. Tom Heaton, the game's designer, said an unsuccessful
QTE trial or one incorrect choice would not lead directly to a character's death, though it would send the characters to "harder, more treacherous paths". Byles described the game as "glib" and "cheesy", and said the story and the atmosphere were similar to a typical teen horror movie. Fessenden and Reznick wrote a script of nearly 10,000 pages. The playable characters were set up as typical horror movie
archetypes but as the narrative unfolded, these characters would show more nuanced qualities. The writers felt that, unlike films, games can use quieter moments for characters to express their inner feelings. With the game's emphasis on players' choices, players can no longer "laugh" at the characters' decisions because they must make these decisions themselves. It enables the player to relate with the characters and make each death more devastating. The dialogue was reduced significantly when the team began to use the motion capture technology, which facilitates storytelling through acting. The story was written in a non-linear fashion; chapter 8 was the first to be completed. This ended up causing some inconsistencies in the story. The development team wanted to invoke fear in the player and ensure the game had the appropriate proportion of terror, horror, and disgust. Supermassive made most use of terror, which Byles defined as "the dread of an unseen threat". To ensure the game was scary enough, the team used a
galvanic skin response test to measure playtesters' fear levels while they were playing the game. Byles described
Until Dawn as a game that took "horror back to the roots of horror"; unlike many of its competitors, tension rather than action was emphasized. While composing for the game, he mixed both melodic and atonal sounds together. With the butterfly effect being an important mechanic of the game, Graves used film music editing techniques. He divided each track into segments and had the orchestra play it piece by piece. He then manipulated the recordings and introduced variations of them in the recording studio. Only 30 minutes of themes with melody and
chord progression were recorded in three orchestral sessions. This was because most of the time was spent recording 8–10 hours' worth of atmospheric music and sounds that Graves later combined to invoke different emotions in different scenes. The Decima game engine was programmed to determine how the music was layered depending on players' choices in the game. ==Release and marketing==