Indie Magazine

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Dedicated to all aspects of the indie game movement, Indie Magazine explores the unique mechanics, one of a kind art, developers, fans and intriguing stories of the industry.

The State of Indie Gaming Retail A look at the move from brick and mortar to digital storefront

Firewatch One Year Later A look back and talk about Camp Santo’s next Game

No Mans Sky NEXT The Final Frontier A metamorphosis from survival game to something else entirely

CONTENTS

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THE STATE OF INDIE GAMING RETAIL

Digital distribution and, more specifically, the ever-increasing number of digital storefronts as well as the success of Steam as a platform, gave rise to the vibrant and varied indie gaming landscape we’ve got today. A similar success would be inconceivable if it was tied to retail releases, which now seem to be a thing of the past for most indie and mid-tier titles - retail is the domain of AAA blockbusters, firmly in the hands of big publishers. Meanwhile, niche products have mostly gone digital, and a lot of them thrive in this type of environment.

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Microsoft is the right company to build the “Netflix of Gaming”

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FIREWATCH ONE YEAR LATER

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NO MANS SKY NEXT THE FINAL FRONTIER

Just over a year ago, Firewatch released to positive reviews and commercial success. It was an intriguing exploration-puzzle story set in a beautiful wilderness. But its main strength was in creating believable characters — Henry and Delilah — who spoke like human beings.

With sales of more than a million copies, developer Campo Santo is now working on its next project: unannounced as yet. I sat down with writer Sean Vanaman to talk about the direction he wants to go in next, and how he feels about Firewatch one year after its launch.

It didn’t take long for the initial enthusiasm around No Man’s Sky to morph into something well beyond the control of its creators.

Calcified by the hype-driven marketing around the game, the pitch for No Man’s Skyunderwent a metamorphosis. It went from ‘a procedural-generated survival game from the makers of Joe Danger’ to something else entirely. An interactive experience so immersive and engaging and sprawling in both content and continuity that it promised to be the last game players would ever need to buy.

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40 54

The Indie Game Unsuccess Story

Octodad

Dead Cell

We Happy Few

CONTRIBUTERS Editor-In-Chief Creative Director

Ian Stark

Colin Campbell

Patrick Mitchell

Editorial Deputy Editor

Michael Haney

Features Editor

Jolyon Helterman

Managing Editor

Jennifer Johnson

Senior Editor

Geoffrey Gagnon

Online Editor

Paul Flannery

Associate Editor

Amy Traverso

Assistant Managing Editor Associate Online Editor Online Editorial Assistant Staff Writer Production Director

Brittant Jasnoff Jamie Coelho Alyssa Giacobbe

Campbell is a Santa Cruz-based writer

Thomas Faust

whose main area of interest is video

Kenneth Gawrych

games. He writes about how games impact real lives, and how they reflect the

Design Associate Art Director Senior Designer Designer Associate Designer

Susannah Haesche Heather Burke

Mike Rose

Betsy Halsey Michael Panglinan

Multimedia Editor

Andy Gomer

Director of Photography

Dora Somosi

Production Manager

more challenging aspects of our culture.

Domenica Belat

Research & Copy Managing Editor

Laura Vitale

Research Director

Lucas Zaleski

Research Editor

Rebecca Dorr

Researcher

Travis Dagenais

Copy Editor

Hillary Corbett

Rose is an ex-game critic turned publishing expert, and writes about video games at Gamasutra, Kotaku, PocketGamer and more. The rumours that he is incredibly loud are mostly true.

FROM THE EDITOR Welcome to the first issue of Indie, a new quarterly magazine devoted to independent video games and their developers.

An independent game is above all trying to innovate and provide a new experience for the player. It is not just filling a publisher’s portfolio need. It has not been invented at a marketing department. And it has not been designed by a committee. This is for readers interested in what sets independent video games apart. Whether it’s the unique mechanics, one of a kind art or devoted developers, Indie brings the latest stories, news and reviews aimed at showcasing a growing independent video game market.

In this first issue, you’ll find a rare glimpse into the development process, a look at how player feedback helps shape the games we play, an examination of the state of independent gaming retail, a reflection on some of this year’s top games and much more. I hope you enjoy this first issue and do let us know if there are any topics you’d like to see covered in the future. Game On.

Ian Stark Editor-in-Chief

The State of Indie Gaming Retail How a rise in digital storefronts has made the indie landscape what it is today Thomas Faust

Digital distribution and, more specifically, the ever-increasing number of digital storefronts as well as the success of Steam as a platform, gave rise to the vibrant and varied indie gaming landscape we’ve got today. A similar success would be inconceivable if it was tied to retail releases, which now seem to be a thing of the past for most indie and mid-tier titles — retail is the domain of AAA blockbusters, firmly in the hands of big publishers. Meanwhile, niche products have mostly gone digital, and a lot of them have come to thrive this way. However, this doesn’t mean that indie games have completely departed the retail space. There are a few companies still trying to brave the increasingly harsher market conditions.

I talked to Gregor Ebert (Headup Games), Hans van Brakel (Soedesco), and Josh Fairhurst (Limited Run Games) about their approach to retail publishing. Both Headup Games and Soedesco pursue traditional brick and mortar distribution for PC and consoles, respectively, and also act as digital distributors and publishers. Limited Run Games, on the other hand, carved out a niche by producing small quantities of acclaimed console games and exclusively selling these boxed versions online, targeting an even smaller customer subset: collectors of limited retail editions.

Since the viability of retail sales in a world that is increasingly turning towards digital distribution is certainly an issue, I wanted to

know how these publishers perceive their role on the market. For Headup Games, there is a distinct trend away from retail: “Digital is [our] main source of income while retail is getting less and less important. It is more a matter of recognition [...] but in regards to sales, it’s not worth mentioning anymore if you don’t sell AAA titles.” For Soedesco, having a retail presence is more about adding value and visibility: “[retail releases are] important for us because with an increasing amount of releases, discoverability becomes an issue. We offer developers to increase their discoverability enormously by adding retail in the mix. You are getting your game in thousands of stores all over the world, [which means] a huge amount of people will see your game. So it’s a great combination of marketing and extra income.”

“This desire for real, true, ownership will never fade so physical media will always have its place.”

Limited Run Games have a slightly more positive outlook on the state of retail.

However, that might be due to their particular distribution model and smaller scope: “It’s been very successful so far with every release having sold out within the course of a single weekend (and some selling out within minutes of launch). Customers have been sticking around and it seems like we’ve got a pretty sustainable business model, so long as we continue to keep things small and run light. It’s definitely sustainable for the developers we work with as we’re creating a new stream of revenue for their previously released titles that in some cases could finance a huge portion of their next project.”

Some regional markets are supposedly in favor of digital over retail distribution, but

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when asked about that, all three publishers couldn’t quite agree on specific countries.

The strong presence of video game retail in Germany seems to be a safe bet for every publisher going retail, and the US compensates lower interest with sheer sales numbers; it is the largest market by far. Apart from that, other European countries, the Middle East, and Australia were mentioned as worth publishing for, while Japan apparently has little interest in Western retail indie releases.

Overall, all publishers considered the worldwide market to be pretty healthy all over, but Gregor Ebert couldn’t help but lament the effect of convenient downloading and rampant race-to-the-bottom pricing which hurts smaller publishers the most.

Even so, there are strong arguments in favor of maintaining a healthy retail landscape, even for smaller publishers and, by extension, developers. Apart from the obvious interest to diehard collectors, retail releases can sway the average gamer with added value and other gimmicks. Some of Headup Games’ releases contain extra fluff like posters, key chains, extra movies, or 3D glasses (in the Special Edition of LIMBO). Their boxed version of Fullbright’s Gone Home, for instance, actually complements the experience with actual items from the game world, adding something tangible to an already immersive game.

There are technical and licensing issues to consider, as well. “Digital games can disappear at the whim of a platform holder,” Fairhurst points out. “There’s no way to say that in five or six years my games will still be available on Steam or PSN or Xbox Live. Businesses go under, platforms die — there are so many things that could happen that could cause my games to disappear forever. When your game exists on a physical format like a PlayStation 4 disc — no one can revoke your right to play that game. You own it and you own it for as long as you have the hardware to play it. Look at Scott Pilgrim, After Burner Climax, P.T. — these games can’t really be picked up anymore. They don’t have a legacy outside of pirate sites.

This bothers me as a player, consumer, and

developer. This desire for real, true, ownership will never fade so physical media will always have its place in the market.”

There are technical and licensing issues to consider, as well. “Digital games can disappear at the whim of a platform holder,” Fairhurst points out. “There’s no way to say that in five or six years my games will still be available on Steam or PSN or Xbox Live. Businesses go under, platforms die — there are so many things that could happen that could cause my games to disappear forever. When your game exists on a physical format like a PlayStation 4 disc — no one can revoke your right to play that

game. You own it and you own it for as long as you have the hardware to play it. Look at Scott Pilgrim, After Burner Climax, P.T. — these games can’t really be picked up anymore. They don’t have a legacy outside of pirate sites. This bothers me as a player, consumer, and developer. This desire for real, true, ownership will never fade so physical media will always have its place.”

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Microsoft Is the company to build the “Netflix of gaming” Jared Newman

A few months ago, executives from two of the world’s largest video game publishers suggested that traditional game consoles are on their way out of the market.

In separate interviews with Variety, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot and Electronic Arts CTO Ken Moss both argued that instead of buying expensive hardware to play video games, we’ll stream them onto virtually any device, tapping into remote servers for the requisite computing power. And instead of downloading games or buying them on disc, we’ll subscribe to a vast catalog of titles, all of them instantly accessible. In other words, the future of gaming will look a lot like Netflix does.

This is less of a futuristic of a concept that it seems. Claims that game streaming will

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replace traditional consoles and PCs have been circulating for close to a decade now, dating back to the rise of OnLive in 2010 (and its fall five years later). Despite some steady technology improvements, all cloud-based gaming services share the same fundamental problem: There aren’t enough good reasons to abandon traditional gaming hardware, especially when the streaming experience is far inferior even under ideal network conditions.

While many companies are trying to crack the cloud gaming code now — including EA, Nvidia, Sony, and several startups — they’ll have a hard time succeeding unless they fundamentally rethink how games are made. If I had to bet on one company that could actually pull this off, it’s definitely Microsoft.

TECHNICAL HURDLES Cloud gaming’s current problems are partly technical. Because every command from your controller or keyboard must travel to the internet, and every frame of video must travel back in the opposite direction, there’s always a small but noticeable delay between hitting a button and seeing the result on the screen.

And that assumes no issues with the connection along the way. For fast-action games, that’s a dealbreaker, which is why the “Netflix of gaming” concept sounds like a great idea until the action stutters due to packet loss, or you fail at a tense standoff in Fortnite because of your controller lag.

So far, cloud gaming firms have tried to improve the situation by optimizing their data centers, tweaking their software, and improving their hardware. Nvidia, for instance, has figured out that the best location for its servers is just outside of metropolitan areas, where the company can hook up to internet backbone networks, says Andrew Fear, the senior product manager for Nvidia’s GeForce Now service. The company has also added features to its graphics cards that help encode video more efficiently, and has spent a lot of time figuring out the best way to decode video on the user’s device.

Still, the one thing Nvidia hasn’t done is work closely with game developers to optimize their own code for streaming. While doing so could cut down on latency and make streaming more reliable, Fear says it would take a lot more work, which in turn could scare publishers away from the entire concept.

“I can tell you that for the most part, what we’ve found is, it’s easier to get adoption from developers very early on… by making it so there’s no change to your existing game engine,” Fear says.

Enter Microsoft. Last month, Microsoft watcher Brad Sams reported that the company is building a cloud-based game console with enough local computing power for “specific tasks like controller input, image processing, and importantly, collision detection.”

Effectively, the console would render part of the game on its own, and the rest in the cloud, thereby reducing latency while still costing far less than a traditional Xbox. (Microsoft has already acknowledged that it’s building a cloud gaming service, though it hasn’t provided any official details to consumers yet.)

Pat Moorhead, the principal analyst for Moor Insights & Strategy, agreed that the idea described in Sams’ story–Moorhead calls it “split rendering”–would greatly improve the cloud gaming experience, but only with cooperation from developers.

“Split-rendering could help solve many issues, but the game needs to be specially architected to take full advantage of the design,” Moorhead says.

POWERING SOMETHING DIFFERENT Even if Microsoft or another company were able to solve cloud gaming’s latency and reliability problems, they’d still have to sell people on the concept even with it’s faults.

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Typically, those who argue in cloud gaming’s favor point to convenience as the main advantage: If you already play games on a console or PC, cloud gaming would let you play the same games on the road from a phone or lightweight laptop. And if you don’t already play games, not having to buy expensive hardware drastically reduces the barriers to entry.

Benjy Boxer, a co-founder of the game streaming startup Parsec, is skeptical of the convenience argument, noting that cost of leasing access to a cloud gaming server can easily become more expensive than buying traditional gaming hardware.

“If you were a gamer, you would own a gaming PC,” Boxer says. “It’s cheaper to do that yourself, because with the cost of hourly rates, it makes more sense to just buy the hardware if you can afford it.”

Boxer argues that the “Netflix of games” won’t reach its true potential without changing the nature of gaming itself. He imagines, for instance, a scenario where someone watching a Star Wars film at home could pause the movie and play the action sequences.

Developers could also build new game engines exclusively for the cloud, allowing for better

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graphics and more objects on the screen.

(Parsec’s current service has its own modest example: If a PC game supports multiple players on the same device, the owner can invite other players to join from wherever they are.

It’s especially useful for indie games that offer local multiplayer, but no online mode.)

“For cloud gaming to really take off, it has to offer unique experiences to the gamer,” Boxer says. “Today, the games that people are playing in the cloud are the same games they can easily play locally.”

This notion is as old as cloud gaming itself.

Even back in 2010, OnLive was talking up how it owned Mova, a Hollywood facial motion capture firm, implying that it could provide photo-realistic faces for cloud gaming. But as with the technical hurdles, the drive to build new kinds of games for cloud services is a chicken-and-egg scenario.

“No game developer’s going to develop anything unless they know they’re going to have an audience of five million people, or 10 million people,” Boxer says. “That hasn’t happened in cloud gaming yet. There hasn’t been a critical audience there.”

MICROSOFT’S MOVES Microsoft has already been planting the seeds for an ambitious cloud gaming service.

On the technology side, the company operates data centers around the world for its Azure cloud computing service, and the company has some experience with streaming: Today, Xbox One owners can stream games to any Windows 10 PC over a local connection.

Microsoft also offers two subscription services for Xbox owners already: Xbox Live Gold lets users play online and download a small number of free games for $60 per year, and Xbox Game Pass provides a larger library of games for $10 per month. Microsoft is also reportedly planning an “Xbox All Access” service that combines Xbox Live, Game Pass, and Xbox hardware paid in monthly installments.

This would be a smart way for the company to test the waters on all-in-one gaming subscriptions before diving into streaming.

At the same time, Microsoft has been steadily building a roster of first-party development studios. In June, Microsoft announced that it was acquiring four new studios, which the company later said was a way to widen the

appeal of its Xbox subscription services. It’s not hard to imagine Microsoft’s studios turning hit franchises like Halo, Forzainto and Sunset Overdrive streaming exclusives.

“They have original content, they have Xbox Live, they have Xbox, they have Azure, which is the most important part probably, so they’re really well-positioned to do a Netflix of gaming,” Parsec’s Benjy Boxer says.

Cloud gaming even gels with Microsoft’s broader goals as a company. Under CEO Satya Nadella (who, incidentally, counts Netflix CEO Reed Hastings as a mentor), Microsoft has pivoted away from software sales, instead leaning into subscription-based products such as Office 365 and cloud computing services powered by Azure. While other console makers and chip vendors could be wary of leaving traditional consoles behind, Microsoft probably won’t have such qualms.

None of this means that other companies are incapable of building the Netflix of gaming.

But right now, no other company has the same platform control, hit franchises, development resources, and cloud-centric business agenda to make it work like Microsoft.

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The Indie Game Unsuccess Story How the Creators of The Magic Circle Survived Their Own Gaming Nightmare Ed Smith

After growing disillusioned in the overly-corporate mainstream, a group of designers and artists take a risk and set up their own studio.

Idealistic and humble, the group are finally able to make the game they’ve always wanted to make, a game that just so happens to resonate with an increasingly sophisticated and artistically aware video game audience. The developers make their money back and then some, win awards for “narrative,” and start to plan a second game — a game that’s going to be even more honest this time. Reassured that low-budget, personal, and idiosyncratic titles can be successful, an entire culture also gets to feel like video games, at last, are getting better by the power of their sheer creative worth. We all agree the independent video game scene is destined to succeed.

As former BioShock developers, Jordan Thomas and Stephen Alexander are familiar with unconventional video game stories. For over six years — first at 2K Boston, later at

Irrational Games — they helped redefine what big-budget games could do, invigorating the famously crude shooter genre with horror, tragedy, and political intrigue. Before taking on directorial duties for BioShock 2, Thomas co-designed the original’s epochal Fort Frolic level. From sea-water cascading through Rapture’s corridors to neon lighting effects and scary set-pieces, like the appearance of the first ever Splicer, Alexander’s art and visual work had helped set BioShock’s tone. But in 2013, they left mainstream game development to found their creative partnership, Question; like the series that had introduced them to one another, their first independent game was set to examine and test gaming’s boundaries.

Called The Magic Circle, the game took place inside an unfinished, eponymous fantasy RPG. Directed by an old software bug that had become sentient and gone rogue, players were led to excavate, edit, and ultimately destroy The Magic Circle from within, indicting

its creators and their volatile fanbase in the process. It was smart and unflinching, but contrary to indie game myth, The Magic Circle would not become a hit. “We thought we were striking while the iron was hot,” Thomas says.

“What we didn’t realise was that the indie wave was about to break.”

In summer 2013, after finalising the original concept for The Magic Circle, Alexander and Thomas moved into Question’s new headquarters, a house in San Francisco owned by Alexander’s parents. The studio had two priorities: cultivate the game’s art style and plan its narrative. Work began in earnest. However, given The Magic Circle had to look like an unfinished game with very little colour, basic graphics, and even some missing textures, Alexander started to worry if its pre-release screenshots would be understood as intentional or misinterpreted as genuine. It was possible the game’s “sloppy” appearance could put potential buyers off.

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On the contrary, sloppiness and roughness were at The Magic Circle’s center. Commercial risk or not, the game had to look a certain way.

“After three BioShocks,” says Thomas. “I remember feeling intensely frustrated, both with that ‘self-serious’ style of games and the various corporate strata that had been bearing down on us. I felt like game development had the same elephant in every room; [that] this is a video game and nothing we’re making here makes sense once you compare it to anyone’s real experience. We were constantly making excuses, for example, for the fact [that] our protagonists couldn’t talk. The self-serious tone is really set against games’ own nature.

So with The Magic Circle, I wanted to make something that was more at ease with its own rough edges.”

“Making a game like this without any concern at all for its commercial value, after so many years in triple-A, that was very therapeutic.

But talk about lack of self-awareness. We

were sort of living The Magic Circle ourselves, just in terms of ignoring any blind spots.”

To fund The Magic Circle, Thomas and Alexander turned to family, partners and wives: the game lived, as Thomas puts it, by “spousal grace.” The duo also hired a third veteran developer. Dishonored gameplay programmer Kain Shin, whom Thomas had first met in the early 2000s, replaced and perfected The Magic Circle’s fragile internal systems — most specifically its central mechanic, whereby players could mix, match, and edit in-game assets as if they were designers themselves.

Towards the end of 2013, The Magic Circle had a solid, technical foundation. Its writing and story, however, were subject to a sudden change of direction. What was once a pure comedy in the mock ‘making-of’ style of Spinal Tap and Swimming with Sharksquickly became much darker.

“After GamerGate started, my attitude towards games and gamers was really put through a mixer,” says Thomas. “I tried to put my feelings together again, on the other side, but they’d changed. Everything was changing.”

“The role of Coda Soliz, the fan who gets a job on the game-within-the-game and in her mind is going to save it from its own creators, her role darkened a lot. Essentially, this whole wave of pollutants had come to the surface of gaming culture. My friends were getting death threats, and it meant I couldn’t see game fans as true innocents any more.

In hindsight, this might have made it difficult for people to find any character in The Magic Circle with whom it

was easy to sympathise. But I couldn’t unsee all this, even if I wanted to.”

Nervous about how The Magic Circle and its burlesque of the gaming industry would eventually be regarded, Thomas and Alexander maintained a degree of allegory. As well as games, gamemakers, and game fans, they discussed narcissism and obsession generally, and tried to find more universal truths. But some of their own experiences made it into the game practically unveiled. The Magic Circle, in Alexander’s words, got “meaner.” Through in-game text logs and email exchanges, the pressures of working on a big, modern video game were given voice.

“The in-game conversations between the art and design departments,” Alexander continues, “There’s only a very thin filter between what’s written there and my own experiences. The nature of that, a team of people who end up fighting just because they care so much, I wanted to represent honestly. Needling the industry, game developers and ourselves, that was always the guiding star. And we basically ignored the idea of making something commercial. But all that stuff, outside forces plus our own desire to make something intensely personal, worked against our chances of big financial success.”

In May 2015, The Magic Circle went into Steam Early Access, all concerns about its commercial appeal came tangibly to bear. Back when the game was originally conceived, indie darlings like Gone Home and Papers, Please had seemed to suggest short, contrarian, and risqué games could make a lot of money.

Two years later, something had changed.

Critical responses,

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either from users or the press, were largely enthusiastic; it wasn’t like The Magic Circle was shoddily-made or unprecedentedly niche.

Nevertheless, its initial run yielded sales below Question’s modest expectations.

“We’d seen big Early Access successes,” Alexander says, “But we only sold about 1000 copies. We stayed hopeful, kept making the game better. And the people who’d actually played it were amazing. Talking to them was a wonderful experience, gave me a lot of faith in at least a subset of gamers. But financially, yes, it was an early warning.”

The Magic Circle was featured on Steam’s new releases page and briefly listed as a “Top Seller,” but its initial numbers quickly tailed off.

Whether it was the screenshots pre-release, which Alexander had worried would make the game look unremarkable; the writing, that

“Buying a game at full price, from the perspective of a gamer, that’s for suckers.”

Thomas knew would be an acquired taste; or something more vaporous, some trend either settling or emerging, it became suddenly clear The Magic Circle was not going to make the money Question had expected.

Certainly, the world awaiting a newly-released, independent game looked much different in 2015 than when Question was originally formed. According to SteamSpy, throughout 2013, 565 new games were published on Steam. In sharp, borderline intimidating contrast, 2969 new games were released on the same platform in 2015. Within two years, the competition The Magic Circle faced for gamers’ money had increased almost five-fold. At the same time — and in the wake of titles like The Stanley Parable, Game Dev Tycoon, The Writer Will Do Something, Goat Simulator and, ironically, BioShock: Infinite—critical discourse

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on the absurdity and nature of videogame development had already been picked clean.

The Magic Circle found a few rave reviews but generally it was scored 7s or 8s, which in the arguably skewed language of video game recommendations was not enough to qualify it as a “must buy.” At least enough to damage The Magic Circle’s commercial appeal, it seemed like, in the years between its conception and release, tastes had changed.

By 2015, The Magic Circle’s overarching insight that making games is a difficult and convoluted process involving much compromise, perhaps felt less urgent or incisive as it once could have. And in the culture post-GamerGate, it’s quite easy to imagine the audience for games feeling one of two things: either that games have let them down and they needed something more uplifting than The Magic Circle’s at-times-uncomfortable satire, or that the notion that gaming is fraught, ambiguous, and perhaps ultimately unsatisfying is self-evident, and hardly worth $20.

Today, however, Thomas and Alexander may only speculate as to what factor or combination of factors altered or damaged The Magic Circle’s sales potential.

“People have come to me and said, ‘The market screwed you,’” says Thomas. “But we’ll never know for certain. What I do know, however [is that] the culture of sales defines Steam. Buying a game at full price, from the perspective of a gamer, that’s for suckers. If it’s not multiplayer or a show-piece for your latest graphics card, then why buy when it comes out? Gamers’ tastes have shifted pretty radically towards experiences that are ‘meaning machines.’ Whether because of procedurally-generated or massively-multiplayer games, gamers today hold fire on anything that offers less perceived value per dollar.

Obviously, I fiercely disagree with that. If a game can sort of touch my soul in some way in a few hours, I’m so grateful to it. But that’s not the guiding principle for a lot of people buying games. Almost all the negative user reviews of The Magic Circle mention length as part of the reason they’re not satisfied, so everybody

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coming to our page reads ‘wait for a sale. You can get this for less.’ There’s just no incentive to buy on release.”

An unfathomable market, fickle players, the battle of attrition to get some thought, some feeling, some substantive point out into the world of games, The Magic Circle had fallen victim to the very things it had attempted to satirise. As if to drive the irony home — to complete the set of developers, fans, and critics being made to look foolish — evangelical reviews at major publications barely affected The Magic Circle’s sales. Perhaps in a realer way than was intended, Question had exposed games’ raw, difficult-to-look-at underbelly.

“I’m not trying to start any fights,” Thomas says, “But the truth is, on the days when a major publication published a glowing review of our game, and we had a few, we barely saw a sales spike. Meanwhile, Jim Sterling published a video of the first ten minutes and we got the biggest sales jump we ever saw.”

“Compared to a lot of other games we had a lot of coverage,” continues Alexander. “Those articles though, they would come and go within a day, and the people reading them were probably already enthusiasts. What we chose to make was not an easy sell.”

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The commercial response to The Magic Circle meant Question had to examine, and in some cases drastically alter, its creative direction. To try and drum up more revenue, a console port of the game became an urgent priority, though this itself invited problems. “The version of Unity we’d used to make it for PC wasn’t supported on PS4 and Xbox One,” says Alexander.

“I had to do a lot of work.”

The studio also started to think about its next game not just in terms of what it was going to say or what it would express, but financial viability. Thomas and Alexander had paid off their debts and earned enough to keep question just about open, just about, but if they wanted to carry on making video games, their next title needed to be more broadly, instantly appealing.

There is a conventional indie developer success story, but it’s probably less accurate than it is reassuring. After growing up with parents, peers, and the mainstream press telling us our favorite hobby video games was silly and for losers, it’s emboldening to feel able to say, “Actually, games are becoming more artistic.”

More broadly speaking, it’s heartwarming to see that when people quit their jobs to follow their dreams, it all works out; given the world we live in, it’s nice to believe that real, artistic energy can simply prevail.

Reality, of course, is more convoluted. Some independent developers make millions.

Others do pretty well, break even, or go broke. Video game culture doesn’t make straightforward progresstoward higher art and things don’t unambiguously “ get better.” No single article, paragraph, or tweet can comprehensively surmise modern video games.

There is no all encompassing success story.

Testament to that nuance, despite its tribulations with The Magic Circle, has managed to sign to a publisher, hire two new designers — David Pittman,

creator of Neon Struct, and Michael Kelly, formerly of Hangar 13 and 2K — and start work on their next project, an unannounced and still shrouded-in-mystery cooperative horror game.

The Magic Circle might have faltered commercially and kept them awake some nights, but Thomas’ and Alexander’s debut collaboration also provided answers. Considering it was made, to clarify conflicts, elucidate disappointments, and make it clear that no video game story is straightforward, The Magic Circle, by its own misfortunes, could be considered a resounding success.

“We made enough not to be truly embarrassed of the work,” says Thomas. “We didn’t leave a complete crater. On the other hand, we

realised we had indulged ourselves first. A lot of studios make something commercial then indulge themselves later. I’ve thought many times: could we have done something else?

But I feel like, since my youth, I’ve sacrificed myself over and over to this God of Video Games, and a lot of that is represented in The Magic Circle. So I like to think we’ve cleared triple-A, and with a healed heart.”

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Octo

odad How a group of strangers turned into best friends Mike Rose

“A lot of us just didn’t know each other, so it was very surprising that it came out as well as it did, and that we got along as well as we did,” adds Tibitoski. “We pretty much all had the same sort of weird sense of humor.”

Unsurprisingly, it takes a good few weeks for 18 bright minds to unload all of their best video game concepts. One-page ideas were pitched over and over again, with some pushing the boundaries of weird more than others. After weeks of getting it all of their chests, the 18 had pulled every ridiculous, barrel-scraping, messed-up folly from their systems. It was time to get down to real business.

“We had to dig a little bit further to find something more interesting,” remembers Tibitoski.

“Eventually we came up with the idea of an octopus inside of an android’s head, driving him sort of like in Men in Black, and using levers to make him walk and micromanage its movements.”

This initial concept was heavily inspired by Being John Malkovich, but as the base idea evolved, it began to take on a form much more inspired by accidentally hilarious 1998 DreamWorks game Jurassic Park: Trespasser. As recently cited by Surgeon Simulator 2013 dev Bossa Studios,

Trespasser’s “revolutionary” micromanaging controls were a bit of a disaster, yet they still ended up inspiring some very silly control schemes for the game.

“In that game it was meant to be this serious cool feature, but it ended up being this glitchy, disastrous, but hilarious, mess,” notes Tibitoski. It was really funny, and I think that’s why we realized it could be a comedy game, not only because of the concept of the octopus being in a suit and stuff, but because of how funny it is to watch that stuff go wrong.”

And so the perfect combination of stupid controls and stupid storyline converged to create the perfect, “stupid” game: An octopus, in a suit, with a wife and kids who somehow don’t know he’s an octopus, despite his flailing tentacles. The stage was set.

It began with prototyping how exactly this concept would come to fruition. “Was he going to just walk around, or can he pick things up, or is he going to walk on walls with his suction cups?” Tibitoski tells me. “What was this game really about mechanically, since we’ve come up with the idea before the mechanics?”

Since the team was split on which mechanics worked the best with the concept, the group decided to go for broke and prototype everything at the same time. The first demo saw a string of purple spheres linked together on a rope, and you were able to “walk” around and grab things with your tentacles.

“You could try to wrap around things and put them in a kitchen sink, or take them out super simple stuff,” the Young Horse recalls.

“Then the walking came along, and we weren’t sure if it was going to be like, he leans in a direction and you have to balance him, or if you drag along his legs or something.”

After much experimenting, the team opted for sort of Marionette-like controls, much like those you can see in the current Octodad build.

“When we couldn’t decide whether we wanted to do just an arms things or a legs thing, we decided to put them together and make it more of a singular experience instead of having maybe separate levels where you do either one or the other,” Tibitoski adds.

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Five months of messing around with this ridiculous concept, and Octodad was born.

Many members of the team were keen to inject more silly into the game, but the IGF deadline was looming, and submissions were due.

Octodad was entered into the student portion of the competition, and the 18 had finished its first and last project together.

Galloping into view Remember that Octodad was an optional, extra-curricular activity for this group of young hopefuls, and while also studying hard for the rest of their University courses, some of the team were also working on their own games.

John Murphy and Devon Scott-Tunkin, two of the 18, just happened to catch my attention mid-Octodad development with Acid Couch, a messy wonder created in two weeks as part of an Indie City Games jam.

When Octodad was completed and entered into the IGF, most of the team was done. They each had a great addition to their resumes, and if Octodad was nominated for the IGF, that’d be even better for their future prospects.

But for others, something about the Octodad project refused to cease bouncing around in their heads. There was more that needed to be don, but they needed proof that anyone else felt the same way. Having already had a game featured on IndieGames.com, Murphy decided to take another shot in my direction.

“I’m writing because I figured you might want to check out the game that I and a group of students at DePaul University just submitted to the student IGF,” said Murphy’s email.

“It’s called Octodad and is about an octopus struggling to keep his human family from realizing what he is while doing everything that a dad does. I’d played the game and posted it up on the IndieGames blog within a couple of hours, and I immediately fired it over to Rock Paper Shotgun’s Quintin Smith, who responded back just an hour later, “Posted.

Posted so, so fast.”

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“We wanted to make a real game and form a company, and sell it so we could keep making weird games”

That initial hit of press from IndieGames and RPS was just the beginning as, in the hours that followed, the game was featured on Destructoid, Joystiq, Kotaku and many more. The team was blown away, and those who thought it should be taken further were now adamant that the story of Octodad needed to be expanded.

Then the IGF nomination happened, and Let’s Play videos became regular, fascinating viewing for Tibitoski, Murphy et al — and cemented the decision to take Octodad further.

“There was this Let’s Play video — I can’t remember her name — but she was just laughing the entire time she was playing,” muses Tibitoski. “That’s the kind of reaction we want.

That’s the sort of thing I make games for.”

After seeing reactions from the press at the IGF Pavilion at GDC 2011, eight of the original 18 students retreated to the basement of a hostel, and put it simply, “We need to make a real version of this.”

“We wanted to make a real game and form a company, and sell it so we could keep making weird games,” Tibitoski says. “Before then, a lot of us wanted to work for bigger studios like a lot of kids do when they grow up playing games. I always wanted to work at Bungie.

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But through making this, and realizing there’s this entire world of independent games and developers, we all changed our minds a few times - or at least, the eight of us who wanted to do Young Horses.”

For the remaining 10 original creators, there were various reasons why they didn’t want to continue to participate. Some still wanted to go triple — A and work for larger game studios like they’d always dreamed, while others were wary of taking up such a risky dream.

“At the time the game had a good amount of attention, but it still wasn’t as big as it is now, and we didn’t have the PS4 version or anything like that,” Tibitoski notes. “We didn’t even have our Steam deal, and we hadn’t Kickstartered it yet. So it was hard to know whether anyone would actually pay for something like this. We still kind of worry about that!”

“So we had no real validation for that, and I think a lot of people were afraid of the fact that they would then have to give up their lives... It was a big investment, and I think a lot of people were afraid of not knowing if it would turn out well or not.”

And so Young Horses was born, coincidentally made up of eight people — Philip Tibitoski, Kevin Zuhn, Majdi Badri, Kevin Geisler, John

Murphy, Seth Parker, Devon Scott-Tunkin and Chris Stallman — each ready to hold on tight to one of Octodad’s arms and take the plunge.

Into the deep As you’d expect, no-one on the Young Horses team had the cash to go full-time on the project, and so Octodad was a labor of love that occurred for 4-5 hours each evening, after eight hours of full-time jobs. This went on for around two years, with day after day of job, home, Octodad, sleep, including weekends.

The Octodad Kickstarter at the end of 2011 helped a little. The funding drive brought in $24,320 which, at the time, was a lot of money for a video game Kickstarter.

“A lot of people didn’t know about it, and we had to explain to a lot of people what Kickstarter was, before even asking them to donate,” recalls Tibitoski. “We were successful, and it helped us start the business and take care of basic costs, and helped us get to conventions like PAX.” “But obviously it wasn’t enough money to fund eight or nine people to work for two and a half years,” he adds. “So it was difficult

sometimes, and there were many times when a lot of us were drained just from working all the time. Also it’s hard to go work a day job for hours at a time, when all you wanna do is be somewhere else working on something you actually love. It was just depressing, I guess.”

What pushed the team on was the constant validation from its Kickstarter backers, and when Young Horses was finally ready to show off what it had been working on, more validation was to follow.

“Once we released the first teaser for the game, everyone was really excited for it,” notes Tibitoski. “Even up until now we’ve been seeing 3-5 Let’s Play videos that are new every week for the first Octodad, and it’s been years.

Which is kind of wild to us, that people are still playing that game, even though to us it seems like such a rough student thing compared to the new one.”

Of course, it’s tempting to wonder whether the Octodad story would be less tumultuous and tiring, had the Young Horses team waited until 2012 before heading to Kickstarter.

March 2012 saw Double Fine sound the Kickstarter video game klaxon, raking in $3.3 million, and making Octodad’s twenty four thousand look fairly measly.

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Says Tibitoski, “It was weird to us at the time that people were even giving us money for an idea in the first place — something that didn’t exist. Even in that first pitch video for the Kickstarter, we didn’t show any footage from the game. It’s all from the first game with basic prototypes, and maybe some sketchy art, and some 2D animation. It was amazing that anyone was even willing to give us money for that. At the time it was unheard of.”

After Double Fine Adventure, the Octodad team did consider running a second Kickstarter — those hundreds and thousands of dollars were tempting, as you’d expect — but inevitably, the thought of running yet another crowdfunding campaign while also holding down full-time jobs and staring at an octopus every evening was a bit much for people to take.

“It was an idea, but something that was shot down pretty quickly,” admits Tibitoski. “We’ve all kind of kept it ‘in the family’, so to speak, and it’ll be nice that we only owe ourselves money and not really anyone else. I’m pretty happy to say that we’ve done pretty much all of this on our own.”

Originally, the plan was to launch Octodad: The Dadliest Catch in the summer of 2012 — but it quickly became apparent that the scope of the game, coupled with how much time the eight had to spend on it, meant that even 2013 was going to be a push, let alone 2012.

Two of the Young Horses were now fulltime on Octodad, funded by the day-time payrolls of the other six, but this still wasn’t enough to speed up the development process.

“Up until August/Sept 2013, we weren’t even sure we were going to ship in January 2014,” Tibitoski laughs. “We thought maybe we’d have to push it back until June 2014. We were eight people for the longest time, and we only had one dedicated artist, Chris Stallman.

He was doing characters and architecture and rigging and animations and stuff like that, and we needed to do cutscenes.”

The original plan was to have full 3D in-game cutscenes with full voice over, and this was looking increasingly unlikely under the current scenario. Enter Nick Esparza, lead

artist on the original Octodad. Notes Tibitoski, “We brought him back to do animation for the project. It’s him that allowed us to release on time, and when we wanted to.”

Octodad at PAX East Of course, a large part of the Octodad story was the surprise grand-scale part that indie games played in the PlayStation 4 E3 press conference in 2013. The team had been talking to Sony as early as GDC 2011, but they never in a million years thought they’d see Octodad up on stage for the big PlayStation 4 E3 push.

“They talked to us about PS3 back at GDC 2011,” says Tibitoski, “but the terms and that kind of stuff just didn’t seem right for us at the time, especially with how we’re often... well, the first game to me just seems atrocious now, looking back, as anyone who makes anything looks back. It just seems so much better now.”

“So we just didn’t think we were ready to do that sort of thing, or had the experience to actually make it happen,” continues the dev. “We had to turn them down, and Nick Suttner, who is our account manager at Sony, kept in touch with us over the years and checked in every once in a while to see how we were doing.”

At PAX East 2013, Sony once again approached the Octodad devs, and came right out with it: “We’re doing this indie initiative for PS4, the system is much easier to develop for now for smaller teams, and all the business relations stuff is now worked out so that it’s more manageable. We’re really looking to push the envelope with weird games we can have on the platform, and we want Octodad.”

In the weeks that followed, Sony sent dev kits to Young Horses for free, with no strings attached - the idea was that the team could play around with the kits, decide whether they wanted to be on PlayStation 4, and send them back to Sony if they decided it wasn’t for them.

“We ended up getting it running on the hardware within about a month, which was apparently quick, they told us,” Tibitoski recalls. “They asked us if we wanted to be at

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E3, offered a booth and kiosk space on the showfloor — which was crazy by itself, that we were going to be in the Sony booth at E3.”

Shortly afterwards, the really exciting conversation happened: “Oh by the way, we’re doing this thing for the press conference with indies, do you guys wanna be a part of that?”

“And we said, ‘Uhh yes, of course we want to be part of one of the biggest gaming events of the year and have our game up on stage with Destiny - yeah, please!’” laughs Tibitoski.

“So they invited us to that, and then we just spent a lot of time testing, and making sure the build worked, and being horrified that it would explode on stage or something,” the Young Horses CEO says. “But everything went pretty smoothly. They flew us out. Kevin [Geisler] was up on stage playing it.”

“I remember sitting there and feeling really awkward. Not awkward... numbing, almost.

Like I didn’t even realize what had happened,

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it’s almost as if I stopped being able to hear anything when it was up there. And then a moment later realized what had happened. My phone started blowing up with text messages, and it drained my battery. I was there in the audience with everyone else watching. I was sitting next to Rami [Ismail of Vlambeer]. It was just crazy to see Kevin up there showing the game off to so much people, and knowing it was being broadcast to a bunch of places.

It’s been crazy ever since too.”

Here comes the console audience Then something rather strange happened.

You’d expect Octodad’s Twitter searches and Google Alerts to go wild following the PS4 reveal, but what Tibitoski and company noticed was that the clamor around the reveal didn’t ever completely die down. As it turned out,

having a game on PlayStation 4 is apparently much more interesting than having yet another PC game to show off.

“The PC audience is huge, and arguably larger, but it’s a very different audience for people who are solely console gamers,” he tells me.

“And it’s interesting to reach a new set of people that we might not have ever reached.”

Octodad isn’t the only game to feel this console heat. Most recently, Klei Entertainment’s Don’t Starve received a large-scale boost of publicity when it launched on PS4, a whole year after releasing for PC. The mainstream media, and in turn core gamers, appear to be oblivious to many massive indie games until they are legitimized with a console launch.

“It’s been weird to deal with from the PR side of things,” notes Tibitoski. “When we announced that we were coming to PC first, and we announced the dates and stuff, people said ‘Why are you coming to PC first? Why aren’t you coming at the same time as PS4?’

And it was like, well, we’ve been working on this for two-and-a-half years now, and a lot of that had nothing to do with PS4! That’s been more of a recent development that we’re super happy with, but we also have these Kickstarter backers to answer to. We wouldn’t want to be like, ‘Sorry guys, you can’t have the game even though it’s ready, because we’re not ready for Playstation 4 yet.’”

Tibitoski even found this mentality running through his own family. While his parents understood how important it all was to him, his extended family didn’t seem to believe that the upcoming PC release was a big deal. Yet when he said to many of them that Octodad was now coming to PlayStation 4, their reaction was “Oh man, that’s crazy, that’s insane!”

“It’s like this cultural signifier of merit or something,” muses Tibitoski.

The team is now hoping to take this console buzz around the game, and apply it to the PC release this week on January 30. The Young Horses have been following numerous other indie game launches over the last few years, and now believe they have a pretty good idea of how their game will sell in comparison.

“We spent a lot of time evaluating, ‘How well do we think we can do, what should our goals be as far as how well this sells, who it reaches’ and things like that,” says the dev.

“And it really just comes down to: We need to make enough money so that we can make another game, and then hopefully exist in a somewhat comfortable way.”

“I think we’ll do well,” he adds, “but I’m not sure how well. It’s hard to say. But some of us will be up at 2 a.m. worrying that we’re going to completely bomb.”

Of course, it’s been over three years since that original Octodad freeware release burst forth. Is Tibitoski worried that people will simply be over the concept by now?

“We definitely worried about people losing interest over time, and that’s why we spent a lot of time thinking about when and what we would release in terms of teasers and trailers,” he answers. “That’s all kind of fallen into place at the right time, I feel.”

After Octodad And what’s the plan for post-Octodad? Says Tibitoski, the Young Horses have thought a lot about the next few years while Octodad was still ongoing.

“We’ve set plans,” he says. “For a long time we’ve thought about what we will do a year from now, five years from now. You can only plan so far with any sort of realistic expectations, but we definitely have pretty good ideas of what we wanna do next, at least as far as right after this. What we’ll do is up in the air, and depends a lot on how the game sells, and if people are happy with what we’ve made.”

Certain game ideas have been bounced around the Octodad camp a lot over the years, that only this team could truly consider. One involves a dating sim/rhythm game set in a Japanese high school filled with monsters, in a similar style to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

“Things like that that are just ridiculous, but might morph into something completely different later, or be completely thrown out

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and replaced with something else,” laughs Tibitoski. “There hasn’t really been anything yet where we’re like, ‘This is what we need to do next.’”

As our discussion comes to an end, Tibitoski returns back to the scene of the crime — that room filled with 18 student hopefuls, eager to show their worth at the IGF. He muses on how a team of 18 who barely knew each other have now provided him with a group of best friends.

“Over the whole project, we’ve learned to respect and have empathy for one another, I guess,” he says. “At the beginning it was difficult to be able to... it’s hard when you have eight people and none of us are the definite...”

He stumbles with his words. “It’s so hard to describe. There’s the idea of authorship in games where one person has all the ideas, and they are the one who is in control of the creative vision of it. Whereas with us, it’s a lot more collaboration. Kevin Zuhn is our creative director, and he keeps us on track as far as saying ‘This does not belong in Octodad.’”

“And we have leads for everything that do that for their respective specializations,” he continues. “But at the same time, we are all very involved in a lot of the decisions, and everyone hears everyone else’s opinions equally.

There have been times where an audio person makes a design decision, and that works out better. Just because, over the past three years or so of working together, we’ve found how to trust one another with certain things, rather than it being an argument every single time something needs to be decided.” “’This person, it’s their idea and their game’ — it’s never like that with us. Which I think is something a bit different.”

Where this group of nine were once mere acquaintances, thrown together through a mixture of luck, skill and timing, they now hang out with each other all the time, both during Octodad development and outside of work.

“It’s definitely become a little family unit,” Tibitoski adds — and he believes that the way they came together resulted in a much stronger team than if they’d been friends prior.

“When you know someone well and their

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weaknesses, what gets under their skin or whatever, it’s a lot easier to argue about stuff than it is to just sit and hear them out, even if you disagree with them.”

“Other developers are always very confused with how many people are on our team,” he laughs. “They’re like, ‘Oh god, we have trouble with two people trying to create something and not tear each other apart.’ Whereas we have nine people now who — we don’t really get into super crazy arguments where we’re yelling at each other or something. People are passionate about things, but it always comes down to a decision, and it’s never something where there’s resentment.”

The Octodad-effect is still being felt elsewhere too. According to recent DePaul Game Experience graduates, every DGE team since 2010 has had to live up to Octodad, and compare its own success to that of the Young Horses — for better or for worse.

But for now, the Horses have all grown up, and are about to finally unleash this suited cephalopod on the world — and Tibitoski’s very well aware of the fact that only his team could have gotten this far together.

“I’ve always kind of jokingly told myself that no-one’s dumb enough to make an octopus fatherhood simulation,” he says. “We’re the only ones ridiculous enough to pull it off and think it’s a good idea.”

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Fire watch One Year Later

Writer Sean Vanaman looks back and talks about Campo Santo’s next game Colin Campbell

Just over a year ago, Firewatch released to positive reviews and commercial success. It was an intriguing exploration-puzzle story set in a beautiful wilderness. But its main strength was in creating believable characters — Henry and Delilah — who spoke like human beings.

With sales of more than a million copies, developer Campo Santo is now working on its next project: unannounced as yet. I sat down with writer Sean Vanaman to talk about the direction he wants to go in next, and how he feels about Firewatch one year after its launch.

One thing that becomes clear in the interview is that Vanaman likes to talk. The first thing he’s happy to state is that there will be no new Firewatch game, although a movie is in the works. “Firewatch is done.” he says. “I’m going on the record and saying Firewatch is done. Henry and Delilah will not be characters in a future Campo Santo game.”

FUTURE PLANS So, what’s next?

“This is going to sound egotistical but a lot of the work I’ve done with Jake [Rodkin] usually ends up having a pretty strong corollary with how I feel about my life at that moment. That’s pretty fucked up when you think about the last two games I’ve worked on [The Walking Dead and Firewatch].

“But my life’s pretty good right now. On the one hand, how do we make a game that has us inside it? On the other hand, how do we push ourselves to do something new and different?

We jump between those two things.” What can he say about his new project?

“We’re working on something that I think is totally different from Firewatch. But I’m not sure right now. Maybe when people play it they’ll be like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s obviously the follow-up to Firewatch.’

“We haven’t played it yet so we don’t know.

We’re still building bits and pieces. But we

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have a real core. The thing we’re working on right now will come out. There’s enough momentum behind the project where we’re really excited about it and where it’s going.

“Because Firewatch has been successful we’ve had the opportunity to completely reimagine and re-examine every single aspect of our pipeline. How can we build better stuff?

What sucked on Firewatch? What did we want to put into that game, but we were limited by our processes and tools?”

CANCELLED PROJECT Before this current project, Vanaman says he and team worked on an idea for about six months that was then cancelled.

“We had this awesome idea and we just built it and it didn’t work out. We thought of it as a game whereas everything I’ve ever worked on, they’ve always started out with ‘How should this make you feel?’

“We kind of went the other way with it and said, ‘Let’s do everything differently. Let’s make it a different way.’”

“Amir Rao from Supergiant said to us, ‘So let me get this straight. You made a game that you liked and that sold well and your response was to delete everything and start over and give everyone new roles?’ He said, ‘Why not change half of it instead of all of it?’ And I was like, ‘Oh... yeah, that works.’

“But we learned a lot from that about how to codify our processes and our pipeline and there were things we didn’t throw out.”

One of the more outlandish attempts to try a new approach came from Vanaman, who decided to recuse himself from the creative process, just to see what might come through.

“I had this idea where I was not going to say a word. I told everyone in the studio this. I’m not going to have any ideas or say anything for months. I don’t want to be the loudest voice in the room. I don’t want to suck all of the oxygen out of the room.

“That was a mistake, though, because by the time I had some ideas to add, everyone was like ‘Thank you. Now can we all just work together like normal instead of you being like some weird manipulator’ so we got back to something more healthy.”

A LOOK BACK AT FIREWATCH The conversation turns to Firewatch, a game I admire very much. In my review last February, I said that it “delivers a deft story about loneliness and paranoia in a world of deceptively far horizons and dreamy vistas.”

One of the things I most enjoyed was how it pulled me through a network of corridors, while making me think that I was outdoors. So I ask Vanaman about how this was achieved.

“It was really hard to figure out. At first we built corridors and it was bad. So we decided that where we were supposed to be building walls, we’d carve out more spaces. We didn’t really have any ethos. We hadn’t made a game like this before, so we were just feeling it out.

“We wanted to make a game where you had the sensation of wandering around. It’s fun to be lost in the real world but it’s not fun to be lost in a video game. You get bored really fast.

So we wanted to give you the fun of being lost while always being able to find your way.

“We carved the space from terrain as opposed to thinking about it like corridors and walls. We started to feel the way we wanted it to feel. It was important to us that like there was this buffer so before you hit a wall you knew you were off the beaten path. We pushed the walls as far away as possible.”

HENRY AND DELILAH I was also enormously impressed with the subtlety of the portrayals of Henry and Delilah, particularly the latter who was funny, unpredictable, needy and not entirely trustworthy.

“I guarantee you that one of the first things I ever wrote down [for Delilah] was ‘likable fuck up.’ People don’t think about this but Lee Everett [a central character in Telltale’s The Walking Dead] was a likable fuck up. I just always liked likable fuck ups. We can all root for them. Everyone sees themselves as that and if you don’t you’re a narcissist or a sociopath,” he says.

“I find it easy to write characters when they are a version of me. Henry’s a version of me and Delilah’s like a weird version of me. I know her the same way as a close friend. They end up feeling like an extension of you because of

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how much you’ve brought them into your life and then you start to identify a little bit.”

The emergence of gently flawed characters as video game heroes has changed the way games are represented. Grizzled, wise-cracking nihilists are on their way out, as gaming’s audience demands something… anything… with a little more meaning.

“An action-adventure character is mostly like the world’s best murderer. If we did a game where you had a gun and shot somebody then the words that came out of your character’s mouth would be all over the map and wouldn’t have meaning. The character would be completely bewildered. Like, what have I done?

“If it was something dark like Firewatch it would be somber and awful and quiet. That gun shot would echo through the valley for a whole minute.”

WALKING SIMS Games that focus on story as much as mechanics — narrative games or walking sims — are increasing in popularity. Vanaman’s work on The Walking Dead did as much as anyone’s to thrust story into the center of gaming.

“It’s a really thrilling time,” he says. “There’s enough of an audience. The possibilities of what a game can be [are] so broad now with the work that we’re doing and Giant Sparrow and Fulbright and others.

“It’s not just about genre. I thought the first four hours of Resident Evil 7 were sublime and then I understood that they had taken so many things from Gone Home.

“It was almost like a love letter [to Gone Home]. Just the mix of quiet moments where you’re not shooting things and you’re just exploring and puzzling through the world and being spooked by a clunky noise. I was so pleased that games can adopt some of these modes of design. It’s thrilling to me.”

ACTIVISM AND POLITICS Firewatch is about the American wilderness.

Campo Santo might have left the game behind, but some of its lessons are still part of the company’s activities. Few people can have

come away from the game without some appreciation of our wild spaces.

“We’re working with a group called keepitpublic.org right now to help promote education around public lands in America. The federal government shouldn’t reduce it. That stuff ties into Firewatch.”

He offers, perhaps, a tiny clue as to the themes of Campo Santo’s next game.

“No one wants to hear me write about why I think we should have a national service program or the National Endowment for the Arts. But we’re always going to write stuff that’s aware of the social facts and the social facts are a lot different than they were when we started working on Firewatch.

“The idea that games shouldn’t have politics in them is fucking bullshit. Everyone knows that. Art is politics. Like, welcome to Earth.

So we’re political in terms of the social facts of the characters, but we’re not going to do anything about, like, the rise of Trumps.”

I ask him how he feels, overall, about Firewatch, now that it’s been a year.

“Who gets to make games like that? It’s outrageous. And then to turn around and see it be successful? I feel very grateful to Firewatch.

“I had to do a video capture of it recently. I see flaws in it, but I also look at it and I’m really happy. Like, ‘Yeah man. Look at the fucking thing we made.’”

Dead Cells How player criticism helped make the game what it is today Samuel Horti

By any measure, Dead Cells has had one hell of a stint in Early Access.

Since developer Motion Twin pushed it to players in May it’s sold over 850,000 copies, been showered with praise from critics and players — 94 percent of its 15,000 Steam reviews are positive as of writing — and turned feedback from fans into heaps of new and exciting features. It’ll be ready for a full release next week: August 7.

But the outlook wasn’t always so rosy. Lead designer Sébastien Bénard tells Gamasutra that his team were “really frightened” about launching into Early Access, especially with talk of an “indiepocalypse” swirling at the time.

“Some big indie titles had failed at this type of thing…[so] at the beginning we were very cautious,” he says. “It wasn’t something we were confident in.” In that case, how did the team turn a tentative start into a huge success?

What advice can Bénard offer other developers entering Early Access? And what are the studio’s plans after August 7?

“It wasn’t something we were confident in” The early fear melted away after the first major update, Bénard says. Part of the caution came from the team worrying about aggressive pushback from players, but the response to early changes was “really reassuring.”

The key to keeping fans happy was ensuring the team didn’t overpromise, and only stamped concrete release dates on features they were certain they could deliver.

“If it was some kind of experimental thing, we’d just explain that it was experimental, and that it might not survive Early Access,” Bénard says. That was true of multiplayer, something the team mentioned as a possibility early on: it was always described as a “maybe,” so fans weren’t angry when the idea was ditched.

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Criticism proved even more useful than praise, Bénard says, and was vital to shaping Dead Cells. He believes that most criticism contains “good arguments” and he made it his mission to get to the root of any that he deemed valid. “Even if I don’t agree with some points, usually there’s some meaning we can take out of it,” he says. “Most important feedback is negative — it’s really useful for us to focus on it and understand the things that people didn’t feel was right with the game.”

The team was always prepared to make fundamental changes if fans didn’t like a feature, he says, pointing to the game’s weapon upgrade system as an example. The first version of the in-game Forge let players boost the stats of their favorite weapons. Fans largely liked it, but a small section of players opposed it because it encouraged players to stick with a few, powerful weapons throughout their playthrough, rather than trying out every weapon Dead Cells had to offer.

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Even though the pushback came from a “small part of the community,” the development team felt “something was really off,” and decided to rework the system to the one they have today, which gives players a higher chance of finding better weapons across the board when they upgrade their Forge.

The key to turning feedback into action was to go in with an open mind. The team had a road map at the start of Early Access, but they concentrated on learning from players. Bénard spoke to fans on forums, and the team would give codes to smaller streamers that would have the time to play and talk with the team.

One of the game’s most important features — how players build their characters — was 90 percent inspired by ideas Bénard picked up during one of those forum discussions.

“Initially, I was not happy with the system,” he explains. “So I had a long and interesting discussion with players on the forum, and they came up with tons of interesting ideas about

“It’s the feeling that even if your idea is not taken, it has been heard. So it’s a small thing that made players feel involved.”

how to make a proper build system. I took this as a huge inspiration for the final system.”

In total, he estimates that 40-50 percent of all changes during Early Access were based on player feedback, including some that “weren’t planned at all” at the start of development.

To encourage constructive feedback, Motion Twin told fans every time a change was made as a direct result of a community suggestion, adding a line to that change in patch notes. In some updates, most changes would carry this mark. “It’s the feeling that even if your idea is not taken, it has been heard. So it’s a small thing that made players feel involved.”

Bénard says Early Access was so useful that, if he could go back, he’d take the game into it earlier to give players more chance to pick it apart. It’s something he’d do for the team’s next game provided the genre fits—and that, for the moment, is up in the air. He says they will do something “very different” to Dead Cells, which all but rules out a sequel, at least for the moment.

“If you have a huge success under one license and just do everything you can to make the license work, eventually you will just die,” he says. “We have plans for Dead Cells, and we want to support it down the road, but we don’t think we should [just] stick with it.”

Motion Twin is currently “exploring some ideas” for the next game—Bénard says he hasn’t landed on anything concrete, but mentions that the team has experience with “community-based games… games based on actual communities, and making them interact in the most horrible possible ways”.

We likely won’t find out more for another six months, he says, during which time the team will hold internal game jams. Their continued work on Dead Cells will begin with beefing up the currently simple mod system to allow for “in-depth level creation mods”, which could change the shape of the game going forward.

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Review: No Man’s Sky NEXT The Final Frontier Fergus Halliday

It didn’t take long for the initial enthusiasm around No Man’s Sky to morph into something well beyond the control of its creators.

Calcified by the hype-driven marketing around the game, the pitch for No Man’s Sky underwent a metamorphosis. It went from a procedural-generated survival game from the makers of Joe Danger to something else entirely. An interactive experience so immersive and engaging and sprawling in both content and continuity that it promised to be the last game players would ever need to buy.

Eventually, reality had to snap back in back in. But not until it was too late.

In the lead-up to its arrival, the fervor around No Man’s Sky was hyperbolic at best and borderline-religious at worst. It was also catastrophically and utterly divorced from the reality of its actual development. There should be little surprise that the backlash was as myopic and caustic as it was.

Since then, No Man’s Sky has been undergoing a second metamorphosis of sort. This time, things are a little more low-key. Bit by bit, Hello Games have been digging themselves out of the ashes with a series of major content updates for the game. First, they

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added additional base-building mechanics with the Foundation update. Then, they fleshed out the game’s single-player and shared-universe systems with the Atlas Rising update.

Now, they’re making the jump to full-blown multiplayer (and the Xbox One) with the arrival of No Man’s Sky NEXT.

This Has Happened Before And Will Again

“NEXT makes the best parts of No Man’s Sky deeper, more diverse and accessible”

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Technically speaking, everything is technically new this time around for me. Having already gone through my own cycle of hype-and-disappointment over a procgen space exploration game with Spore, I skipped No Man’s Sky when it initially released.

For those like me — or those who were pushed away by vitriolic reputation attached to No Man’s Sky — the gist of the game is as elegant as it is intriguing. You wake up on a remote planet in a crashed spaceship. You receive a cryptic message from someone — or something — called The Atlas.

Almost everything in No Man’s Sky: NEXT essentially comes down to the process of gathering and crafting to meet and manage this hierarchy of needs. But where that loop takes you that is entirely up to you. You can kick it with the game’s various space-faring alien civilizations or go hunting for alien artifacts.

Become a bounty-hunter, explorer, builder or merchant. The galaxy is your oyster.

If you’re someone who felt burned by No Man’s Sky as it was at launch, NEXT does a lot of heavy-lifting to try and bring you back into the fold. On this side of the event horizon, there have been a staggering amount of additions and changes. Even though the fundamentals haven’t changed, it definitely feels like No Man’s Sky has evolved.

In NEXT, everything is more streamlined.

Plus there’s a whole lot more to actually do.

There are new planetary vehicles, base-building, interplanetary portals and, as advertised, proper co-operative multiplayer for up to four players. You can even begin to build your own armada of freighter ships. Once assembled,

you can send this fleet out to complete missions or call them in when you need backup.

It would be misleading to say that these additions make No Man’s Sky: NEXT a whole new game or the game it should have been at launch. But they do serve to make it a concretely better game than that of the past.

So Long And Thanks For All The Fish Still, no matter your ambitions, the core loop in No Man’s Sky is very much the same as it was before the update. Pursuing your space fantasy of choice always comes down to an identical cycle of wandering alien landscapes, zapping things with your mining laser to collect resources and then using them to craft structures and completing upgrades.

In theory: being a space-pirate, mercantile maven, intrepid space explorer or cosmic commandant should feel like very different pursuits. In reality, they’re all just different shades of this same type of busy-work. NEXT changes a lot of things about No Man’s Sky — but it doesn’t change this.

If you got bored after a dozen or so hours at launch, it probably won’t take you too many more hours before that boredom begins to creep back in with this update. Especially if you don’t have friends to play with online. NEXT makes the best parts of No Man’s Sky deeper, more diverse and accessible - but Hello Games haven’t tinkered with the broader flavor of the universe all that much.

To play devil’s advocate here: not that this busywork is necessarily bad. Sure, I get the case that it can be a little dull and repetitive.

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But as fans of No Man’s Sky will contest, there’s something zen to it. It’s almost like a combination of Spore and Minecraft.

At times, it even blends with the trappings of the game’s science-fiction universe to produce charming micro-narratives. A pit stop for fuel on a seemingly-uninhabited moon can quickly spiral into an adventure of its own. At their best, the mechanics can paint the framework’s canvas with the most galvanizing of colors.

If this was a game I had the chance to play in high school or university, I could easily see myself sinking hours into it, amassing resources, reputation and rewards aplenty.

The Bottom Line Of course, if you were to string it all out, there’s more to do in No Man’s Sky than anyone could have time to accomplish within even a lifetime of play time.

Courtesy of a few post-launch refinements, Hello Games’ lofty ambitions to build a universe simulator now delivers impressive results. However, like Minecraft, the exact mileage you’re going to get out of those results is ultimately going to come down to how much time you’re willing to put in.

I don’t know if I’ll ever have the time to fulfill my ambitions with No Man’s Sky — but I know I want to. Even if the odds are stacked against it, the literal and metaphorical stars in No Man’s Sky can sometimes align to produce majestic results. And when these constellations can’t be found anywhere else, sometimes is all you need.

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WE HAPPYFEW A role-playing survival game that is willing to take risks Colin Campbell

All video games are worlds of facades, but We Happy Few investigates the very idea of phony fronts. It’s a story about the amount of effort we put it into performative happiness and the concealment of emptiness. Through a meticulously constructed universe and an outstanding script, this game offers an experience that’s genuinely fresh and confrontational in nature.

I’m about midway through the role-playing adventure, and it’s clear to me that its creators don’t just want me to have a bit of fun.

This is one of those rare games that makes me feel discomforted. It is unafraid to confront its players, to be strange — not in the cheeky, playful of way so many of its contemporaries, but in a darker, nastier, more disorienting fashion, delivered with a sharp edge of wit.

Its strangeness isn’t limited to the psychedelic 1960s alternative-history that have garnered the game attention through two years of early access. Rather, it’s the powerful thematic tensions of shame and social coercion, and how they entwine the story’s characters.

We Happy Few’s tale is a gripping mystery that plays out like a highly emotive narrative adventure. Along the way, it bolts on all the paraphernalia of role-playing games, such as side-quests, upgrade trees and crafting, but the story goes far beyond the familiar tropes of that genre. We are not here to crawl dungeons or to save the universe. We are here to escape from our own humiliation.

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This marriage of an original story with standard RPG mechanics creates an experience that is both arresting and fulfilling. It is not without its faults however. Sometimes the game suffers from weird bugs. Its missions can feel outlandishly perverse, requiring specific actions or items. But it’s hard to fret over its flaws when We Happy Few takes the risk of doing something new.

The words “we happy few” are taken from Shakespeare’s Henry V, when the hero exhorts his beleaguered English troops to press on against their more powerful French foes.

“From this day to the ending of the world… we few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.” Henry goes on to mock the shameful Englishmen, safe at home, rather than risking their necks for king and country.

Brotherhood and an intense aversion to societal shame is at the core of the game’s story. In We Happy Few, England is a sorry shadow of itself. Following defeat in World War 2, many young people were sent away to victorious Germany. One of them was protagonist Arthur’s beloved brother Percival (those Camelot names are another nod to England’s martial mythology in the game). Now, 14years later, Arthur is painfully ashamed about the loss of Percival. (One abiding mystery throughout the game is why, or how, Arthur managed to avoid being taken.)

Arthur resolves to escape his dreary little office job, and find his brother. But the world he lives in is hostile to any show of individuality, regret or unhappiness. In this version of 1960s England, the people have chosen to throw off the pain of the past, to live entirely in the present. Society’s elite inhabit a gaudy Mary Quant-world of swinging parties, fabulous fashions and happy pills.

Order is maintained by a corps of horribly grinning cops. Citizens are expected to be high, all the time, on a narcotic called Joy. The people wear creepy, smiling masks that hide any sign of distress. When they talk, they speak of trivial, pleasant things. Anyone who fails to conform can expect to be beaten to death.

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Outside the glittering Austin Powersstreets, another class of people exist in a miasma of desperate misery. Stricken by poverty, disease and addiction, they roam the apocalyptic countryside. Both sides of this unique society hate one another outright.

Arthur must negotiate these different worlds as he quests towards his goal, pulling in allies and making enemies along the way. In order to avoid being killed, he must constantly find ways to “fit in,” which means wearing the right clothes and behaving appropriately. This is not a world where the hero can march around in steel armor, waving a sword around. Arthur’s greatest asset is anonymity.

Arthur is an unlikely hero. He isn’t special.

He doesn’t like hurting people, and he isn’t very good at saving the day. He speaks like a man who understands he’s not cut out for the challenges ahead. Each new obstacle is a new outrage on his limited sense of self-worth. “I don’t even want to be here,” he whines.

If you loved The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you’ll be in good company with Arthur. He’s not unlike his namesake, Arthur Dent, bouncing along on the whims of fortune and the absurdities of other people in order to get by. His humor ranges between light understatement to overblown hysterics of the “fuck… fuck!… fuck!!!” variety.

As I play through the missions, I gain experience which I spend on augmenting my health, combat ability or stealth skills. My playthrough, so far, has mainly been about running and hiding. I’ve used combat only

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H when forced to do so. Arthur is not a powerful warrior, but he can sure run fast. The augmentations are almost irrelevant to me, though I expect they’ll become more important as I continue to play later into the game.

Stealth is a more effective tactic than violence, though it can be hit or miss. In this first-person game, it’s sometimes difficult to cover all corners while sneaking around, and I passed through a few missions more by luck than skill. There were occasions when I completed a task just by running pell-mell through the scene, trying to stay alive long enough to get the job done. I feel sure this was not what the game designers had in mind.

Looting and crafting are more important than fighting and sneaking. Many missions require that I either find, or make, a particular thing. It can be frustrating to get to the end of a mission and find out that I have to go back and find the ingredient I need to make a lockpick. But then, I ought to be more prepared.

It’s a good idea to search and loot every cupboard and dustbin. If looting isn’t your bag, you might not love this game.

What’s most impressive about We Happy Few is how carefully its world has been created. It’s a place that takes the youthful optimism of the 1960s and transposes it with environmental disaster and post-war decay. This is a fascinating juxtopositon, a refreshing break from the battlefields, wastelands, medieval fantasy worlds and grand space opera that have become the foundation of so many games of this style.

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Environmental objects throughout the world seem to scream of desperation and decomposition. From furry-carpeted nightclubs to abandoned houses; from eccentric ‘60s architecture to broken neo-gothic churches, We Happy Few offers a pleasing variety of locations that all contain misery. Within those locations, live a cast of non-player characters who feel solidly unhappy and realistically doomed, mainly due to an outstanding script and superb voice-acting.

This is where We Happy Few shines brightest. The dialog and character barks in this game are second-to-none. They are funny, human and uncannily realistic. As someone who grew up in England, I felt I recognized many of the fussy, indignant, precious,

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hilarious and kind people who I met in this game. But I suspect that this feeling translates to people of all nationalities.

Perhaps this is what makes We Happy Few so unusual. It is beautifully and carefully written. The words that come out of this game are better than anything I can recall in even the best narrative adventures. The script has clearly been elevated to a place of prime importance. It’s been honed by writers and actors working together to create a coherent universe that’s as frightening as any hellscape dreamed up in more lavish fantasies. If you’re looking for something out of the ordinary to play, you’ve found it.