Category: Gaming Interviews

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Intricate storylines, nuanced characters, and beautiful 2D environments. When you think of Wadjet Eye Games, all of these elements spring to mind. So it was with some surprise to hear that the latest sci-fi production they’re working on, Technobablyon: Birthright, a sequel to James Dearden’s 2015 Technobablyon, would be in 3D. Curious to find out more, I sought out acclaimed writer/designer Dave Gilbert at EGX Rezzed in London to chat about revising people’s perception of his studio, Unavowed’s huge success, and what indie developers should be doing in this day and age to get their games noticed.

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Laura Cress: Hi Dave! So, you’ve announced that Technobablyon 2 is going to be in 3D. Can you tell me more about the decision behind that?

Dave Gilbert: It’s just another way of making a game. We’ve been doing the same type of game for a long time. I feel like we’d kind of plateaued; even though Unavowed did do much better than expected, that was kind of an outlier. I was kind of fighting the constraints of flat 2D environments with Unavowed and so this just seems like the natural progression. We’ve been doing the same thing for 13 years, and the tools to do 3D are much better. Ben [Chandler, Wadjet Eye artist] has learned how to do it and it looks pretty good, and so we’ve figured, well, now’s the time since we have money in the bank from Unavowed. The retro label is something that’s been given to us; it’s something that we haven’t sought out ourselves. I never think of our games as retro. I always consider our designs quite modern in terms of design. But some people say they’re retro or throwbacks to nostalgia or love letters to the golden age. I’m like no! They’re not!

Laura: Are you annoyed that people say that?

Dave: I’m not annoyed, it’s just that that’s not what we’re trying to do. But, they look like that. And I can’t deny that’s what they look like, and these two things I haven’t been able to reconcile. So I thought, well, maybe it’s time to try to do something a little more modern, a little less retro in presentation at least. I do know in Unavowed I was struggling with that a little bit, because I wanted to have this feeling of travelling with these companions, your friends, and they’d banter and talk around you as you did things, but it didn’t really work because of the 2D. Sure, they would talk, but they would just stand still while you wandered around the screen, and as soon as you did anything, it would interrupt them, and that did annoy a lot of people.

Laura: So part of the reason behind the change was to rectify that?

Dave: Sure. If it was a more 3D environment where you could walk and explore while your friends are chattering around you – that’s what I was going for. And so I was talking with Ben and thought, why don’t we just do that?! (laughs) It’s sort of scary because we’ve been doing this one specific thing for a long time, but I don’t think our games are successful because of the 2D. I think if you’re only playing our games because they have the retro look then that makes me sad because there’s a lot more to them than that!

Early work-in-progress screenshot from the upcoming Technobabylon: Birthright, Wadjet Eye’s first adventure in realtime 3D

Laura: When it was announced that you were looking to make Birthright in 3D, people started throwing up the old comparisons of adventure games that moved to 3D but didn’t do as well, like Escape from Monkey Island…

Dave: Yes, I was like, oh sure, bring up Escape from Monkey Island. I’ll try and make my game like one of the most reviled games in existence. Thank you! (laughs) The tools are different now. You can make good games in 3D very easily now. Most adventures are in 3D and they look great. I think Escape from Monkey Island came out literally twenty years ago – we can do better now. I joke that in 2006 I made a game that looked like it came out 15 years earlier and we’re technically doing the same thing now: making a game that looks like it came out in the early mid-2000s!

Laura: Whereabouts are you in terms of development for the game?

Dave: It’s hard to say because there’s so much to tweak and change. We’re about a third of the way through the design. There’s a lot of recurring areas that we reuse. It was a big learning curve in terms of how to get everything made. At GDC Ben described it much better because he’s the artist, but basically at one point he realised he’d learned so much that the way he was doing things was completely wrong – it was taking too long and looked ugly and so he re-did it all in a month!

Laura: Will this be a direct sequel to Technobablyon?

Dave: Yes. You only play as one of the three characters though; Technobablyon had three characters and you bounced between them. In the sequel you just play as Latha, who has just joined the police force, and so she’s kind of finding her way. She’s a cool character. And now that we’re using 3D, there’s a lot more we can do with The Trance as well. That’s what I loved about Technobablyon – whenever I give James [Dearden, of developer Technocrat Games] feedback, it’s just “more Trance!”

In the Technobabylon sequel, the protagonist Latha will have full freedom of movement at the range

Laura: Will the sequel have a branch of endings like Technobablyon did?

Dave: Yes it will, and we’ve managed to do something clever where you can choose which ending you had originally chosen in the original. There’s some very subtle branching paths.

Laura: Can you tell me anything more about the “Birthright” part of the title?

Dave: I can’t really say without spoiling it! I don’t want to speak for James; I think I know where he’s going with the title because I know the story, but I don’t want to spoil it!

Laura: You were talking about Unavowed there and it sounds like the success of that almost took you by surprise?

Dave: Yeah!! I was saying now it’s time to move to 3D and do something else, then the game comes out and it outsells everything we’ve done by far! And it gets an IGF nomination and people are flying me out to events and having me speak about the game…So now I’m second guessing myself – maybe I spoke too soon; should I be going back to 2D?! But I think again it’s more that it succeeded because the game was good rather than it was in 2D. It’s all voodoo to me. I don’t know why games do well and why other games don’t. I’m just grateful and lucky people like our stuff! Whatever we’re doing right, I just have faith and keep doing it.

Laura: What do you think it was about Unavowed that so captured an audience?

Dave: The RPG aspect of it might have been a reason. I call it an RPG because it’s got elements of branching, the party stuff – that’s interesting and it hasn’t been seen in an adventure game. I was actually inspired by Jen Hepler, who was at BioWare at the time and who gave this interview in 2013 where she talked about how you can skip narrative in combat-based games, but you can’t do the opposite. And in BioWare games she really wanted to do that, because the meat of the game was narrative – the talking to your characters, deciding which one to bone, that kind of stuff! I thought, that’s a great idea! Why isn’t anyone doing that; someone should do that! Nobody did. So in my fit of hubris, I was like…I’ll make that game!

Laura: So you made the game, and then what happened?

Dave: Suddenly it got a lot of names interested – people that people respect were talking about Unavowed. I also designed it for streaming, and I think that helped. Often when you watch a stream of a narrative game, you’ve gotten the experience, and that’s it! But with the branching and choosing different party combinations, if you’re watching the stream of it you haven’t gotten the experience and there’s a good chance you might want to go and buy it later. Also I pushed it a lot. I always say to developers, if you’re not tweeting about your game every day several months before launch, you’re doing something wrong, because it’s free!

Even Gilbert was surprised by the unprecedented success of the urban fantasy Unavowed

Laura: What else inspired Unavowed?

Dave: I always say, if there’s a big Triple-A game that you like and it has some little aspect that you really like, take that and make that your game as an indie. And so I took that aspect of BioWare titles that I liked – that I choose my party and I go out and they react to things around them and to things that I did. I knew I wanted to make that kind of mechanic, but in terms of the actual setting I’m just a huge fan of Dresden Files and Hellblazer, and I always wanted to make an urban fantasy and there’s not really a lot of them!

Laura: What do you think about the shift even in larger titles towards narrative in the last few years?

Dave: Visual novels are so big so a lot of companies are focusing on narrative because they see, oh, this is important. You know, there’s a narrative summit at GDC now – people are talking about it, more than they used to. And that’s always been my bread and butter, the narrative aspect.

Laura: You can see just from Rezzed the amount of small indie developers out there now. What other advice would you give them?

Dave: Well, when I started out things were so different, so all my advice and tricks I learned were relevant ten years ago. It’s important to stand out in some way. Because there’s so many games coming out, the ones that stand out and do well have something interesting and unique about them. I will also say start small. Don’t make that big game for your first one. You’ll burn yourself out, and you’ll run out of money and you’ll really do damage to yourself. There’s a reason why my first few games were very, very small. 

Latha’s avatar can once again meet up with Cheffie in The Trance in Technobabylon: Birthright

Laura: When will Technobablyon: Birthright be out?

Dave: It might be close to being done at the end of this year, but I doubt it’ll be ready. It looks really good; I’m kind of amazed! I can’t wait to get the voice acting in there and see how that plays out. I don’t know when that’ll come out – or Nighthawks for that matter. We’re hoping for next year.

Laura: Thanks for chatting with me!

Dave: No problem! I will say: I don’t know how I managed to get this far but I’m very grateful that I have. The fact that I can do this for a living and support my family on it and live a fairly comfortable life while doing something that I love is an amazing blessing, and I’m just grateful for that every day. Especially to Adventure Gamers, because you guys were supporting me from the beginning and I’m always grateful for that; you guys have always been behind me and you reviewed my stuff from day one and that’s awesome. But also to our fans and everyone that’s played our stuff – since 2006 – I owe you all so much because I’m here because of that, and I’m grateful and thankful every day.

The 15th annual British Academy Games Awards took place on a rather drizzly Thursday evening at the Queen Elizabeth Hall of the Southbank Centre in London last week. With it came the best of the videogame industry to celebrate and praise the work of their colleagues, and get a little tipsy in the process. Whilst God of War was the big winner of the night, claiming five wins including Best Game, developer Lucas Pope’s nautical detective game Return of the Obra Dinn also bagged two awards for Best Game Design and Artistic Achievement. Wisely staying away from the red carpet and the rain but with limited time, I caught up with Lucas backstage at the BAFTAs following his triumphs to find out what the designer of not only Obra Dinn but also the highly acclaimed Papers, Please thinks makes a great game, and where he might be taking his next no doubt award-winning venture…
 

Laura Cress: Lucas, congrats on your two BAFTAs…although obviously nothing compares to your recent Aggie Award win?!

Lucas Pope: Oh thank you! I was actually very proud of that Aggies win. I didn’t design and create Obra Dinn as an adventure game – but when it was done I looked back and said, “oh, of course it’s an adventure game!” You know, I grew up playing those games, Indiana Jones and stuff like that, so it was a real honour, actually, to win.

Laura: It was quite an emotional acceptance speech you gave for your first BAFTA [Lucas referenced his late father, who didn’t live to see Obra Dinn’s release]. What does it mean to you to win these awards?

Lucas: Well, it’s a chance to get up on stage and give a speech, so that’s one thing! I’m just very happy. Making games is not something that’s easy to support somebody doing. And I generally make games for myself, but to have this kind of validation that what you’re doing is OK and is working out – it’s pretty fantastic, especially as a solo developer. I’m usually surrounded by people who really don’t care about my games so much, which is actually good for me – my family care about me, not necessarily my games. So, to win something like a BAFTA…well it’s pretty fucking awesome obviously – but also, that kind of validation…who’s going to complain about that?!

Laura: Were you worried after making Papers, Please about the amount of hype around it and how you were ever going to follow that up?

Lucas: Oh yeah, absolutely! And that’s one of the reasons why Obra Dinn took so long. It took me a long time to get to the point where I could say “OK, I like this game I’m making and I can follow up from Papers, Please.” But actually I got beyond that point, and because I had kids I realized, “well, this game doesn’t define me. Even if this game is terrible I can still enjoy my life with my kids and that there’s things about living that are not just all wrapped up in this one game.” And so then I got past that point…after maybe another year I should point out; not quite fast enough!

Laura: How long did it take you to get that iconic “three fates” sound down in Obra Dinn – did it happen straight away or were there different variations?

Lucas: I got it right away. It’s a variation on the main theme of the game and I just threw it right in there basically, and it ended up working really well. Papers, Please had this “printer feedback” when you failed which also ended up being very important for the flow of the game, and I wanted something like that again, and it kinda just came out easily.

Laura: Are there any games at the moment that you’ve been playing that you’re enjoying or that have inspired you?

Lucas: I play a lot of Mario Kart with my kids. I don’t know if it inspires me, but it’s a lot of fun! I had a huge stack of games that were building up over the years as I was making Obra Dinn, and when it finished I tried to buzz through all of them. I really enjoyed [What Remains of] Edith Finch. Actually the game that really stuck with me was SUPERHOT, which came out a long time ago and I never really got a chance to play it. When I finally played through it, I envisioned it as the kind of action game that I would want to make. There’s a lot of things about it that were really appealing to me so that’s one that sticks out to me.

Laura: You’ve won two awards here, so you’re obviously a bit of an expert now at all of this – what makes a great game in your mind?

Lucas: Oh Jesus…well that’s gonna cost ya! I first think about what kind of game I’d like to play. I know myself best so I like to think I can make a game that I would enjoy, so that’s where I start every time. https://www.youtube.com/embed/X1igyUzm6xg

Laura: Any inklings of your next game yet?

Lucas: No, I’m gonna take a bit of a rest, I think, and then figure out what I’m doing next. I have a lot of ideas but nothing is screaming out loud enough that I would give up my slight hiatus! If you look at Obra Dinn you’ll see flavours of Papers, Please in it, sort of a sense of that game, and if you look at my next game you’ll see a sense of Papers, Please and Obra Dinn in it.

Laura: Thank you for your time and congratulations again on your win!

Lucas: Thank you!