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Episode 13: Andrejs Klavins (Golden Idol)
253 Plays1 month ago
In this episode, hosts Alan and Syrenne are joined by Andrejs Klavins, one of the developers behind The Case of the Golden Idol and The Rise of the Golden Idol. Topics include the development of the Golden Idol games, balancing narrative and deductive reasoning puzzles, and the process of iterating the game design and UX to create the new standard for detective game design.
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Transcript
Introduction and Host Introductions
00:00:21
Speaker
Welcome to the Dragneck and Friends official podcast, where we peel back the curtain on puzzle games and the people who make them. I'm Seren, the producer at Dragneck and Friends, and I'm joined as always by Alan Hazilden, the head dragneck at Dragneck and Friends.
00:00:36
Speaker
hey there Today, we're joined by Andres Clavins, who you may know from their work on the Golden Idol games. How are you doing today? Great, thank you.
Golden Idol Games Overview
00:00:50
Speaker
ah So, can you sort of talk a little bit about the Golden Idol games for anyone that hasn't heard of them? How would you describe them? Yeah, sure.
00:01:02
Speaker
so We are internally calling them deduction games. yeah Effectively, maybe these are narrative-rich puzzle games, where each game consists of a number of cases. We're calling them scenarios. and yeah like First game consists of 12 murders.
00:01:28
Speaker
and the you're facing a sort of frozen in time vignette visual which you can explore. And then the game asks you to answer some questions by filling in some blanks or filling in some puzzle to kind of test your knowledge whether you figured out what's actually been going on here.
Inspiration and Prototyping
00:01:51
Speaker
What was the original inspiration for making Case of the Golden Idol? I think the I mean, the the the biggest inspiration, obviously, is a return of the Obra Dinn, Lucas Pope, in the hit. But I think an important motivator was Mark Down's video about detective games and issues in them, which formulated for us this idea that, okay, maybe there's a problem. like There are not enough detective games which actually offer a detective experience.
00:02:25
Speaker
And i'm I guess I'm kind of curious, did the setting in the world come first or did the gameplay come first? It was gameplay first. Our earliest prototype was made with a my paint art in an engine called Construct in which you can quickly hack up things. And it was set in nowadays in Polish student geometry, where a student has died because he has accidentally overdosed insulin. So, yeah, something completely else.
Design Challenges and Solutions
00:03:00
Speaker
So obviously, the the video highlighting the sort of deficiencies in design in this space up to the point had given you inspiration. But how did you begin coming up with like the UI design, like how much sort of trial and error was involved in like managing that adjusting that I'm assuming that there were a lot of play tests involved.
00:03:34
Speaker
i Yes, quite a lot. Our initial the validation step with this so student geometry example was the earliest version had just ah two locations where you can click on things, see them closer up or read some text, but there were no puzzles.
00:03:56
Speaker
I just asked Annes to tell me what does he thinks what does he think is going on here. When we felt that, okay, this could be interesting, we tried to turn it into a puzzle, ah earliest puzzles had very dynamic sort of sentence building mechanics ah but where you could I think you had to construct a sentence from subject, but object, and then sort them in the correct order. But that we discovered was pretty overwhelming. And it was hard to communicate what exactly we want players to tell us. And if we asked them very direct questions, then it felt like we were hinting too much. So at that point, we
00:04:50
Speaker
So, okay, let's just try out this kind of simpler, less idealistic approach that there are empty slots in the scroll text and the players just gather loads of phrases, words, and they have to decide which they put in where. There we, again, quickly enough, discover that offering loads of options to players actually makes experience kind of worse, and that there is value in differentiating the types of words that we expect in some places, ah because sometimes so it would be like downward, downward, downward, and players have no idea what the hell do we want from them, but what kind of sentence I've been talking about.
00:05:46
Speaker
ah So that was all streamlining. But at this point, I would still you say that we hadn't fully discovered the game. In my mind, one of the main breakthroughs was we could build a small scenario, and that felt okay to play. But then we built a more complex one, ah the another little mermaid from the first game.
Gameplay Development and Breakthroughs
00:06:13
Speaker
And then we discovered that play some players like they would play and they input something wrong, they get message wrong, and they feel like, okay, they want to quit, like they they don't know what's wrong, like there are so many options what can be wrong, ah they're making no progress in the game. And I really thought, hmm.
00:06:33
Speaker
Maybe it would be nice if they could confirm the names of the characters somewhere. Like maybe when you open a close-up of a character, you can drag their names there. And we tried and everyone really loved naming people. And at that point, we had this realization that, oh, right, we we don't need this one very hard puzzle, but we need sort of a series of puzzles, which gradually build understanding in the game and confirm information. And that creates this nice, more gradual pacing for the game. And yeah, and I'd say when we discovered that and validated, that was when Golden Idol Ordinal was born.
00:07:15
Speaker
And then how long was it between like having that first um insulin in the in the dorm room case to like, oh, we figured this out. that This should be like a bunch of smaller puzzles that each inter into link to the overall puzzle.
00:07:32
Speaker
I think we arrived at our early prototype in February and I think this, oh, this works moment was like roughly two months later. Oh wow, that's pretty great. Yeah, it it was a relatively short time. Yeah, I didn't think that much long.
00:07:57
Speaker
And I'm i' curious what your process is for coming up with the individual scenarios. Like, do you plot out the the overall story arcs first and then figure out what points in that would be interesting to zoom into? Or do you like come up with the scenarios and then figure out how to string them together? Or is it a bit of both?
00:08:17
Speaker
We have very much this approach that we try to start from very a big picture because we're sort of afraid of writing ourselves in corners or running into plot holes. So typically our approach is we have We didn't know what exactly the story is, but but but we know what kind of story it should be. like What are its mode themes and and what kind of plot beats would make sense that to be. For instance, for the first game, we knew that we need a plot beat. The discovers supernatural qualities of Golden Idol for the first time. So we knew we needed that.
00:09:07
Speaker
ah Then we'd have ah discussions about, okay, like let's let's define this plot bit if if we have already some kind of inputs up to this point, buts what's already known about characters, and what are the definite outputs that have to result from this plot bit.
00:09:27
Speaker
that part is typically not that difficult but then comes a difficult part which is okay now we need some kind of local story which works as a sort of independent story, but at the same time also provides this sort of fulfills this requirement. And that's much trickier in the first game where we had this idea that it always has to be a murderer. We have to think, okay, who's going to die? How they're going to die? And how does it fulfill the big story requirements? And then in this part, we start with
00:10:07
Speaker
So the chronology of events like okay, these are the motivations of characters. This is what should logically happen and then we try to figure out okay but where do we like make the like the stop point like where what what what is player playing what are they discovering and here we always run into a problem of drama versus investigation because it's it's always exciting to show something dramatic like
00:10:38
Speaker
you know, someone's
Creative Direction and Team Expansion
00:10:40
Speaker
falling from a cliff. But that kind of spoils the investigation part because instead of showing a body by the cliff where you can't figure out what happened to the body, you kind of already know what's going on. But on the other hand, it sometimes serves better as a spectacle. Yeah. And from that moment, yeah, and usually when we work out details of this local mystery,
00:11:05
Speaker
if If it feels like we we are happy to slightly tweak the big but story elements as well. My typical example is that we we originally had planned to kill off 3rd game character Walter Keene, the gentleman robber.
00:11:23
Speaker
in the forest cabin scenario. But when we started the writing it, we realized, he seems like a cool guy. Actually, we'd like to keep him around, and so he actually became a pretty central character in the game. But we we we try also not to be very Not to plan out ahead what exactly should happen. Like in detail, like we just want to, okay, broadly we need this plot bit, but what exactly is going to happen then we will discover then when we start working on that plot bit. Yeah, that's pretty much our process. And were you mostly trying to make the cases in chronological order or?
00:12:08
Speaker
actually actually Actually, for the first very first first game, we the original order of scenarios was ah that this reading of Will's scenario and Little Mermaid in scenario, and we had ah developed them in the opposite order and also flipped them, and originally they were swapped. But we felt that players were pretty confused and we were a bit afraid that maybe we were sending them some kind of like mixed message that players are not sure what's happening when, and then we decided, okay, no, like let's offer anything everything linear order.
00:12:49
Speaker
In Rise, as you probably know, we completely dropped it and the timeline is like you visit events very sporadically, which is somewhat linked to the fact that we had to work with an expanded team and people were working on sort of various bigger story arcs and they're not being chronological as pretty valuable for us.
00:13:13
Speaker
Yeah, I mean I think there's a lot we could dig into with the sequel and like how it's different structurally and also also how your team was different. Yeah, I guess I'm i'm curious like how how how big was the team for the first game and how big was it for the second?
00:13:26
Speaker
Yeah, so first game we made just two of us and Kyle Misko composed music. Second game was and built by a much larger team, four full-time employees, and then five content creators as contractors, so and then yeah ma more other contractors here, composer Paul joined. them Yeah, roughly around 10 or a bit more people worked on the game. So it was definitely much harder. It was quite a switch for us. Instead of just being two of us now, now you have to align and manage work of loads of people. Yeah, I mean, how did you manage that larger team? um like how did you How did you make that switch from a tiny team to a much larger team successfully?
00:14:23
Speaker
Yeah, it is definitely challenging where I think our biggest challenge was balancing. So we we found as as contact us, people who we believed had the essentially best experience building narrative mysteries. Will from UK had built a small Detective Game, before that, which we tried out and enjoyed the ah Bill and Danny from Sydney. They had audio, sort of podcast format, escape room, show, and they've been building escape rooms for a long time. And then Max and Nathan from USU also had their mystery podcast, which is more like sort of like
00:15:12
Speaker
role-playing mysteries where where one is kind of like a puzzle game master and then the other one is trying to to solve them and and I as as as we didn't want to micromanage people and and also we I mean we believe that you get the best out of people if you you give them broader goals and And then they can use the creativity to Express themselves So our ideal was that, hey, here is like maybe this narrative arc or this scenario. These are its goals. Let's work together. It's primarily on you to figure out how to how to build it, what's the mystery and do all those things. So yeah, there was this part of wanting to give a creative freedom so to empower them. But then on the other hand, the challenge was it still has to be coherent. It it still has to
00:16:08
Speaker
pass some kind of quality threshold or things that are important to us, like what makes the game feel like it's a Golden Idol game, but not not to become too controlling and the not throwing a chilling effect that people are like, they feel like they're making all the creative decisions for them. um Yeah, that was that was an interesting challenge. Hermetally, I think,
00:16:37
Speaker
We would often, quite quite a lot, challenge sort of the soundness of of events underlying initial scenario ideas. Like someone would ah jump in a scenario and kill someone else and we'd say, wait, wait wait what why is that person killing someone else? like You need a good reason to kill someone. It doesn't happen so widely. Let's work on this some more.
00:17:02
Speaker
then ah And it's hard for me to express because it's, I think it's kind of vibes on mode based, but Golden Idol on the one hand, it's pretty silly game like it has funny moments, funny characters, but the but on on on the other hand, we You never want it to be or to feel like cartoony or goofy.
Storytelling and Realism Balancing
00:17:25
Speaker
Like the events should have logical causation and they they should feel somewhat realistic or plausible.
00:17:35
Speaker
And yeah, balancing these things for the game doesn't feel farcical. That that was also often challenging. And did you design any scenarios yourself in the sequel, or were you just only able to, ah yeah did you have to have more of a director role and you just didn't have time to get into the weeds and design something specific yourself?
00:18:05
Speaker
ah Yeah, it was firstly me and Anast worked closely to together on all content. On the second game, I had much less time to work on the content. Anast as well, he he he became more of this sort creative director who had to have lots of meetings with other people and wet their ideas or challenge their concepts.
00:18:33
Speaker
I, on the other hand, had to manage the project altogether, be more in a producer role for this whole thing. But we we did build together all introductory.
00:18:49
Speaker
arc and the tutorial. Like we always want to go early experience because it leaves the biggest impression. So I think it's super important. And we built not all but most of the conclusion arc and the final scenario. So still we did work on quite a bit of things, but yeah, definitely less.
00:19:19
Speaker
Is that something that as you look forward to what yourre like what what your team is going to be working on in the future, obviously, you've announced that you're there's going to be DLC for Rise of the Golden Idol, but even beyond that, is like the getting back into the weeds, working on some of that creative energy. Is that something that you are excited to get back into and go do? Or are you sort of happy with taking the step back and operating in more of that producer role?
00:19:57
Speaker
No, I definitely want to return to a more creative role. yeah second Second project in that sense was, creatively, it was, I wouldn't say less fulfilling because we still had to steer all of that. but Yeah, there was much more of my time was so dealing with so various non-creative problems. So in that sense, we we kind of want to get back to this more, I guess, fun part of of game development. Makes sense.
00:20:38
Speaker
One thing that I've noticed, and Alan and I have talked about, about the different versions of the Golden Idol games is that they are different on different platforms. Like the UI is different, the UI gets optimized more on mobile than it does for ah PC, etc. like What was the original process and thought process behind going ahead and like doing that?
00:21:09
Speaker
Yeah, the backstory
Porting and Translation Challenges
00:21:11
Speaker
is effectively that a couple of months after the the launch of the first game, I received a critical acclaim and I wouldn't say like its initial sales weren't super strong, but they were kind of climbing. It was showing steady sales persistence.
00:21:31
Speaker
And our publisher, Playstack, they were really happy with it. then And they said, hey, we we we want to try to make like lots of things happen with it. And one of the things they tried was getting a Netflix ah deal. and and And they managed to do it. And the requirement is to have a mobile version. But our first game,
00:21:58
Speaker
And also one the they are built in Godot Engine. And at that point, we we wouldn't like it it it wouldn't have worked with Netflix API. And there would have been like lots of challenges ah but mind that meant that Play Stack said, OK, they will actually rebuild the game in Unity as as mobile versions.
00:22:24
Speaker
And as a result, yeah, there kind of now exist parallel versions. And and and same way it happened for the sequel where, yeah, yes, if Godot's engine-like maturity was maybe a bit further, that moment we might have avoided it. But in this case, there was a bit of parallel development, which which again kind of increased the difficulty.
00:22:51
Speaker
ah producing the game um because and not only we had to develop just content and game as usual, but we had to pass on these materials, export them in friendly manner to our publishers team so they can recreate it in Unity Engine. so ah Taking in mind also that the sequel had to be translated in 11 languages,
00:23:18
Speaker
Golden Idol is not at all a friendly game to translate. yeah this This became a very complex project. Yeah, I actually wanted to ask you if you had any war stories from ah localizing the game because ah it seems like a very tough game to to localize. So yeah, were there any things that like you wouldn't even have thought of initially that like when you came to the localization step, you're like, oh no, this makes everything five times harder.
00:23:50
Speaker
No, we had watched a video of how Lucas Pope had struggled vocalizing. So so we we we knew that this will be very painful. but But a few war stories that come to my mind.
00:24:07
Speaker
So one one one is noticing, for instance, how many places we have texts baked in art. Like in the second game, there's a garden the retreat scenario where there's this serene, nightly garden.
00:24:26
Speaker
And in the background, you can see on the other side, like the Harmony Foundation logo initials, but now you need to create and draw them in in a bunch of other languages where the initials are different. And in Asian languages, you have turned them into hieroglyphs. ah So drawing them, flipping them, and realizing that there are quite a bit of places like that in the game was something we definitely did not expect.
00:24:55
Speaker
We had to drop one puzzle just because it was not translatable. It was a puzzle where like how the acronym IDLE that they give to the device in the second game coms and and And the idea was that so each word that you slot in is like code forms in the end, like ah acronym IDLE, but IDLE is a very different word in various languages and with different word count and letter count. So yeah, that that was just not global. We had dropped that one.
00:25:34
Speaker
and then i know I remember yeah originally this is one of the reasons why we had like we had this idea. We've always felt a bit ambivalent about the fact that grammar often helps you figure out things but store which can of frequently be filled in.
00:25:51
Speaker
Like, it's it's especially it's annoying if you have lots of suspects, but say only one of them is a man. In that case, if you use any pronouns in a skull text, it will immediately hint whether it's he or or sometimes you have like people look and say, okay, here, only past tense makes sense, so I'm going to just look at the words in the past tense. And then I thought, hey, wouldn't it be cool if all the words you get are in a very neutral tense, and then when you slot them in the sentence, it kind of grammatically adjusts. And if you fit somewhere in like mail name, then pronouns that refer to that part in the sentence change to he.
00:26:43
Speaker
That felt like a cool idea, but then we realized, oh no, it means that we don't need to create translation variations for every word that can be spoken in this place.
00:26:57
Speaker
Yeah, that's so much work. Yeah, and in English we could have pulled it off, but in all these 11 languages, we realized that's not realistic. Yeah, because like all the nouns would change their gendered versions as well in some languages.
00:27:16
Speaker
Yep, yep. Loads, loads of dynamic challenges. I mean, ah just when working near the launch of the game, it's kind of but we'd we'd go through these so-called language quality assurance ah rounds and And after each round, there'd be like 40, 60 Jira items in the Jira board that we kept going through. And many of them were like small things like here, text is not splitting correctly, or here something's getting out of bounds.
00:27:52
Speaker
But then you discover something interesting like, huh in the loading screen, typically, you have like 50% sign, right? But it turns out in Turkish, ah the percent sign is before the number that follows it. ah So now you have to slightly adjust such a thing. it's Or or of the fact that... I forgot what it... I think it's in Spanish, question marks is also at the start of the sentence and it's kind of flipped.
00:28:21
Speaker
which in some cases also would cause challenges for us. So yeah, like like localization for the old Nando was, I wouldn't say nightmare, but close to that.
00:28:35
Speaker
Do you think you've learnt any lessons from from these two games that me like you can, like, do you do you have some kind of, like, smart, like, design ideas in your head of like, oh, if we just rejig this design thing, we can make localization easier by doing that? Or um do you think it's just an unavoidable price you have to pay for this kind of game?
00:28:57
Speaker
I don't think of fire did no we I think there are a few situations where we looked at it and thought, ah, if only we had built it differently, it's probably much easier. one One thing that I think it's an inevitable trade-off,
00:29:18
Speaker
One thing that we could always do is ah treat all text fields as some kind of sort of like more neutral, dynamic boxes. like i know You open a letter and it's not fixed size, but it's as big as it needs to be in the language.
00:29:35
Speaker
But the downside of it, it kind of like removes the charm of everything being hand-drawn and looks very in-world, like it becomes... Maybe as you know in some games you open a text material and it's always like this one standardized pop-up. Yeah, honestly, I don't know how we approach it differently.
00:30:00
Speaker
Yeah, no, no, no, no, no good learnings, to be honest. What was the gap between going from Golden Idol to Golden Idol's DLCs, sorry, Case of the Golden Idol, Gold Idol 1, to its DLCs to Rise of the Golden Idol to now working on its DLCs?
Ongoing Development and Player Engagement
00:30:24
Speaker
Like, are you... taking breaks in between and like doing post-mortems to analyze what you can be doing to improve, or are you just keeping the momentum going and moving forward? Yeah, this has been quite but not sprint, other longer one um marathon maran yeah ah but yeah. like for in In my case, for me,
00:30:53
Speaker
ah shortly, like one month after the release of the ah case of the Golden Idol, also my first child, my daughter, was born. So that was ah quite also lots of new experiences and challenges. ah And and off of after the launch of the first game, like the moment when we saw that it has positive reception and it's not quite a flop, we knew that Okay, we we want to do a DLC just because it's kind of like next easiest thing to do. It gives us an answer what to build next without us having to reinvent everything and then building your engine and your game. We had a pretty good idea what we wanted to do. And during
00:31:45
Speaker
that development of of of the DLC. Firstly, we discovered that the so then it turns out fitting all the story ideas that we have in 12 scenarios is much easier than in three scenarios. and and We actually have to shorten things massively.
00:32:07
Speaker
and And then in the end, we realized, okay, we need these to be two DLCs. Otherwise, it's just too hard to fit fit all the ideas in Playstick agreed. Do that. And but at that point, our takeaways when thing like looking at the base game and thinking about the DLCs was that we want them to be a bit more challenging, but it's going to be more experience for fans, more dedicated the audience. ah and yeah we And we wanted to explore this time switching mechanic, which appears in the second DLC.
00:32:51
Speaker
like but but but but That was often a challenge in the first game that if you have this frozen in time scene, it's easy to show various things like spatially, but chronologically it's actually difficult. Like say someone's taken a thing from someone else and you can't really show it. Yes, you can only show that one person now has it. And so yeah, exploring various moments in time opened ah much more but at the same time it also created so much more content to create because now there's lots more things to observe and there's a risk of it being even more overwhelming in terms of how much stuff there is then yeah and and unfortunately we didn't have much time
00:33:47
Speaker
much time for for breaks, like immediately after the second DLC, we jumped in developing the sequel, gathering the theme and everything for that. But there, our observations Yeah, our takeaway for the sequel was that we, as as the first game was so positively received, you always have this sequel challenge. People kind of want the same, but they don't, they want for something new. So you should change some things, but not too many things.
00:34:23
Speaker
And in the end, I'd say we kind of played it more conservatively. We tried to innovate more in the setting, in the story, less in how the game plays. An important thing that we did do is these chapter puzzles, which are in the second game. It is something we wanted to build for the first game, but we did not have enough time and decided to scrap that feature. but For the sequel, we wanted to make it and I think it's been a good decision because it's one of the more universally positively received features. Yeah, it's really interesting that that was something you wanted in the first game because yeah it felt like a really strong evolution of the formula.
00:35:08
Speaker
Do you think that with the sequel, knowing that you were going to be doing that, it gave you more power to make the story more non-chronological and bounce around in the timeline? Or do you think you wanted to do that anyway, just in terms of making the pacing a bit different? At first, we we had this very ambitious idea that the players can access all five chapters immediately, and but they they they just choose in what order they play them. That's creating a kind of like non-linear playthrough, like maybe some, like one person's Gold Knight of playthrough is different. We quite... Someone had to drop this idea because we realized if our characters return and appear in various chapters It's kind of spoiling some puzzles like you can't make an interesting puzzle about discovering this character if you've seen it already in a different chapter
00:36:16
Speaker
And then we thought, okay, fine. will we We will actually like control the timeline, how it's set, not not spoil it, them and instead focus on thematically exposing the characters over time. But the chapter puzzles, ah they they appeared because of two reasons. One was ah people really loved the moment when they realized that scenarios are connected.
00:36:45
Speaker
And they always wanted to express it, fill in something. but the But we also thought that it's a really nice experience if you play through all the scenarios in a chapter and now you have to revisit them but looking for something else. You're kind of reframing what you're looking for.
00:37:08
Speaker
In the end, even though no i'm i'm I'm happy how they work, but I'd say still all chapter puzzles are relatively short, like they add time to half an hour of gameplay time, like the initial playthroughs of each scenario still create the bulk of the game. When did you begin working with Playstack on the original game?
00:37:32
Speaker
It was definitely a year from starting prototyping. We had tried doing marketing on our own. We were bad at it. We failed to track the interest in the game or gather enough wishlists. And so then our next step was looking for publishers.
00:37:57
Speaker
And luckily, they were one of the publishers that got interested in us. They actually approached us. And now we've had a very nice meeting with their head of marketing, Rob, who who in this honest manner said that this game will be very tough to market because it's not like very visually appealing and and its gameplay is mostly happening in people's heads. ah You can't make a nice gif about Golden Idol, but as they've played the demo, they've really enjoyed the process. They still want to bet on this project.
00:38:38
Speaker
And we thought, oh, that's very honest answer. so that That kind of comments us that we want to cooperate with them. And how much of the game within that demo that you sent them at that time?
00:38:50
Speaker
Oh, them actually was quite big. I mean, it's currently is still quite big. The four scenarios, initial one, Cliffside, the Death of the Gentlemen, with the horse, Reading of the Wheel, and Little Man made-in. They were like, say, around two hours of gameplay. Maybe a bit less, but yeah, one and a half to two. So yeah, it definitely allowed them to kind of get the teeth in.
00:39:17
Speaker
As we sort of wrap up, Alan, do you have any last questions? Just as a free free card, like but what's been your favorite part of working on these games?
00:39:31
Speaker
I think the happiest moments are, we have this, so we have the phase where we work out the concept of the local scenario, it's like mysteries and etc. Then we start sort of the building a playable festival version of it. And then during playtesting, we discovered what works, what doesn't. And I really kind of don't like the games or the scenarios where the players have had that like big revelation pretty soon, like they quickly understand everything that's going on.
00:40:11
Speaker
and then they're just like sorting out details. But when the opposite happens, they are gradually gathering details, and then they have this like big revelation moment. They audibly gasp. They're like, ah and they understand what's going on. That's such a sweet point. like then then it's It's like payoff for all that silent, cringy feeling where you silently observe a playlist and see how everyone's getting confused about things that you never thought of. But yeah, then you get these moments of triumph and I think these I really enjoy.
00:40:53
Speaker
Awesome. And do you have any ah questions for us while we have you? ah Yes, definitely. I guess it's a difficult question, but I'll ask it anyway.
00:41:09
Speaker
What do you think hasn't been done or is missing in mystery games that we can play so far? like like like Do you have some like ideas like, hmm, why but that isn't a mystery game? which does that over happens something like that can Can you just rant about it? It's interesting. and i think that one One thing is that I um really enjoy, especially following the release of Case the Golden Idol, is that there are other games that now take some of those gameplay elements and put them into other games that are doing different things. And so it's...
00:41:51
Speaker
Like, for me, I feel like a mystery, like a really good mystery, not game, like a show or a movie or a book is a well told story that is curated from start to finish.
00:42:10
Speaker
that you and maybe the character are figuring out things along the way, leading up to progressively bigger and bigger reveals. And at the end, it recontextualizes how you think about everything. And I think that there are a lot of games that are very good at one of those two things, like the you're figuring out things along the way, or it has a big twist at the end.
00:42:39
Speaker
But I don't think there's a lot of games that fully do both, if that makes sense. Yeah, for me, um, I think I'm really interested in like the perspective that the player has in these games and like, is there a player character or not? Um, like Obedin like nominally has a player character, but it's really just a hand wave. Um, and your game, you just like, you don't even have it. You just like, oh yeah, you're this omniscient presence. Um, you're seeing these, these scenes, um, but you,
00:43:17
Speaker
aren't anybody specific. I think that there's gonna be a lot of games I think that put you in the role of like a private investigator or a spy where like it would make sense that like you're writing these reports um and you're you're more embedded in the world. And I don't know if that's actually like an improvement over your formula where you're just like,
00:43:44
Speaker
ah You're just there and watching. But I think that's something that a lot of the successful games in this genre haven't really leaned into. And I think, um like with the exception of the Duck Detective, which gives you like a really... um like that That's very much a character in that world who has a personality. But yeah, I think there's space for leaning into that more.
00:44:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's an interesting area of something you've been also wondering about. Community games are about kind of like discovering and proving you have knowledge, but instead of just proving you have it, but applying the knowledge through a character is an interesting problem.
00:44:32
Speaker
Definitely. And I don't know if, you know, we'll come up with a solution on this podcast, but it's definitely, definitely an interesting place to find the genre in. So where can people find you? And do you have anything that you want to plug for the audience? ah Except for both games. um um um Honestly, not I mean, I have a blue sky and Twitter account, but I'm very inactive in my socials. But yeah, if if someone thinks it's just me.
00:45:14
Speaker
think um'm it's it's just my Name and surname in blue sky. Occasionally I tweet something about the game. Yeah. Yeah. Andres clavines dot blue sky social. Yep. That's all I can offer. Okay. Well, thank you very much for joining us. Yeah. Yep. Thanks. Thanks for having me.
00:45:41
Speaker
And thank you for listening to the Dragneck and Friends official podcast. Our music is by Priscilla Snow, who you can find at ghoulnoise.bandcamp dot.com. Our podcast artwork is by Adam DeGrandis. Our podcast is edited by Melanie Zawodniak. Please rate and review us on your podcast service of choice, and be sure to tune in next episode for more interesting conversations.