It took me a long time to recognize that, and eventually kill a big chunk of gameplay because it didn’t make sense. I also took a while to learn the importance of justifying - I’m making something that’s both a narrative and a puzzle game, and I was putting in scenes to make puzzles work that had no part in the story, that had no meaning. Early on I finished too much art too soon.
Roberts: I learned exactly how much I had to finish the art to test ideas.
GamesBeat: Are there things you would go back and do differently, now that you know? I think once you see 10 seconds of video, you get what it’s about. I’ve seen other people - reviewers, people online - try to describe it online and they can’t either. I’ve never known what the elevator pitch is and never pitched it as a concept.
I proved that you can make a game that’s unpitchable. Roberts: But it only works as a description if you’ve seen the game. But you solve puzzles by connecting tiles together, or stacking them, so the images inside them combine to form new images. It’s a hand-illustrated puzzle game where you arrange tiles on a grid, and each tile is a separate interactive scene that you can move around inside, like a first-person adventure game. GamesBeat: Did you ever come up with a good elevator pitch for the game? It was just the first time I’d decided to-I worked on the game all by myself in secret before then. There’s still stuff in the early part of the game that hasn’t changed a lot since 2012. That would have been back in 2013.Ī lot of it, I did ultimately deal with it. That was probably my moment of lowest confidence, which was pretty early on.
I wasn’t sure I knew how to extend the demo I released into a full-length game. I guess there was a point where I released the demo out into the world early on, and I got a lot of positive feedback, but I also got another round of feedback about issues with the game design and the puzzle design, and there was a moment when I felt like I was doing it all wrong. Roberts: The financial situation was distressing. GamesBeat: Looking back, what was the most painful part for you? It might have just as much craft put into it, but if you have very little to spend on marketing– Something that’s good or even excellent, but in a less surprising way. Something that’s remarkable generates more word of mouth than something that’s good. That’s another argument for making something weird. GamesBeat: It seemed like it was more viral than a lot of other games that you see out there. I let them manage that process for the most part, since I don’t have a good instinct for PR or marketing myself. Annapurna has their own marketing strategy, their own PR company that they work with. They wanted to put more money into marketing and PR than I ever would have been able to. But I didn’t have a marketing budget, for example. Roberts: I funded the majority of development myself. They had a relationship with Microsoft, but it wasn’t if there was just a big bag of money that showed up. GamesBeat: I thought it was interesting when Microsoft worked with the Cuphead folks, that they were still on the hook to mortgage their homes and things like that.