Ingredients for a Puzzle Adventure Game Developer

Today, I’m taking a break from the usual development updates and getting a bit more personal. I put this post under a new category called “Musings”, which will encompass writing that doesn’t directly relate to Little Ghosthunter.

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When uninformed souls think of indie game development, they imagine releasing a hit game right off the bat, earning millions of dollars and fans. Games like Minecraft and Undertale that rake in sales for their creators like plankton into a whale’s mouth. But when you look closer in the indie space, you’ll find an alarming number of games go unnoticed, get delayed or even cancelled. Statistically, your game is almost doomed to fail. A quick Google search says it’s a 70% chance of failure. Pretty bleak prospects for an aspiring producer. One would question why anyone would go into the field or (gasp) quit their stable job to become a game developer.

The answer is that people don’t become game developers for the fame or the money. They do it because there was something about games that they just couldn’t get enough of. Something they liked so much that it inspired them to create.

A few months ago, when the process of making and selling a game felt too big and scary to ever complete, I started writing this post to remind myself why I wanted to do this in the first place. Here are three games that made me make video games my thing.

Broken Age

Every game enthusiast has that one game that sparked their initial love for them. For me, it was Broken Age. A 2D puzzle adventure game. I didn’t play it, because I wasn’t that much of a gamer yet, but I did watch someone else play it. One day in 2014, my favourite Minecraft YouTuber deviated from his usual content, and because I liked his other videos, I decided I’d like this one too.

He introduced the game like an old friend, talking about how he used to play point-and-click adventure games all the time when he was growing up. As someone who hadn’t even been in this world for a decade, those words were foreign to me. Point-and-click? Adventure? Somewhere in my underdeveloped brain, I’d gotten the idea that it was an old game. It was not. But as a child, you get used to not fully understanding things most of the time.

Broken Age follows the stories of two characters: a girl who escapes being sacrificed to a giant floating monster, and a boy who lives in a spaceship with his disembodied AI parents. You can switch between the characters’ storylines freely, which is helpful if you get stuck on any puzzles.

What drew me in were the graphics. At that point, there were two types of games I knew: Minecraft, and online kids’ games like Club Penguin and Poptropica. Neither of those were particularly renowned for their graphics. That’s why the art of Broken Age was so striking to me. It was textured, organic, and so incredibly comforting. Later, I’d learn this was because everything in the game was hand-painted. I remember watching a behind-the-scenes video and being shocked when they revealed that bit of information. Who knows how I thought video game art was made before I learned that. Maybe I just assumed some computer program just magicked it into existence. Imagine if that was a thing.

It was like I had stepped into another dimension. I was wonderstruck. The writing was hilarious, the characters were delightful, and the story blew my mind. For the entirety of that playthrough, I wasn’t on Earth. I was on rolling hills, in a spaceship, at the seaside, walking on clouds, fighting a monster. And for the first time, I looked at a game and thought, “I want to make something like that.”

Watching people play games on YouTube became my main hobby. My favourite games were the ones with a story. Not necessarily because they were more fun, but because they stuck in my mind for longer.

Detroit: Become Human

In 2018, one of my friends recommended I watch a Let’s Play of a game called Detroit: Become Human. It wasn’t the type of game I’d usually be drawn to, but I decided to give it a shot.

Detroit: Become Human is an adventure game set in a futuristic, dystopian version of Detroit, Michigan. The player controls three androids, a.k.a incredibly humanlike robots, who were built to serve humans. The gameplay consists mainly of button mashing and making choices. Incredibly difficult, heavy, and emotionally demanding choices. I was kind of grateful I wasn’t the one playing because I don’t know if I would have survived being put through so many upsetting moral dilemmas.

I like Detroit: Become Human for multiple reasons. One of them is how it creates atmosphere. It does the nighttime city vibe so well. There was a scene where the android Kara had run away with her abusive owner’s child and gotten caught in the freezing rain. Luckily, they found a laundromat. A laundromat is the perfect place for a futuristic urban setting, in my opinion. The sounds of machines running, the rain falling outside, someone snoring while waiting for their clothes to dry. It would almost be calming if you didn’t have to decide between stealing clothes from a stranger and letting your child freeze.

Also, this game features one of the sickest pieces of sound design ever. It happens when Markus wakes up after being disassembled and has to replace his missing parts. After a good ten minutes of muffled hearing, this is what happens when he finds an audio processor:

As cool as Detroit: Become Human’s sound design is, it also marked a turning point in how I saw video games. I realised how powerful games could be as a storytelling medium. Instead of simply telling a story, they suck the audience into the story’s universe and allow them to interact with it. Suddenly it feels so much more real!

Concrete Genie

One of the few games I did experience firsthand was one I picked up randomly at a Sony store, and it is quite literally the only PlayStation game I have ever completed. It was called Concrete Genie, an adventure game (see the pattern here?) about a boy whose paintings come to life. The game revolves around painting creatures to save your town from an evil force called the Darkness.

Concrete Genie taught me the joys of exploration and collecting things. Running around and climbing onto rooftops in an abandoned town is fun on its own, but it’s even better when there’s a secret in every corner. I sat alone playing it in my living room, oftentimes on the floor because the controller charging wire was too short to reach the sofa. And I loved it. It felt as though the game was talking to me, as though it was made just for me. The other games I knew had always been discovered by someone else first, but this one just fell into my lap like a secret gift from my guardian angel.

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So those were the three most impactful games in my journey towards making games. These games are so important to me, and they inspire my own probably more than I think. It was tough narrowing down this list to just three games because there are so many that I love. If you’d like to read more about the games that I like, let me know and maybe I’ll do that in a future post. But for now, thank you for reading. I will see you soon.

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(Psst! Click me!)

If you like secrets like me, maybe you can figure this one out:

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