![]() You quickly learn that you can make things better for the deserters by dealing with Thompson. GamesBeat: One of my other writers, who’s also playing right now, he had a question about Edgewater. This is a game about decisions, and maybe you want to play through this game a couple of times to see all of them. And by ending Edgewater on a very big decision, which can only go one way or another, we’re telling you two things. We’re teaching you - hey, this is the kind of game you’re getting into. Not just the sense of humor, but also the way the game is intended to be played. We use that zone to establish the tone for the rest of the game. Since Edgewater is a beginner zone - it’s the first zone every player is going to see. We’re encouraging them to take agency and make choices, and those choices affect the story. I always think of this as a game we’re playing with the players. Why give players that decision so early?īoyarsky: It’s a game about decisions. ![]() GamesBeat: Early on, you force players to make a pretty big decision when it comes to Edgewater and the deserters. We like layering humor on top and then something slightly unsettling just underneath. We’re trying to make players feel like, okay, this is hilarious, this is bizarre, this is weird, but if you stop and think about it, there’s something dark about what they’re doing and how they’re going about the research and what they could use the research for. I think the reaction you had, where it’s funny and weird on the outside, that’s really what we’re going for. Poddar: I have a memory of working on that level, and I think Leonard popped in to the writers’ room and said, diet toothpaste, that’s what they’re researching. It’s very silly on the surface, but it’s got some deeper things going on. There seems to be other things going on there. I don’t remember who said it, but somebody threw it out there as a joke, and then all of us were immediately like, of course that’s what it has to be, because it seems really ridiculous, but there’s aspects to it in the game that turn out to be not really all that silly. We were in a brainstorming meeting with some of the writers and Tim and I. We were trying to come up with something that seems a little silly on the surface, but could have deeper meaning. We started talking about diet suppressant stuff. Originally some of the designers had come up with something that seemed fairly standard, and Tim and I were like, no, this has to really reflect back on points that are happening in the story, on deeper themes. We were tossing around ideas for what they could be researching. What happened was, that was the first area we made for the game, in the proof of concept. GamesBeat: Whose idea was it to come up with diet toothpaste?īoyarsky: No, it wasn’t wholly me. GamesBeat: How hard is it to keep that on track while at the same time enjoying the humor? I’ve really enjoyed the humor, but it seems like it would be distracting to make a game like this while you’re laughing a lot. ![]() You do that long enough and eventually you get a pretty funny game at the end of it. If it seems to hit a good note with a lot of people, if it’s making other people on the team laugh, that’s a signal to me as a writer that I’m going in the right direction. We get input from other designers, from artists. We’re putting together a pitch for a level or a character or a quest. We don’t have a writer who goes off in a room and does work on his own and comes back. The way we achieve that, the process by which we try to make a humorous game, is we iterate a lot. It sounds simple to say, but that’s our underlying motive. And the reason we’re doing that, which is the second answer I can give you, is we want the player to have fun. We want our sense of humor to permeate the entire game. It’s central to the design of the game, and therefore writers are responsible for exploring humor, but also artists and level designers and sound designers. Humor isn’t something that only the writers are responsible for. One way to answer it is that the work we do is interdisciplinary. Poddar: I can answer this in a couple ways.
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