Confounding expectations with Gorogoa
Gorogoa presents you with drawings filled with interactive sections. You click on certain objects to animate changes in these environments and are able to travel to new locations as well as superimpose illustrations to redefine them. Its 90’s European animation mixed with picture book presentation felt very nostalgic in an energizing way. It mixed visual elements of astronomy books and old Victorian architecture. It felt inviting to play and it was easy to get lost in Gorogoa, but it didn’t feel too familiar or old. It felt like playing the silent movie equivalent of a point and click adventure game.
When I booked my appointments for E3 2017 I didn’t expect that the game I’d leave the show most wanting to play more of would be a 2D animated puzzle game. Also, when someone said “of course, Jason can talk to you” I certainly didn’t picture the middle aged affable software engineer I ended up chatting with. Not only is the one-person-game usually the product of overactive twenty-something minds, but Jason sounds jovial to me, it’s the name of a Power Ranger or a kid lost at the mall.
Roberts always wanted to make games and “thought about games for many years and took a lot of notes in a lot of notebooks”. It was with around the release of Jonathan Blow’s Braid in 2008 that Jason says “it began to seem economically feasible for a small team to release a game”. His team is even smaller than Blow’s, who had David Hellman doing the art and a composer. Roberts only outsourced the music and is doing both programming and all the art of Gorogoa.
When I told him how the game reminded me of that old animation he responded with: “I only know one way to draw. That’s just my style. So it’s probably been influenced by a lot of stuff I’ve observed over the years. But you know because not being a professional artist I can’t choose. It’s hard for me to choose different visual styles, I just draw it.”
Most of the assets are drawn in Photoshop, but there was a piece of glass that broke in a scene I played that looked quite different. Jason told me that it was a placeholder animation he made with a physics simulation, “I want things to look handmade and so there’s such a thing as things looking too nice. And I went a little bit of ‘yes even animations don’t have to be look exactly right or be as clean as they are in other games’ because I think part of the appeal is it’s like a personal work, like it’s handmade and I try to do everything and I’m not an expert animator so. Yeah sometimes I’m striving to get something that looks a little bit more imperfect.”
But what intrigued me most was how Roberts was design the game itself, with so many interactive options a many of them leading you to new areas, I asked him how he kept track of it all. “Sometimes I modeled things in 3D in Blender because the scene often has multiple viewpoints that you can see it from and things have to align properly from each viewpoint. It’s hard to just sketch things out on paper becausethere’s so many different levels of depth.”
Another challenge for a single person game studio is to figure out the difficulty of the puzzles and how approachable the game is. “I don’t know that a puzzle design is going to work until I build it in the game. So I build a lot of stuff that I end up throwing out because I don’t know a better way to test out ideas. We’ve watched a lot of people play it. There’s still some stuff in there where there are some difficulty spikes. And we want the game to be more complex as it goes along. But there are some spikes that are probably too high too early. ”
Just like the game is an exploration of scenes that you eventually begin to understand as a story, the development of Gorogoa went down that road: “I started with something that was based more on the mechanic and the visuals. From that I sort of discovered the story and then the story pushed back on everything else. I decided I really liked the challenge of making every scene that you use in the game as part of a puzzle also be a scene that works in a story. Once you’ve got these framed storybook type images the mind cries out for that to be an actual story and all those moments to be meaningful.”
My moments with Gorogoa were certainly memorable if not meaningful and I look forward to exploring its story and images when it eventually comes out on PC and iOS.
