In co-open, lowpolis turn getting lost into a child’s adventure
The Queer Games Bundle is a collection of nearly 600 items by LGBTQ+ creators and teams, nearly 400 of which are independent video games, all sold for just $60. I’m talking with creators from the bundle about their games and their making habits. Visit the bundle and consider buying it.
Yaffle and rayzones work together as lowpolis, whose game co-open appears simple at first. You play a child whose grandmother has let them go to the grocery store alone for the first time. The store is welcoming and has a strong sense of place, including pine cone jam and other regional items. But then you take a peek through the open door at the side of the store.
How long have you been making games?
Yaffle: I started learning about how to make games in Game Maker back in 2009, but it turned out too difficult for me, so I stopped trying pretty soon. Same thing happened with my attempts to learn SDL and XNA. Only a couple of years later, while being obsessed with the Night in The Woods Kickstarter trailer, I tried to learn Unity and it finally clicked. Since then, for several years, me and rayzones have been making video games for various game jams on itch.io as lowpolis (shout out to A Game By Its Cover game jam).
rayzones: i.. don’t think i can remember. Not in the “since before i was born” sense, my time memory is just ridiculously poor. i think the first game we worked on together was from when I was graduating college, which would be about.. seven, eight years ago? It was a very classic-like tabletop game and the idea was basically “the map is HUGE, and also there are random events!!” Fun times, haha. But yeah, the first games i’d want to count were our entries to AGBIC, it’s my favourite game jam.
What tools do you like to use?
Yaffle: Despite having stuck with Unity for a long-long time already, I can’t say that it’s my favourite game making tool. However, I spent so much time learning it (and I am still learning new things about it almost every day), that it’s become hard to pivot to something else right now. I still would love to try something else (most likely Godot) in the near future. Apart from big game engines, recently I started working with ink and I just fell in love with it. It quite literally expanded the horizons of our game making abilities, and I can’t wait to experiment with it more. I’m also still struggling to find time to make a bitsy game…
rayzones: i don’t really use anything special when working — Blender for modelling, graphic editors like Procreate for drawing. i also use Campfire for working out narrative elements sometimes, but that’s mostly because i’ve been using it already for other things and it’s a familiar environment.
i think my favourite part of the technical process is discussing the concepts and doing quick notes and plans on paper with pens and pencils — so those are probably my favourite tools, haha. i also really like mixing media, but we haven’t really gotten to that in our games yet.
What themes or genres do you like to explore?
rayzones: The relationship between the player and the game is something i’d like to explore more: there is a lot of balancing of pressure against freedom against expectations against empathy. i don’t like telling others what to do, but when you make a game for people to play, you usually plan for them to interact with it in specific ways, and sometimes this juxtaposition leads to fun results. In the same vein, to me as a player some things that might be considered “good design” sometimes feel counter-intuitive or stressful — so i want to try and make what would work for me, and hopefully for others too.
Yaffle: I’ve always been interested in slice-of-life stories, and I think I’m generally more drawn to documentaries and neorealism, so translating this into video games in some form has become a very intriguing goal for me. A lot of this also comes from reflecting on where I live, my own identity, and the ways of a just and sustainable living. In terms of video game genres, I think I’m constantly being pulled by MMO ideas from one side and visual novels from the other.
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of making games?
Yaffle: I think, throughout the years, prototyping a game has become my least favourite stage of game development. I feel like it’s also the longest part and the real gamedev wheels start turning only when finally assembling the whole game. So much stuff suddenly changes: something gets thrown out completely, many new ideas get rapidly implemented. In the end, the game usually gets very far from its initial prototype — and that’s what fascinates me in game development.
rayzones: For favourite, i love how games grow and change organically during development! There are so many factors interacting with each other when it comes to games, and seeing the game take shape and raise new questions as it starts coming together is exciting.
It’s a very dynamic process, with a lot of problem-solving and communication between you and the thing you’re working on first, and then between the finished game and the player. And that in turn creates a dynamic that lies somewhere between a collaboration and a game of telephone: you need to think of ways to communicate messages and feelings through the playing experience, trying to predict what the player might think and feel when they interact with your game, hoping that in the end at least some of it will make sense to them.
It also took me a while to realise that i really enjoy watching people play. Receiving feedback is a mixed bag and i tend to be a little scared of it with games, but when you can see someone having fun and feeling something in response to something you made in real time it’s a great feeling, and if they don’t find it enjoyable it’s much easier to understand why when you see what happens in their playthrough, as opposed to when people just tell you their final thoughts.
For least favourite, games take so long to make that they are really hard to finish, i’m better at working in short bursts rather than marathons, and my opinions on things I’m working on tend to change quite fast, so it’s a struggle. i do love the regrounding sessions though, when we understand that we hit an emotional wall in the process and discuss the entire project again, because i always come out of it with fresh thoughts and a clearer understanding of why i even want to make it in the first place.
Is there a game that has affected you recently?
Yaffle: For me there were two big video game moments last year that greatly inspired me. The first one is Terranova that I can’t stop talking about. It’s a very touching period piece about teens in the early 00s internet. The other one is Hardcoded (though I only played the demo on itch), which showed me how a porn game can be a heartwarming experience and also a safe space to explore your sexuality.
[Editor’s note: here’s my interview with the Terranova creators.]
rayzones: It’s been a while since i played it, but MIND Psychometry by Juniper-C is something i keep thinking about, especially recently. It’s hard to give more context without explaining the whole experience, so i can only recommend playing it.
co-open is a narrative adventure game about going to the store. What inspired you to make it?
Yaffle: Initially it was a small idea for the Bar SK Christmas jam: you went to the supermarket with your grandma and picked products for a New Year’s Eve dinner. Then, when we got an opportunity to make a bigger game, we decided to expand on this idea and to make it about a child’s feeling of getting lost in a big unknown space, and also to reflect on social spaces and the people we wanted to meet there.
rayzones: The premise is you are sent shopping, but technically the game rewards you more for doing anything except shopping. A game that we made before co-open, Good Morning Drifter, was about not racing: there’s a small queer DIY racing club where you meet up with your friends and race each other every Saturday, but the game focuses on the one day you can’t participate, so you come to just hang out and spectate, and some of the feelings we landed on with Good Morning Drifter served as inspiration for me when we were trying to figure out what co-open should feel like.
We started co-open as an exploration-shopping game that at first was more focused on the store itself: the whole game was meant to be a large somewhat-surreal store where you could find interesting things between shelves. Like Yaffle said, it was about being little in an unknown space. For me that was somewhat inspired by childhood memories of going to strange shops and feeling like i’m in a different dimension, so we started off with this idea of a shopspace that would constantly surprise you — but the more we worked on it and the more alive the world became, the more it felt like making it about not-shopping made more sense: making it so that the exploration itself is not presented to you by the game directly meant that we could make it more toned-down and realistic, because anything you find beyond the door would feel special, which was more in line with the original inspirations, and gave us more room to explore the premise of a kid getting their first glimpses of freedom and responsibility without judgment. i personally love taking small mundane things and trying to make them more fun and dramatic and significant, so it was more interesting to work on for me.
By the way, the door through which you leave the store area to go adventuring is strongly inspired by one of the grocery shops i would go to as a kid, before it got converted to a supermarket: there were these large double doors where i think the bread loaves were stored, and i would often see a cat enter and leave the area. i was too afraid to try and peek behind the doors myself, and the cat wouldn’t tell me anything, so it’s still a mystery to me.
This store has a great selection. How did you decide what to include?
Yaffle and rayzones: Thanks! We wanted to imagine an alternative, more sustainable way of running a grocery store, and with that in mind we wanted to keep the selection vegan, as well as have enough products in stock that are local to the setting — for some products it is implied, for others spelled out in their price tag descriptions. we mostly picked from our favourite real-life products, some even have design gags that comment on their irl counterparts.
On the other floors, you find people who give you fetch quests. Do you have a favorite of these?
Yaffle: My favourite one is probably the recipe, because of the way how it’s not an obvious one, but how nicely it wraps up the whole shopping experience.
rayzones: The ball quest probably! It’s extremely simple in setup, and you don’t even need to go far to fetch the ball, but the framing is silly and dramatic, and ultimately about the friends we make and keep along the way. It’s also very fun to watch people solve it, because there’s some struggling involved and it fits the plot of the quest emotionally i think.
I love the phone numbers with all the guest writers. When did you decide to make that part of the game?
Yaffle: It was one of those cool late stage development ideas that I value so highly in my gamedev experience, haha. I’ve always loved this feature in other games, but I don’t think it’s a common one (I can only remember it in SiN: Episode 1 and Deus Ex?..), and it’s also pretty easy to implement. And so we asked our friends to come up with some small phone talks that we later integrated into our game world. Also we didn’t want it to be any kind of game collectibles, but it was very hard to track which ones you’ve already found and which ones you haven’t, so we made a phonebook for them later in the game menu.
rayzones: We wanted to collaborate with our friends in some way for this game if they wanted to be a part of it, so when we decided to add phone calls to the game it felt like a great way to add different voices to our phone conversations, because it made the world feel more real, and coming up with different ways to frame and hide the numbers for those calls was a lot of fun.
The art is so lovely. What was it like creating and then drawing the world of the store?
Yaffle: I can only speak for the “creating” part of the question. At first, we thought the world of the store would have much more magic realism aspects to it, but, as we started making the store, we decided to concentrate more on how we would like to experience real public spaces and what would be important for us there.
rayzones: Thank you so much! It might not look like it, because the game’s spaces are pretty simple, but making them was hard for me! i’ve never done level or environment planning before, so pretty much everything was trial and error, and we had to change and cut a lot of stuff in the process, but ultimately i’m mostly satisfied with the end layout we decided on.
i think my favourite part of the map to make was the Rooftop Zone: this was an extra location that we were adding for the itch release of co-open, so it was created much later — it’s very small and detached, so it was easy to make, but i love the mood of it: dark, lavender, inhabited by many pigeons. Huge thanks to Kyle Yerhot, co-open’s composer, who understood what i meant by sending over a track from the Utena OST with messy explanations. ;__; All the beautiful music Kyle created for the game was huge help in figuring out some parts of it!
