From Uncharted to Obra Dinn: Lucas Pope talks about his career in game development

From left to right: one of the hundreds of characters from the 2013 game Papers, Please ; video game developer Lucas Pope in his hometown of Saitama (Japan); captain of the damned pirate ship from the 2018 Pope game Return of the Obra Dinn

The plot of the new video game of the designer, programmer, artist, screenwriter and musician Lucas Pope Return of the Obra Dinn is associated with a huge staff of characters. However, there is one minor detail - they are all considered dead.

Players in the role of the insurance investigator should understand the stories and the fate of dozens of men, women and children. Yes, the game has a damn cargo ship and magic, as well as a huge logbook, a glossary and a long list of names for accounting and cross-references.

Pope is one of the best independent game developers in the world, a man-orchestra who single-handedly created the game of the year 2013 according to Ars Technica Papers, Please . If you do not know this, then the plot of the game seems boring. But like in his other games, Pope somehow again turns boredom into something amazing. When you first start Obra Dinn, the player’s task may seem monotonous. Each crew member is recorded in your virtual book, and understanding all their relationships will be very difficult.

I’m thinking about all this - about a virtual book, about last names, about the number of souls that filled a damned ship called Obra Dinn, when one October day I enter Omiya Station, 40 minutes north of Tokyo. Pope lives in Japanfor almost ten years, and before that, he has worked in the American gaming industry for more than ten years. It was in Saitama that he created the bulk of his game, which was included in the list of the ten best games of the year according to Ars Technica.

Waiting for Pope to arrive to talk to him about this and other games in his career (in particular, about Uncharted 1 and 2 ), I could not help but notice how fussy this station was. Pope would later call Saitama a more modest metropolis of Tokyo, but I was struck by the fact that hundreds of people walk by my side every minute. Compared to them, dozens of dead souls from a fictional pirate ship look rather strange.

Obra dinnPope’s chance was to create something irresistible based on the classic type of games about solving puzzles and juggling evidence. But at the same time, this is a very personal game: the player interacts with the names in the book for so long that he begins to understand these people and worry about their fate. This partially explains why it took him four and a half years to complete the game. As I happened to learn, this modern classic appeared only when Pope mastered the game development tools quite well (including those that he created from scratch), wanting to tell his most integral story in a video game.


To stamp or not to stamp is the main gameplay of the very procedural Papers, Please .


However, formalities can have great power.

“Formality of proceduralism”

Pope finally appeared at the station. It is easy to notice, he, with his height more than 1.8 meters, with sharp, Scandinavian features, a thin beard and long hair, stands out among most visitors to Omiya. His appearance is more suitable for the programmer or drummer of the heavy metal band (over time, Pope admitted that he has experience in the latter).

He brought me to the nearest Doutor Coffee, and there was a reason. According to Pope, he still did not go to bed, and the reason for this is the imminent release of Obra Dinn in October . Coffee at five in the evening is a great start to a conversation.

Pope carefully avoids mention of his anxiety before the release and problems with finding bugs, probably in order to reduce the importance of having to devote time to coffee and interviews. (Perhaps I was lucky by fortuitous luck: Obra Dinn came out while I was on vacation in Japan . And I am so insane that I think talking with the genius of game design is a good way to relax.)

“I love tools. I love to create tools. But no one likes the tools. ”

Pope states that his reason for joining serious gaming studios (namely Realtime Associates in 2003 and Naughty Dog in 2007) was his love for developing his own game design toolkits (outside the“ big ”area tools like Unity, Maya, Photoshop and read). Pope lists the smaller needs of game developers: “Embed scripts in the game. Adding localizations. Tools for placing objects, binding metadata labels. "

“Creating all of this is a derivative of the game itself,” Pope continues. “Some programmers do not like to do this, to do those parts that the user will not see in the finished game. But for me, this kind of work includes the user interface, design, programming and art - all that I love. I like to create tools that solve very complex problems within the game. ”

Pope gives an example of a hypothetical game studio: a difficult and uninteresting task comes up to one member of the team, and the company tells him whose “time is cheap” to solve it yourself. “I believe that writing a tool performing this task is very simple and anyone can do it . Then you really enjoy it. The quality of the material you create that gets into the game is much better, because you do not waste your time on nonsense, stupid activities that the computer can handle. Computers are great for such tasks! What interests me is that I am already different from most programmers in the gaming industry. ”

I involuntarily smile. This sounds like a review of Pope's video games themselves, right? He nods in confirmation. " Papers, Please- this is the formality of the procedure for performing a task, the difficulty is whether I can do it efficiently. "

He is right. Papers, Please constantly returns to sorting and cross-referencing data, only turned into documents and stories of different people. The player takes care the role of a border control officer, and he will have to play Minesweeper with high stakes, juggling documents, checking their text and photos, in other words, it’s like the internal computer tool needed to make the game’s design more efficient Introduces an exciting, drama-filled video game

Obra Dinn has a similar property: it turns a boring idea (processing and sorting a network of AI characters to determine their identity and relationships) into an exciting interactive process (you need to go back in time and use magic to investigate several murders).


Does anyone remember Gearhead Garage ?

From Malice to Gearhead

This property can also be found in Pope’s first game sold in retail stores: Gearhead Garage , published by Activision’s Value department in 1999.

At Gearhead, players had to examine broken cars, diagnose their problems, find solutions (repair existing parts, order new ones), click to change parts, and report that the car was repaired. Like the subsequent Pope games, Gearhead begins with very simple things, but in the process of development shows more and more complexity.

Similar to the following, more successful Pope games, Gearheaddifferent from what you might expect in a car game. The player will never be able to control these machines.

Gearhead was developed by Pope's first company, a studio called Ratloop Games, which he and his friends founded online while studying at the Virginia Polytechnic. The team gathered from around the world, they were united by a love for Quake , they found each other in online matches or on forums. Together, they began to work, each from their own country, on a mod (“total conversion”) of the game called Malice .

The commercial mod was so successful that as a result, the American publisher Quake GT Interactive placed it in a retail game kit. When working onMalice Pope was involved in graphics, modeling and backends. At that time, the team called itself Epochalypse, but over time they changed their name to the more harmonious Ratloop Games. Soon, they as a company formally settled in Virginia.

Unfortunately, the team’s first attempt to create a completely original “third-person sci-fi action-adventure game” ended in nothing. It was an era when game publishers for PCs and consoles owned store shelves, and retailers like Software Etc. and Babbage's gradually faded. Pope’s young team was eager to get the idea across to publishers, but Ratloop noticed the explosive success of selling low-cost CD-ROM software.

Therefore, Pope focused on a unique idea for that time - a game in which you need to repair cars, but you can not drive them. “As a kid, I was repairing cars with my father,” Pope explains. This experience with cars even before he could drive them was remembered by Lucas. “And in fact, this approach worked very well. So we got a game about auto mechanics. "

Ratloop Games developed and sent the prototype to several publishers, noting that every major company had a “cost-effective project department for selling cheap games at Wal-mart.” The Activision Value subsidiary liked the prototype, it published the game and sold about “a couple of hundred copies of Gearhead ”. The Ratloop agreement stated that the studio retains franchise rights, which was rare at the time.

When the game gained popularity, Activision Value suggested Ratloop to expand this concept to other topics, for example, to create a Jet Ski Garage , but on top of this system Activision wanted to make a racing game. At that time, Pope was not interested in creating a sequel in which there would be something other than repairing vehicles and parking them in a virtual garage. This stalemate situation, along with the absence of other projects and the expiration of visas for some Ratloop employees, led to the fact that the development team dried up and the paths of its members diverged.

What DS will give, then PSP will take

Years later, Pope admitted that he was trying to make a sequel to Gearhead for Game Boy Advance , and even an “adventure” mode appeared in his incomplete prototype. Players could actually drive the cars they create. “I wanted to work on consoles, and especially on Game Boy,” says Pope. Therefore, he had to go to tricks in order to achieve the correct operation of 3D elements in the game. According to him, the appeal of the first Gearhead was that players could manipulate the three-dimensional parts of the cars at a time when 3D on the PC was still new. He wanted to recreate the novelty of 3D on the weaker “hardware” of the GBA.

“But then DS came out,” Pope adds. Important for a weak system, the novelty of 3D on the new console was losing its appeal. Gearhead Advance’s potential as a product has ended, so the developer said to himself: “I’ll have to look for a real job.” (Later, Pope posted an incomplete ROM game on the Internet , you can play it in emulators and flash cartridges GBA.)

Pope soon moved to Los Angeles and almost immediately found a position in the game studio Realtime Associates, which had a portfolio of " serious games " and partly funded by Pam Omidyar. (You might find this name familiar: she is the wife of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.)

Pope’s biggest project at Realtime was a 2006 PC shooter called Re-missionPope describes as a serious look at Fantastic Voyage . The goal of the game was "to teach children to get used to chemotherapy, because cancer patients can feel very bad from it." Pope says he is particularly proud of this game, which children met on PCs installed in medical centers. “We made such a thing, and it worked!” He exclaims.

After completing the development of the Re-mission, Pope had to leave Realtime for various reasons. Firstly, the next project was related to the “ military order, ” and Lucas was not interested in this topic. Secondly, the transition of Realtime to serious games (and the departure from cartoon platformers for Sega Saturn like Bug and Bug Too) led to a “tense” relationship between the development team and investors. “The peculiarity of the games is that they look sloppy until there are two or three months left until the end of development,” says Pope. Realtime investors, waiting for the completion of projects, did not understand this.


Our website wrote in 2007: “Like any good adventure movie, Uncharted captures the player with a fast-paced plot and believable characters.”

In addition, Pope caught the eye of Naughty Dog because he saw the first prototypes of what Uncharted should look like . This is awesome, Pope thought then. "Like Indiana Jones, I want to work on such a game." Trying to get a job at Looking Glass Studios during the development of the Thief: The Dark Project and failing, Pope fulfilled his promise then: that he would not be shy and try to get into the next game studio, the work of which will delight him again.

Pope says failure also helped him: the project was canceledJak and Daxter for PSP, and after its cancellation, Naughty Dog began to actively hire employees. “Now it’s wild to think about it, but when I got a job there, there wasn’t a person in the studio who was exclusively involved in GUI tools,” says Pope. “Only the command line and people who worked with the backend” (It is worth noting: Naughty Dog talked about the canceled game of Jak and Daxter , but for the first time they learned that it was planned for the first portable Sony console.)

Naughty Dog: saving the situation and reaction to the Gears

At Naughty Dog, Pope started off the bat, joining the company about eight months before the game was released. He created as many as four serious tools for Naughty Dog’s design and graphic departments: a GUI tool “for designers to plan plans at all levels” called Charter; different game menus; save system; and a set of tools for localization, allowing you to manage the "many thousands" of voice and text files in about 12 languages. “Previously, one employee with the Excel spreadsheet did the localization, and she did all the work herself,” says Pope.

Former Naughty Dog president Christophe Balestra didn’t skimp on the phone when talking to us: “Lucas came to us when we had a big crisis with the Uncharted tool conveyor", - he said. “We were desperate for a good tool programmer. He was one of those who saved the situation. "

Pope realized his desire to work with a mixture of programming, design and art when performing tasks such as creating a menu system. He liked to create icon designs, place them, choose fonts, combine menu pages and trees into a single whole. Each stage of the process did not require a separate artist or programmer. “I could do it myself,” Pope says.

In the process of developing these tools, Pope closely communicated with the team of programmers, which during our conversation was praised many times. He came to Naughty Dog with knowledge of C # and found that developers mostly use older languages ​​like C ++ and Lisp. Pope said team members such as head of design and assistant general manager Evan Wells inspired him to work, inspiring confidence.

“The fun part about working on Uncharted 1 was that we had no idea what we were doing,” says Pope. He reiterates that the team was very capable, but design decisions were constantly changing at the last minute, including having to completely redo the control system.

"The company announced the development of Uncharted 1and then Gears [ of War ] came out , ”Pope recalls. "And Gears invented a modern third-person shooter." Initially, Naughty Dog used a control system in Uncharted , more similar to Tomb Raider , that is, it had more automatic rolls and auto-aiming. “Suddenly Gears came out and showed everyone how to do it. So six months before the release, we changed everything. ”

This “everything” included changing the camera’s perspective, control and the general style of movement, adding a third-person perspective at an angle instead of the standard “view from behind” of the classic Lara Croft games. At the same time, the Naughty Dog development team managed to realize this, keeping a promise and retaining real-time cutscenes, lack of downloads and a plot with full voice acting.

When Pope is asked questions about content that hasn’t reached Uncharted 1, then he standardly answers about “mechanics and ideas”, without going into details. He says a lot of this then turned up in the second game. Then he recalls a series of scenes in the jungle that were drawn and modeled by artists before level designers turned their work into scenes with puzzles and battles. He was shocked at how incredibly these scenes looked on the PS3 hardware, but they did not match the studio’s views on the gameplay, so they were cut out.

Pope admits that large volumes of content are constantly being cut out of games, “but it was wild to see the scale of these cut scenes.”


Luxury landscape of Uncharted 2.

His first and only sequel

Pope remained at Naughty Dog in the same position to create Uncharted 2 . He perfected ready-made tools and developed new ones. For the first time in Pope’s career, he stayed with the company to work on a sequel, in which case he did not even have doubts. His time on Uncharted 1 ended too quickly, and he still wanted to work with the illustrious Naughty Dog team. And he had ideas for new GUI tools, such as the “new sophisticated tool for creating shaders” that would allow artists to write shaders in the language of the game, and then transfer them to Maya and view the results there.

“It was almost like a completely different project,” says Pope. “And it was not my game. I had no feeling that I had to do the same work that I did before. ”

In the process of creating two Uncharted games, Pope began to accumulate the kind of experience that he would never have considered necessary for a good game developer: pragmatism. He recalls the words of the technical manager of UnchartedChristophe Balestra, who ordered employees to cut out an unstable, somehow made camera control system that clogged up the code to some extent. “And if we throw it away entirely?” Pope recalls Balestra’s words. "She is ugly, but the player will never see the code." Pope remembers how he was furious when the game came out and “Nathan Drake in some cases looked ridiculous ... but nobody cared.”

“This is a kind of rite of passage - you change your mind about what is important in the process of working on the game,” says Pope. He admits that this experience helped him get rid of the obsession with an "OCD engineer" when "it is necessary to ensure that the bridge never collapses, even if Godzilla passes through it."

Children's dreams of wooden cows and robotic lizards

As we approached the noodle shop, Pope finished telling stories about working at Naughty Dog. And while we made an order and ate a fatty meat broth, the conversation passed on to his childhood. Lucas already mentioned that he was repairing cars with his father. How it was?


Lucas Pope (left) orders noodles in a cafe in Saitama. In such cafes, you usually need to pay for the order in the machine, take a receipt and give it to the dealer. (Pope speaks fluent Japanese, so he made an order.)

Pope recalls one of the first books his father gave him, it was A Useful Book for Boys. Lucas says that she looked like “the old Boy Scout manual, on the pages of which ink drawings were drawn” of projects that need to be built from scratch. “For example, a wooden cow that moos if you twist its tail.”

Due to the fact that his father worked as a "jack of all trades", Pope had access to a fully equipped garage. “From that age, I started flipping books and thinking that I wanted to do all these devices with my father, and then we spent a couple of months - sawing, pounding, painting - and we created a lot with our hands.”

By the time he entered high school, Pope was friends with a teenager who was interested in robots and computers, and this friendship went well with Lucas's childhood interests. Pope almost immediately decided: "I will make a living by creating robots." His interest arose from disassembling robots from Radio Shack, he connected them to Commodore 64 computers and controlled them through code. Management was "not very impressive," but he already began to dream big in the early 90s: "I wanted to create a miniature lizard that could be ordered to run around and sit in my arms."

An enthusiastic Pope applied for admission to the Virginia Polytechnic University to study as a mechanical engineer. However, after simple construction projects that he created with his father and school friend, he had to face a brutal reality: “I learned that everything is chaotic in the real world. And difficult. I have to deal with gears, grease, switches and sensors, and all this nonsense did not interest me. ” And he could have failed this part of the learning process ... if he hadn’t felt much more comfortable in the programming courses. “As soon as I started studying C ++, I realized that this is what I want to do. The magic is happening in the software. There are no rules. ”

Pope felt like a connoisseur. He has already experimented with Hypercard. He could apply his love of fine art (“I love to draw”) and music (as a child he was forced to study the piano, and he learned to play the drums in a school speed-metal group called Aftermath) in computer projects. And he fell quite in love with Quake , who appeared in stores in the summer after completing his first year of study. (Work on the aforementioned “total conversion” Quake called Malice began shortly afterwards.)

When Pope remembers his childhood and love of games, long before the very first work on game design, he talks about buying NES and thanking him for the first game for this console wasRareware Wizards and Warriors . But he had more pleasant memories of the first console, the Atari 2600. “At that time, in the early 80s, the idea of ​​video games did not take its final shape. It was after Mario that they started saying “here is a video game, this is a side-scroller, you are this little hero”. But in the 2600 era, people were a little more creative. They didn’t have powerful technologies, but various bizarre ideas arose, and I appreciate it. ”

He regrets that he was not touched by the European boom of personal computers of the 80s. “In Europe, Nintendo has failed to drive many different genres out of the market. They always had strange projects there, for example on the ZX Spectrum. Some of these games were terrible, but they left an impression that Nintendo games weren't capable of. ”


The video is in German, but it gives an idea of Mightier - Pope's first independent game.

Add “Indie” to “IGF”

This curious look at things can easily be found in Pope’s “independent” games created over the past decade. The first of them began their lives when he was still working at Naughty Dog. At that time, he had been living with his wife, programmer Keiko Ishizaka for several years. They met at Realtime and continued their relationship, working in various game studios in California (he is at Naughty Dog, she is at 2K Games).

About a year before Uncharted 2 was released, Pope took a two-week vacation and spent it with Ishizaka ... to develop a completely new video game. She is called Mightier.(from the expression “the pen is mightier than the sword”), and it uses the import functions from the camera, experiments with which were undertaken several years earlier by Sony EyeToy, only in this case they were much more ambitious. The game asked players to print puzzles on paper, draw on these puzzles to solve them, and then hold drawings in front of a webcam connected to a computer. “The drawings created a level in the game that you could jump and run,” Pope says, emphasizing that their conversion system could have been what the games for EyeToy were not capable of: Mightier created fully three-dimensional versions of the drawings.

For several years attending the Game Developer Conference (including the first events held in Santa Monica), Pope and Ishizaka knew about the Independent Games Festival, so they sent their game to it. Mightier won in one of the nominations. “We felt that creating our own little, weird games was interesting,” says Pope.

Thanks to this nomination, IGF Mightier also appeared on Steam, but not for sale. Valve simply contacted the couple and asked if it was possible to publish the game for free download. They agreed. Pope still had a paid job at Naughty Dog, so he did not seek to develop his career towards the release of an indie game, and online game stores for PCs and consoles were still actively attracting independent developers.

Although Mightier did not win the main award, the feeling of rapid development of the game and the growing susceptibility of the market to the release of independent projects a year later changed the views of Pope and Ishizaka: they wanted to resign from their posts in the studios and “become indie.” This choice included three important consequences: moving to Japan, where Ishizaka's parents live, a paid contract for porting the Rocketbirds Flash game to the PlayStation 3, and a desire to create a game for the iPhone.

Pope was attracted to the iPhone format, as well as "the difficulty of using touch control instead of standard joysticks." They from Ishizaka quickly came to the game mechanics, which remains incredibly rare in the world of games: the placement and alignment of light sources (candles), so that they spread light taking into account the obstacles casting a shadow. The resulting Helsing's Fire game remains one of the smartest iOS games of all time. It sells for a modest 99 cents .

Fans of the game may be intrigued by the fact that this leisurely puzzle was originally an action game in the surroundings of the universe of wizards and magic. "When I decided that it should be about Dracula and Van Helsing, everything fell into place." Pope says that it was he who became the source of the dark, bold humor of the game, caused by his addiction to restrained British comedies. (The same penchant for dark comedy can be found in weird conversations from Papers, Please .)

Although Helsing's Fire was a collaborative effort, this game was Pope’s first important move to bring all his talents (programming, graphics, music, design) into one project. , and not as support to other teams of game creators.

However, money from Helsing's Fire salesdid not flood the river. “In the first week, we sold 60,000 copies, but these volumes were not enough to replace our former salaries at Naughty Dog and 2K.” In addition, sales declined immediately after the first week, despite the fact that the publisher Chillingo tried to promote the game as the new Angry Birds .


Trailer Papers, Please

“There is an element of the game”

For the next project of the couple - the Rocketbirds port on the PS3 (which over time received its own nominations for the IGF), it took about a year to live in Singapore. This provided the family with a cheap opportunity to travel to southwestern countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia. And for this it was often necessary to cross borders.

Pope recalls how he once returned to the United States. At the last stage of the airport screening, “a huge guy in body armor said to me:“ Welcome home “”. “Just hearing this, I felt that I was returning to America, and realized that I didn’t have such feelings when I traveled to other countries. It made me think about the experience of crossing borders. ”

He thought that in different countries and for different people this feeling can be completely different: for someone it is enough to just pay for a visa, for others crossing the border can be a terrible process. But Pope was not interested in political difficulties. The instincts of the engineer immediately leaped into it: “There is an element of the game. From this, you can somehow make the game. "

This game, Papers, Please , has received many rave reviews and awards, including the 2014 IGF Grand Prize. Although indie game fans may know the game well. they may be surprised how quickly it was completed - in just nine months.

Part of the reason for this rush was necessity. When Pope had just started working on the game, Ishizaka had just become pregnant with her first child, and they planned that Pope could take the time to develop the game on her own, and only then start looking for a more reliable position in either Tokyo or the United States.

“My wife played an early prototype of Papers, Please and said,“ You can finish it, but then you have to look for work, ”Pope says with a laugh. “And it's funny, because now, no matter what I show her, she just raises her hands up and surrenders. “Do what you want, I'm sure it will work.” Pope laughs again.

Unexpected Success Papers, Pleaseled Pope and his family to. what he calls a “financially stable” situation. He only vaguely guessed how well she would be received by the then developing new sector of the Internet: a growing community of lettered players who eagerly downloaded the game’s pre-builds and recorded how they played them. “I did an act that then seemed crazy: I added three additional months to the development cycle, increasing it from six to nine,” says Pope. The reaction of the fans, as well as the active voting for the game in the then new Steam Greenlight system, encouraged him to continue working.

“Then, in the 90s, I wanted people to record VHS tapes about how they play Nintendo games,” says Pope. “For some reason, I liked to watch people play games. Therefore, what letpleplayers play inmy game, greatly increased self-esteem. Something in this game was well suited to the format in which you can play a role in the video - it’s interesting to do and it’s interesting to watch. ” Pope mutters with a ridiculous accent: "I refuse everyone a visa because they are all assholes."


Welcome to Obra Dinn

“We had to choose a smaller ship!”

Even before he came to the gameplay of Papers, Please , Pope presented a wider gameplay in the style of a “customs officer simulator,” which included baggage screening and various high-tech scanners. Pope rejected all this during his brief development period, and he does not want to implement these ideas in the sequel.

“People wanted me to do Papers, Please 2 , but I just have no incentive, no inspiration, no ideas,” says Pope. “I have some rough ideas about subsequent games in this universe using other mechanics and characters, but I didn’t want to delve into these things.”

Instead, Pope took the only item Papers, Please- Its pixelated graphics with a sparse palette, which could be found in Pope's favorite European PC games - and simplified them even more.

“I started playing computer games for the first time on a Macintosh,” Pope explains. “Therefore, the idea of ​​what should be an interesting, good, long game is connected with the Mac. They were all black and white. So at Obra Dinn, I wanted to make something visually beautiful. Whatever happened to the plot, it always had to look like cool games that I played as a child. ”

Pope spent just a week prototyping how a completely new black and white game, that is, without other colors and shades of gray, can work with 3D graphics. That is Obra Dinnstarted with cheating: Pope thought he would be able to achieve retro style very quickly.

“I set up Unity and immediately, during the first week, started playing with cool one-bit stuff,” says Pope. “In terms of Unity tools, I was very impressed. This is a special kind of engine, because it was created for people like me. You can edit the source code, return to the editor, and it will recompile everything again in one second. In addition, this is an editor, so you can add new functions to it. For a guy like me, in love with tools, this situation is ideal. I could very quickly begin to turn the elements in the pipeline into a system, which simplified the creation of the game, and it was almost instantaneous. "

Surprisingly quickly becoming attached to the Unity game engine, Pope weighed a few ideas for a "small-scale" entourage. Having played with the world of Egypt, Pope settled on the idea of ​​a cargo ship from the 19th century. “I decided that the ship is small and enclosed in itself. It will be easier to work with him. ” (Pope quickly realized that his decision was “completely erroneous.” In the course of our conversation, as we walked through the department store, Pope rolled his eyes and exclaimed: “I was so stupid. I had to choose a smaller ship! Three-deck instead of four-deck.”)

But even despite the ever-expanding scale of the game, the development of which took as much as 4.5 years, Pope found that he was becoming increasingly attached to the chosen surroundings, mainly in the process of his research.

“I read a lot of stories of that period, and one of the popular types of stories was collections of descriptions of the disasters that happened with these ships,” Pope says. “The true memories of the survivors - they wrote about shipwrecks, sold the book and it became a blockbuster. It struck me how cheaply life was valued then. Usually the survivor and writer of the story is the biggest scumbag, whose survival is based on the deaths of many, many people. And in those days he was considered a hero. That was the attitude. He survived, we are happy for him, and that’s all. It didn’t matter that he took the last boat, and because of this, everyone else died. The reality was that if not for him, it would have turned out to be someone else. They wouldn’t fit everything on this boat, understand? ”

“But in addition, on these ships, where there were 60-100 people, no matter how many there were, everyone depended on each other. Between you and the water there is nothing but a team that saves the lives of all. This breaks down some of the barriers that were usually found in society: prejudices about race, religion, or status. "I liked to experiment with this in the plot, and I used a very motley team."

Without telling the spoilers, I can say that this particular view of the unification of people from different nations and cultures greatly influences clues and hints, because it shows the dynamics of the relationship of a fictional team on board the ill-fated ship. However, Pope is still cautious in describing the surprisingly emotional plot: “I like that players don't have to worry about Obra Dinn 's plot! The player is in the role of an insurance agent, so the game does not judge you depending on your empathy or understanding of the situation. Everything is interconnected because you get evidence through the plot. But I like the idea that as an insurance appraiser, you should not look for who is to blame for these tragedies. You just need to log them. ”


Trailer The Return of the Obra Dinn

“I didn’t have enough strength of mind”

Pope lists many reasons why the development of the game lasted much longer than the originally planned “short” period. He struggled with the problem of rendering a one-bit visual effect (dithering), in which shades of gray are transmitted by fields from dots, trying to make active, violent scenes look clear. (To do this, it was necessary to carefully adjust the "bright areas" of the characters and come up with a trick that allows dithering to rotate with the movement of the camera.) He had to connect a team of 60 people (initially there were 120) so that their stories logically connected.

He strictly adhered to the basic mechanics of the game: the player should only see the moment in history in which the character dies. (When in the game a user stumbles upon a corpse or a ghost of where the corpse used to be, his magic pocket watch begins to knock. If you open them, you can see a frozen frame of the moment of death along with a brief fragment of a dialogue with a hint.)

“It constantly bothered me,” Pope admits. “I did not want to just scatter notes. Considering death, you can find another body, and return to this death, but this structure was very difficult to maintain and ensure its interest. Killing 60 people so that it was mechanically connected to each other and continuing a continuous history turned out to be terribly difficult. "" Video games are inextricably linked to death, and today they have to kill a lot of people, ”says Pope. “What if you need to focus on death, but without killing other people?”

Did not contribute to the completion of the development and the fact that the skeleton of the development team consisted of one person. Pope was a director, producer, screenwriter, musician, artist, modeler, and game programmer. (But don’t think that Pope spoke with 60 different accents; for the voice of the game, he hired actors through online listening services.)

Pope calmly admits that with a full team the game could have been completed in “six months”. “People who are much better experienced in different disciplines would do a much better job.” So why limit yourself? Lucas has two answers to this.

“For me it was a journey. I like to learn new things. I liked to model everything. I liked writing the script, writing a bunch of musical compositions, ”he stops. “For me, working with other people, for example, as in the situation with Naughty Dog, there is always a lot of difficulty - when they put all their efforts into something, and someone doesn’t really like the result, or it doesn’t quite fit, then we have to change it or completely get rid of it. I always suggested: “Let's just use this.” If someone put a lot of effort into it, I have neither the strength nor the determination to cut it out. But I can cut my own work out of the game. ”

Dad works on the bloody footprints

Pope acknowledges that the pressure on the success of Papers, Please also contributed to the increase in development time . “Now that the hype has subsided, then I probably won’t feel the pressure to make the next game perfect.”

And rest assured, another game awaits him in the future - Pope promises that it will be "something small." He smiles. “I thought Obra Dinn would be small, but that didn't happen. So I’ll try to do something small again. ”

Our conversation begins to end, the effect of coffee, pastries and huge hot bowls of noodles and broth begins to subside. Pope is already preparing to leave Saitama suburb and return home, where he has a lot to catch up. We finish our purchases at the department store, where Pope bought the Tokyo Highway board game, which received good reviews, and several toy animals that his children should like (he has a five-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter).

“I want to finish the game. to spend more time with them, ”says Pope. “Unfortunately, they saw this game. She is so cruel that she doesn't give them pleasure. On every screen, someone dies a brutal death. They saw all this, although they understood nothing. ” Pope portrays himself working at home. “I'm working on traces of blood! I’m trying to correctly implement the physics of blood. ”

At this point, I disagree with Pope's claim that his games do not require attachment to the plot or characters. Doesn't a ship filled with people you invented start to surprise you? Doesn’t he look like his own child? This time he goes back down. “When you play a game, you remember people. By the end, you will know the name and face of each person. And I perceive games and stories from a human point of view. INPapers, Please, the player does nothing but communicate with people. The same goes for Obra Dinn . ”

“To complete the story, I need a lot of people. My wife first finally played the game just two months ago. All this time the plot was not completed. Recently, we watched a video about how I drew these characters. Now it’s interesting to see the fully formed characters of the game, with their stories, roles and voices, and compare with how rough they were. It was interesting to recognize them in what I created first. They used to have nothing. ”

At this Pope finished talking about the mechanics of the game and said goodbye to me. At the same time, he said that he was looking forward to the next week of October, when Obra Dinn will finally be released.. “I made a lot of promises to keep,” says Pope. “Things to do with his wife. A stack of games, taller than me, is waiting for its passage. Films to watch. Games to play with children. Things to build with them . ”