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A Feast for the Eyes - Cảnh tượng / Phỏng vấn nửa quá khứ màu vàng
Chúng tôi đã ngồi xuống với Max Wrighton để nói về Half Past Yellow, công việc trong quá khứ của anh ấy và trò chơi giải đố sắp tới Spectacle.
Phiên âm âm thanh
"Hello, it's Jacob Hansen from Gamereactor.
We are in Malmö in Sweden today, where we are attending the Nordic Game Conference.
And we are going to talk to a lot of interesting studios."
"And the first studio we have managed to get an interview with is called Half Past Yellow, and they are based in Copenhagen.
And they have a new game coming up called Spectacle, and we are going to talk about that now.
So, yeah, could you start, Max, by introducing yourself and your studio?
Yeah. Hi, my name is Max Reiten. I'm the game director, game designer at Half Past Yellow."
"And, yeah, we previously made a sort of puzzle adventure game with platforming elements called Time on Frog Island.
And now we're working on our new project, which is a first-person puzzle game called Spectacle.
Yeah, and this game, Spectacle, it's coming out next week?
Yeah, or pretty close. And what can you tell us about the game?
Yeah, so we have a demo coming out."
"So, as part of, like, the Steam Next Fest.
And Spectacle is a first-person puzzle game all about blinking and winking.
So, basically, you control the world by blinking.
So you press both mouse buttons to sort of black out the entire screen as if you're blinking in real life."
"And when the screen is blacked out, the elements in the frame can change.
It's all deterministic, so if you blink at a certain thing, a certain thing will happen.
If you blink at another thing, a different thing will happen.
And the puzzles sort of exist in the space between what you can see and in the space between how these things interact."
"Does the game have an overall story and a protagonist, or is it more like an abstract puzzle?
It does have a story. We're not narrative designers much as a company.
So we do kind of try and keep the stories a little bit more abstract, a little bit more, like, open.
It's kind of just what you see in the game."
"But there is a bit of a story. You are part of a cult of lizard people.
And you have to, or, like, your job is to save trip space.
Trip space is like this otherworldly place where you go when you're dreaming.
Humans go when they're dreaming."
"And the lizards are native to trip space, and they're trying to save it. It's crumbling.
So your previous games was a very open game. There wasn't a lot of hand-holding.
You had to figure things out for yourself.
Is it the same design philosophy this time, or is it a more guided experience?
It's definitely been a challenge."
"Time on Frog Island was very much kind of what we wanted to be a very open experience, like you say.
It wasn't very hand-holdy. But with a puzzle game, it's quite different.
We've done a lot of learning of, like, what is too hard and what is too easy when it comes to designs and level designs.
And also the game itself is more abstract with the blinking mechanics and these types of things."
"So we can't necessarily allow players to just kind of, like, go on feel as much.
So there is a little bit more tutorialization. It is more linear, like it is just a linear experience.
But we've put a lot of work into the puzzles to make them feel the right difficulty.
So since your last game, you have gotten some funding from Ghost Ship Games, is that right?
How has this funding allowed you to work with your game? Has it given you any more opportunities?
It's definitely been a big help, not just from the funding point of view, but also from the relationship point of view."
"So we knew Ghost Ship from an indie perspective, like knowing the other devs in Copenhagen.
But it's been really nice because alongside the investment has also come expertise from Sun and Mikkel to sort of help us make Half-Life Yellow as good as it can be.
So it has opened up our ability to experiment and look into new games and start our new projects."
"Alongside the money we received from Time on Frog Island sales.
But I think the main thing has been the expertise we get to kind of mine from them, let's say.
Your last game came out on quite a lot of platforms and since then there has been released even more platforms with the Steam Deck and other handheld consoles."
"Are you still going for multi-platform release and how is that challenge for a small studio to develop on so many platforms?
So the multi-platform release made sense for Time on Frog Island.
It was sort of very important for us to make a big splash.
But with the new game, first-person puzzle games definitely work best on PC, we think."
"And it kind of shows, at least the market research we've done, that PC is where they make their most money.
So we are targeting PC first.
We would like to see the game come out on consoles but that will really depend on deals and platform partnerships and stuff.
It's probably not going to be PlayStation 4 or the Xbox One."
"But for sure PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Switch 2, maybe? I don't know. Who knows?
The concept with the blinking with the mouse sounds very unique but have you looked at other puzzle games for inspiration?
I think a lot of the normal ones.
You can't make a first-person puzzle game without being compared to Portal and Portal 2."
"The Witness is obviously a runaway success in the genre as well.
There's also Danish made first-person puzzle games like Light Matter, which we also looked at and played.
We did a lot of just playing things in the genre.
And I think what we saw is that players are very much interested in seeing new mechanics."
"Once Portal has happened or once Light Matter has happened, there might not necessarily be another game that's exploring those things.
Because these games have already done it and players are interested in seeing something new, unless it wasn't fully explored.
So that's where our mechanics came from, was just trying to see what an open spot in the market could be."
"What has been the major challenge in developing this game or some of the things you maybe didn't have thought about before tackling this genre?
Definitely difficulty. That's been the most interesting part.
As the designer or as any of the developers on the game, you know the mechanics inside and out.
So it becomes way more difficult to understand the difficulty of a puzzle."
"You think something is super straightforward and then you put it in front of a player who's just interacting with your game for the first time and it's super difficult.
You build a puzzle which you think is basically just a corridor that you walk through with a couple of buttons to press.
And players are like, wow, that was perfect difficulty. That was exactly what I wanted."
"So it took a lot of learning and we're still learning how to get the difficulty curve right and get the puzzles right.
Are you doing a lot of playtesting to find the right difficulty or are you mostly sitting among yourself trying to adjust it?
We should be doing more playtesting. We are doing playtesting and it has impacted the difficulty of the puzzles."
"But you can never do enough, I feel, with a puzzle game.
So yeah, it's definitely difficult to actually have new stuff to constantly test and sort of organized playtesters coming in.
Organized testers who are also fresh.
We don't have currently any kind of formal testing set up, so it's kind of just testing with friends and people we know."
"So we're slowly burning through the people who have no experience with the game.
But yeah, it's very important for sure.
When exactly is the game coming out and have you thought about the release timing?
Is it just because it's finished now or is there a strategy behind it?
It's currently not finished. In terms of the actual release, we're not sure."
"But the demo, hopefully it's actually coming out on the 24th of May, so it's just like Friday.
But we will have to see. It's basically in Steam review right now and then we'll get it out when it comes through.
But yeah, so that's when the demo comes out.
When the full game comes out, it's honestly hard to say. There's a lot still to do."
"And yeah, it's kind of also contingent on finding partners and these types of things.
We'll see.
Thanks for your time and good luck with the game.
No, thanks a lot for having me."
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