Illustration by Michael DeForge
The House.
Ping Sanguanshua, Markus Luik, Skyler Kweon, Helen Yao
Ping Sanguanshua, Markus Luik, Skyler Kweon, Helen Yao
+In one or two sentences, describe the main themes present in your game.
We played a lot with creepy, off-putting elements like how the text is kind of all over the place and nothing is really as it should be.
+What was the inspiration of the game?
What made your team decide to make this game specifically?
This was supposed to be a polished version of an older project we worked on, but it turned into a completely separate game because interactive books are such a fun medium to use for games. The original game was a journey through another house which is why this ended up being called Volume 2. That house had lots of moving parts and physical items that could be moved around. It was cool, but it was such a pain to make.
The first revision concept was to make something that was more mechanical and the player had to almost level up their stats as they were playing through the book. It felt very plain and didn't have anything we were really excited about, so we started over and tried something different. We managed to end up with this game that really only stops you because you don't know enough about the world yet. These sorts of games have always interested me because learning and reframing my thinking is probably my favorite thing to do. So making something that forces other people to do that and personally figuring out the best way to get them to do that is so much fun for me.
+Were there difficult moments when developing the game? What led to those difficult moments? What did you learn from it?
So the first idea of this game was to make a dungeon crawler book with combat and monsters and equipment. We decided to use stickers for this because it seemed like an interesting bit of physicality for a book that we hadn't seen before. The issue with that was stickers are far too finnicky to make work in an elegant way. They get super dirty and stop being sticky and so we just scrapped it. It kinda sucked at first because we spent basically half of our time thinking about how to make those systems work, but eventually we got to a point where it just wasn't worth holding onto a concept that didn't work well enough.
So I guess the biggest thing we learned from it was to come up with backup ideas and rapidly prototype all the different weird things we could think of before we jumped into one idea. Personally, as the person leading the project I was feeling, completely self-created. pressure to come up with something interesting so I threw some crazy ideas out. I really should have been more honest with the state of my ideas and asked others to help me come up with stuff but that's how it goes.
+Talk about your teammates! What was everyone's role?
This game is such a pet project for me so I immediately asked to take lead when the people who wanted to join our team came. The original House book was created by Markus and I where Markus focused on the writing and narrative and I focused on the mechanical/puzzle design elements. Here too, I came up with the overarching ideas of how the book should function. It was really fun for me to come up with different ways to hide information. But I also realized I was NOT cut out to be a production manager. Coming up with tasks for other people to do was definitely one of my shortcomings.
So Markus (amazing) came through and organized so many lists of tasks that needed to get done and assigned them to people. He kept us on schedule and was really integral to making sure everything ran smoothly. He also did lots of work with the writing and made some of those really awesome pages that have text all over the place. We found it really fun at the end to play with the way text was laid out on the page and created a really cool aesthetic. Definitely could not have completed this without him!
Skyler was one of the new team members and he definitely was a great help with prototyping. He gets work done fast and does a lot of it. He would lay out a lot of bones in the project and Markus and I would go through and polish it. So it helped a lot to have the amount of content he created for us. He would also keep me in check if I went too crazy with my ideas because I can sometimes go a little overboard.
Helen was the other new team member. It was so cool to have an artist work with us for this book. It was honestly astonishing how we would ask for assets and then they would just be there. Her art feels so good in the book in creating exactly the kind of feeling that we wanted. We didn't have any art in the previous book really so this basically just opened a whole avenue of puzzles we could include.
Honestly I felt like the team worked really well together and any shortcomings we had would be made up for by another!
play this game on itch.io
Instagram - @k.sanguanshua, @ksigames_official