Jason Roberts interview: Creating Gorogoa required awkwardness and chaos

GamesBeat: Was there some sort of managerial skill you picked up during this?

Roberts: I don’t know. I tried not to be a manager. That’s why I was more comfortable treating them as collaborators. Maybe some collaboration skill is what I developed. In the next project I’ll work with more people. Well, I don’t know about that. I expect I’ll work with an animator, at the very least, a sound designer, a composer, and possibly another artist.

GamesBeat: You seem to have gotten a lot of attention for this game, because it was so unique. You seem to have been able to meet a lot of people.

Roberts: And travel around, yeah. It’s been great. It’s attention, but not a scary amount of attention.

GamesBeat: We talked a bit about Annapurna. What’s that relationship been like?

Roberts: It’s been great. They’re very nice, patient people. They’re like a little family. They assigned someone to me to act as a kind of producer, and that helped me a lot with getting thing organized and getting things done. They took over a lot of details. For the most part, they handled working with another engineer to do the ports.

GamesBeat: Was it more that they funded you, or finding people to join you, or…?

Roberts: Well, both. They fund the game, and you can find your own people, but they’ll also put you together with people if that’s what you’d prefer.

Above: Gorogoa

GamesBeat: I thought it was interesting when Microsoft worked with the Cuphead folks, that they were still on the hook to mortgage their homes and things like that. They had a relationship with Microsoft, but it wasn’t if there was just a big bag of money that showed up.

Roberts: I funded the majority of development myself. But I didn’t have a marketing budget, for example. They wanted to put more money into marketing and PR than I ever would have been able to. Annapurna has their own marketing strategy, their own PR company that they work with. I let them manage that process for the most part, since I don’t have a good instinct for PR or marketing myself.

GamesBeat: It seemed like it was more viral than a lot of other games that you see out there.

Roberts: That’s true. That’s another argument for making something weird. Something that’s remarkable generates more word of mouth than something that’s good. Something that’s good or even excellent, but in a less surprising way. It might have just as much craft put into it, but if you have very little to spend on marketing–

GamesBeat: Looking back, what was the most painful part for you?

Roberts: The financial situation was distressing. I spent all my money. I guess there was a point where I released the demo out into the world early on, and I got a lot of positive feedback, but I also got another round of feedback about issues with the game design and the puzzle design, and there was a moment when I felt like I was doing it all wrong. I wasn’t sure I knew how to extend the demo I released into a full-length game. That was probably my moment of lowest confidence, which was pretty early on. That would have been back in 2013.

A lot of it, I did ultimately deal with it. There’s still stuff in the early part of the game that hasn’t changed a lot since 2012. But I was able to respond to that. It was just the first time I’d decided to—I worked on the game all by myself in secret before then.

GamesBeat: Did you ever come up with a good elevator pitch for the game?

Roberts: I still don’t really have one. It’s a hand-illustrated puzzle game where you arrange tiles on a grid, and each tile is a separate interactive scene that you can move around inside, like a first-person adventure game. But you solve puzzles by connecting tiles together, or stacking them, so the images inside them combine to form new images.

Above: Gorogoa

GamesBeat: That’s pretty good?

Roberts: But it only works as a description if you’ve seen the game. I proved that you can make a game that’s unpitchable. I’ve never known what the elevator pitch is and never pitched it as a concept. I just made it. I’ve seen other people — reviewers, people online — try to describe it online and they can’t either. I think once you see 10 seconds of video, you get what it’s about. That’s the saving grace.

GamesBeat: Are there things you would go back and do differently, now that you know?

Roberts: I learned exactly how much I had to finish the art to test ideas. Early on I finished too much art too soon. I also took a while to learn the importance of justifying — I’m making something that’s both a narrative and a puzzle game, and I was putting in scenes to make puzzles work that had no part in the story, that had no meaning.

It took me a long time to recognize that, and eventually kill a big chunk of gameplay because it didn’t make sense. I’d be wiser now about thinking in advance around the non-gameplay implications. If I need everything, every scene in the game, to work as a narrative scene and work as a part of the puzzle, I can only work the puzzle part out through iteration, but I’d better make sure it’s compatible with what I’m trying to do elsewhere.

Above: Jason Roberts, creator of Gorogoa, at Gamelab 2018.

GamesBeat: Part of the five years was going back and redoing some things, then?

Roberts: Oh, yeah. A lot. Probably at least 60 percent of the material in the game was thrown out and rebuilt.

GamesBeat: You seem unusual in that a lot of people who are game creators, they’re outsourcing all their art. Here, the art is the central thing you’re doing. You’re creating all of it.

Roberts: In the early concept of the project, I was looking as much for a visual art project to work on as I was looking to make a game. That was essential for me on this project.

GamesBeat: Was it almost about creating art, and then figuring out what to do with it?

Roberts: Right. That’s why the earliest version of the game was thematically messy and disorganized. I just drew a bunch of pictures that I wanted to draw, that were fun to draw. I came up with a bunch of imagery and didn’t think through what it meant. The drawing part was so exciting sometimes that it would lure me off the path of making a good game. That happened a lot.

Disclosure: The organizers of Gamelab paid my way to Barcelona. Our coverage remains objective.