Jason Roberts interview: Creating Gorogoa required awkwardness and chaos

You could say that Gorogoa, an artistic puzzle game mostly created by a single developer over five years, had the perfect outcome because it was “in between a success and a hit,” according to creator Jason Roberts.

It was a very unique game that made you feel like you were interacting with beautiful hand-drawn paintings. Working on his first game, Roberts taught himself game development. And he created all of the paintings and most of the game on his own, except for the sound and music.

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The title came out in December on the PC, Nintendo Switch, Android, and iOS. The game turned about to be relatively short, but it was like a work of art, with a puzzling ending.

It was successful enough to encourage Roberts, who had never made a game before, to stay financially independent and to continue making video games. But it wasn’t a big enough hit to justify starting a 10-person studio. That means that Roberts will continue making games, but he won’t give up control of his artistic vision.

Many developers cross that bridge when they ride the success of a game to a bigger studio with more resources. But Roberts feels like he will collaborate with just a few developers on his next game and stay true to the awkwardness of finding his way on his own. He gave a talk about making Gorogoa at the Gamelab 2018 event in Barcelona last week, and I caught up with him for an interview.

Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

GamesBeat: Was there a highlight in the talk you wanted to drive home for the people here?

Jason Roberts: Well, the talk was about how a lot of the decisions I made on how to approach the game early on turned out to make my life very difficult and make the design constantly challenging. Each step was a struggle, finishing the game, but that awkwardness of making the game is connected to why it’s unique and special. If you make something through an unlikely, inefficient process, it will seem more magical, naturally.

GamesBeat: You get something out of the chaos there?

Roberts: Yeah, exactly. I discussed a lot of design decisions and why they were challenging. People can take what they want from the talk. They can accept my moral or look at what I did and conclude that they should not follow in my footsteps.

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GamesBeat: You had to do a lot of things by necessity. You were by yourself, right?

Roberts: It would have been challenging anyway, but I tried to show, in the talk, another way I might have approached making Gorogoa with simpler and more regular art. It would have allowed more puzzles, and might have allowed me to finish the game sooner while putting more gameplay in it.

GamesBeat: You had to teach yourself the whole process, right?

Roberts: Yeah, I did. I should have read more about design beforehand. I think I would have gone with the art style regardless, because that was such an important part of the project for me. I like drawing in pencil. That was a requirement for the project that had nothing to do with game design.

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GamesBeat: The idea, the mechanic, was unique. Was that there at the beginning?

Roberts: Yeah, that’s been around for a while. I even had another game that I designed earlier that had almost the same mechanic, but a completely different story. It’s the kind of thing that appeals to me. I like imagery and I like visual tricks and illusions. This has that quality.

GamesBeat: Was the inspiration that M.C. Escher kind of composition?

Roberts: Every time people ask me to list inspirations, I always forget some. But Escher, yeah, definitely. Especially this artist Christopher Manson, who made these books — my favorite is called Maze, a puzzle book, where each page is a room of the maze and you have to explore the maze. You figure out the shortest path through the maze and solve a riddle.

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A bunch of illustrators of antiquity. Gustav Dore and David Roberts, who traveled the world in the 19th century and did sketches and drawing. Architecture and that way of looking at ruins and mysterious structures. That informed the design.

GamesBeat: What’s the outcome been like for you?

Roberts: It’s done well. It’s in between a success and a hit, I guess? But it helps that it’s a small team. It was successful for me. If it had taken 10 full-time people to make it would not have been as successful, that’s for sure, at the same revenue level. That’s an indicator to me that it might be a good idea to stay lean and work with, at most, one or two other people, as opposed to expanding to start a studio. That’s exciting in a lot of ways, but I feel like I would be giving up my advantage.

GamesBeat: I don’t know if you heard Amy Hennig talk yesterday about being a creative director.

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Roberts: I heard part of the fireside, yeah.

GamesBeat: She compared it to raising kids. You give them direction and hope they go the right way. As a creative director you can say, “I want the art to be like this,” but the art director and the artists create it. There’s a loss of control, even though you’re the “director” on this massive game.

Roberts: That’s certainly true on a big game, where you have to delegate. I had that experience with sound design and music, where I just let go. Those aspects of the project, I gave my collaborators — Eduardo Ortiz Frau, my sound designer, and Joel Corelitz, the composer — I tried to limit my role to vetoing certain things or insisting on certain specific things here and there. Otherwise, they had their creative leeway.

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.