When did you play Snatcher and what made you want to create a graphic adventure game in that style? Also, have you or any of the other members of the team played any of the other old Japanese adventure games like Illusion City, Famicom Detective Club series, Twilight Syndrome, The Space Adventure - Cobra: The Legendary Bandit etc? Is this kind of game one you are going to concentrate on going forward? Or will you create other kinds of games?
I appreciate seeing someone do a game in that style anyway and will be buying the game today just to support the effort since we need more games like that. It's one of my favourite type of games (Japanese adventure games).
I probably played Snatcher when I was around 12 or 13. It really struck me hard when I played it - it was a game that, at least in America came out mid 90s, and was just so far ahead of the curve in terms of graphics, music, themes, and storytelling. I really seemed like an underrated masterpiece, and I was always super sad about the fact that Kojima never got around to making more games like that. (It wasn't until way later in life I got my hands on the English fan translation of Policenauts). As a kid, I made a silly flash game that was basically Snatcher 2, but I had not the art or music or writing or programming skills..I just knew I wanted to do it!
Visual novel/adventure games have always been my favorite genre - and they're a very very difficult genre to lock down what's good and whats bad - becuase the gameplay is very very tertiary. Although good game play mechanics can make a good adventure game great, Gabriel Knight, Snatcher, Danganronpa...Virtue's Last Reward, all were amazing because they combined all the elements together into a magical package.
I really loved how Snatcher did that and managed to explore dark themes and do it in a cinematic way that had really never been done before, and since this was our first game, and, when we started, we really didn't have a programmer on board, I thought the Snatcher style/inspiration would allow us to do a few things:
1) Place the game in the near(ish) future, which would allow us to examine themes and make situations that would be unrealistic to happen in 2015.
2) Since this was our first game, and we knew we wanted to explore certain issues and really make the first game that goes super hard on LGBTQ stuff, a point and clicks allows players to explore that stuff on their own time and doesn't force it on them, so to say. The main story is pretty unrelated to any social issue stuff the game brings up, so if the player just wants to zoom through it and not learn about the characters and their issues, they can do that, but if they poke and prod, hopefully they'll let these unique characters into their lives and it won't feel like "Oh, there's the gay character, there's the ____ character"
Many people on the team are huge adventure game fans, specifically Japanese style. Gabriel Knight, Police Quest, I have no mouth but I must Scream, all great - but stuff like Famicom Detective Club, Jesus: Kyofu no Biomonster, all that stuff (i think JJSignal talks about it in his reply) really helped inspire the art style and that old school, windowed approach.
Point and click/adventure is definitely something we love and we really like the engine we built, but I think our next game will be drastically different ; ) Although doing this has been a blast, we want to experiment more with showing, not telling in our storytelling next
Thank you so much for the kind words and we really hope you enjoy the game! 🍺🍺
