Indie Developer Spotlight: Jake Elliott – Part 2

In part one of our interview with artist and game developer Jake Elliott, we discussed how he got into game design, learned some about his game development philosophy, and about his sources of inspiration.

A screenshot from one of Jake Elliott's upcoming games.

In round two, Jake shares some exciting new information about his next two upcoming games, and sheds some more light on how the worlds he creates and their thematic underpinnings.

IGC: When developing games, which do you typically approach first – story or gameplay? Does either attribute inform your projects more than the other?

JE: I approach the story first, but for me the “story” is a pretty vague and open-ended thing.  So as I said earlier, the story that I started with for “Beulah…” was just: “There’s a girl in a valley who rides a giant bird.”

Story and gameplay are pretty tightly linked in “Dog and Bone Are Friends” because the story is just the instructions for the game, like “Dog and Bone Are Friends … Bone is afraid of birds … Dog can bark to scare birds … Bone can use ancient statues for magic … They would like to play with you”.  That’s pretty much how the game works, and it reads kind of like a children’s book.

IGC: A lot of folks have mentioned that they love your games because of the subjective feelings or moods they evoke. Is subjective player interpretation one of your typical development goals?

JE: Yeah totally; a lot is left open to interpretation and that is very deliberate.  I didn’t want to provide a back story for “Beulah and the Hundred Birds” because I don’t think of myself as that kind of storyteller; I’m more interested in saying something like “there’s a girl in a valley who rides a giant bird” than I would be in naming the valley, the bird or her motivations.

“I Can Hold My Breath Forever” was structured around these handwritten notes from the nameless “friend”, and they described the passage of time as the player moved through the caves.  So in the first few notes they talk about times in terms of hours, then days, then years.  Of course it’s only taking the player a few minutes to find all these notes, so there’s a disruption there where the player has to think “is my time as a player mapped asymmetrically to the character’s time? Or did the character really wait years before even entering the caves?”

I really just wanted to connect these three concepts – time, space, and friendship – in a small and playful system so the player could experiment with the way they interact.

That game got a lot of comments on my site and the flash portals it was embedded on, so I had the chance to read a lot of different interpretations and also to see how a lot of people responded to its ambiguities.  I was surprised and encouraged by how mixed the reaction was; like any artist I’d rather the response be 50% positive and 50% negative than 100% neutral.

IGC: Thanks very much for your time, Jake!

Jake followed up with us again after the interview to let us know that he has since quit his day job and formed his own indie game studio called Cardboard Computer. Check out his brand new site for a more detailed introduction to the project, as well as some insight into what Jake has planned for the future.

We wish Jake the best of luck, and can’t wait to see what Cardboard Computer brings!

If you haven’t already, check out PART 1 of our interview with Jake Elliott.

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