4/10/2023 0 Comments Gorogoa coal![]() ![]() As things started to take shape, he quit his job to focus on the game full-time. Sometime in 2011, he began building today’s version of Gorogoa. He began designing an early version of the game, with a different story but similar mechanics, in a notebook, before deciding it was “too complex,” throwing it away and starting over. The release and massive success of Braid, the 2008 indie game designed and self-funded by Jonathan Blow, inspired many like-minded creators to attempt to create their own personal game projects, Roberts among them. He thought about the games that had fascinated him as an ‘80s kid: the groundbreaking computer puzzles by Cliff Johnson like The Fool’s Errand, or puzzle books like Maze, which was filled with dozens of intricate, enigmatic woodcut illustrations that hid all manner of secrets inside them. “But I like video games because they have machines, and puzzles with moving parts.” Games also let him use his software engineering skills, bringing together all of his talents into a single project. “I had been designing games in my head for a long time, and they were always impractical,” he said. ![]() “I started it without thinking it through, and it was taking me four weeks to do every page.”Įventually, Roberts decided that if he was going to do a complex art project, it should at least be interactive. He embarked on what was to be a massive graphic novel project, in which Gorogoa was the name of a prison. ![]() He took playwriting classes in his spare time, which didn’t pan out. I thought about trying to make comics,” he said. Always, he felt the pull of creative work always, gorogoa was there, rumbling under the surface. Roberts worked his way through a string of small software firms, places that allowed him some degree of “creative freedom,” making good money but growing slowly more dissatisfied with the occupation that once excited him. Along the way, inside those scenes, a story is told. This is what plays out, in ever more complex ways, over the course of Gorogoa, a shifting of the layers and juxtapositions of different scenes in order to set off actions between them, and thus solve the puzzles. Drag the door over the boy, and he walks through it, now standing atop a building in the city. Zoom out from the window to see the boy still inside his house. Zoom in on the city panel, and you find a door atop a roof. Now there are two panels: A city exterior, and a window leading to nowhere. You drag the panel, and the unexpected magic happens: Instead of simply moving this panel, your action has removed the window from the scene, splitting it in two. Your cursor turns into an omnidirectional arrow when you hover over the original panel, which currently shows the window the boy was staring out of and the city beyond it. The tiny panel in the middle of your screen now becomes a two-by-two grid of panels, and this is the space in which you play Gorogoa. With a hand-crafted game like Gorogoa, that means tacking on months or years of development time. Make one tweak, and you have to redesign the whole chapter. “The changes have rippling effects, because everything fits together so carefully,” he said. “It’s not about infinite polish, it’s about me constantly making significant changes.” At various points along the way, Roberts has scrapped large, completed sections of the game. “I’ve never been a perfectionist,” Roberts said of the game’s elongated path to the finish line. Roberts has been working on Gorogoa for over seven years. He painstakingly put together the puzzles, in which seemingly disparate objects and places across different scenes are made to meld together as if by magic. He drew the game’s gorgeous, intricate artwork in pencil. Gorogoa, released on December 14 for Windows, iOS, and Switch, was created almost in its entirety by Jason Roberts, a 43-year-old former software engineer. I was mesmerized, I didn’t want to stop, and once I was done with the brief demo, I had to know more about it. Once I started playing, the cacophony of PAX disappeared. I actually made a complete circuit around the PC before I saw it, so unassuming was the little stand and so packed was the convention floor. When I heard it was nearing its release, and would be at PAX West this year, I decided this was my moment to get acquainted with Gorogoa, and I wandered up into the sixth floor of the Seattle convention center, snaking through the vast maze of tiny indie game booths until I found its small demo area. ![]()
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