Hey Space Octopus Fans,

It’s finally time to peak behind the curtain. We are here today to do a small behind the scene postmortem to talk about the development of Do You Copy?

Here today we have:

Patrick – Designer
Jayce – Designer
Ryan – Artist
Jacob - Artist
Asher – Writer

Patrick: Hey everyone, so I wanted to start out with talking about how we came up with the concept of Do You Copy? A lot of people out there I’ve read have said we were directly inspired by Firewatch. That is an awesome compliment, but the truth is we created the idea with what we could do in 48 hours and decided what aesthetic would be interesting. We had debated a guard station, radio station broadcasting tower, but ultimately, we liked the idea of being in the woods.

Jayce: Firewatch didn’t even come into the conversation until art used it for reference on how to build the tower. Really game jams are great to try and figure out how to make something with a lot of constraints. We can’t do everything we want, but sometimes we get more focused ideas that we wouldn’t think of otherwise. Being creative in that space is always rewarding.

Asher: The short story I found was on the r/nosleep subreddit, which inspired our interpretation of the Goatman. I am also from Jersey, so of course the Jersey Devil was an inspiration. The back story that is found on the board in the tower comes from stories I heard growing up. The story of the Leeds family was always a weird one.

Ryan: Focusing on a small space allowed us to focus on building high quality assets. I wanted to learn to texture my assets better and took this opportunity to learn substance painter. The year before we chose a stylized style that allowed us to build more, and this year we focused on building a believable scene.

Patrick: A lot of the focus was how do we build things smart to reuse without it feeling like copy and paste. Building modular assets that made sense to have duplicates helped build the space out.

I also approached building systems this way. For example, the interact system had a master blueprint that was built off of for more specific purposes. This allowed for faster iteration and one place to fix the majority of bugs.

Jacob: I knew from an art perspective, I wanted to focus on building believable environmental story telling that felt lived in. We wanted to build a space that you could see that someone has lived there for a while. We really tried pushing that realism. Creating the assets and implementing them with material instance was super smooth

Patrick: The way we thought about the Zero-Sum theme was to have the player balance the hiker’s safety vs their own. We wanted the horror to begin with the player just thinking they were trying to save a different character, but it turns into them doubting and wanting to make sure they stay safe as well.

Asher: It’ fun predicting what the player would do. When you watch a horror film, you watch these characters and yell at the characters on screen for their terrible decision making and yell at them to do something else. I wanted to challenge the player to be in those situations and see what they would do. The good ending takes the player expectations and flips them. People want to save others, but sometimes they do so without thinking about their own safety.

Ryan: I am not as much of a fan of trial and error gameplay, but I think we made it work by working it into the story and lore.

Jacob: Part of it is learning more about the world and going back and replaying with the knowledge you learn about the mystery and how to react to what is being said.

Patrick: The most expensive thing to build in games is characters. In the past we had built monsters, but they come in late and there are a lot of bugs with them. We thought of some ways on how to do characters, and that’s how we landed with the radio to do a full character without modeling, texturing, rigging, animating, etc.

Ryan: It’s also the first time we focused on doing a full VO game in 48 hours.

Asher: I locked myself in a bathroom and screamed for a while.

Jacob: I remember for our first game jam game I screamed in the woods behind my apartment and my neighbors were curious what was going on.

Asher: The hiker was inspired by the character who dies first in a horror film. I wanted to track his story. His story is one that he didn’t choose to be in, but a story that came to him. I wanted to have the hiker interact like they like they really would be panicked.

Jayce: One of the goals we set out early on, was to give time for the player to be in the moment. We wanted to allow for them to set the pace and explore. We wanted to balance that pacing so they weren’t bored either. Sometimes we had moments where nothing happens until the player goes somewhere new. And it’s awesome to see how people have reacted to that. I don’t think we nailed that with Devoured Dead and Sweet Home.

Ryan: One thing that was challenging was creating gameplay in such a small space. We wanted to make sure there was enough to interact to keep the player interested. That why we had things like the map and cork-board interactable instead of just looking at it. I was afraid things weren’t working well because things weren’t scary until the very end.

Jayce: Yeah I didn’t get until I started reading what Asher was writing and putting in. We were giving people just enough narrative context so they get starved to want to know more and start filling in the gaps. It’s like they the shot of Charlie Day from It’s Always Sunny with the theories on the board in the background. I enjoyed seeing what people would say out loud what they were doing as they played the game.

Patrick: The thing I think is most important with game story telling is players coming up with different theories that could be plausible. We know the truth, but they make their own story. It creates a more collaborative experience. It is one of the reasons I wanted to do different ending for the game.

Jayce: My favorite theory was a player who thought the hiker died at beginning and it was the Goat Man the whole time, so he never trusted the radio and sent the Goat Man away and got the best ending.

Asher: And that is the guy who will survive a horror movie.

Ryan: The thing I wish we could have expanded upon was the flood light. We saw multiple players trying it multiple times to lead the hiker.

Patrick: Yeah the idea behind that was if you left the light on for too long, the monster would actually come after you. The player would have to balance that with leading the hiker. Unfortunately when working on this we realized to do this correctly would take much more time than we had.

Jayce: I will say I felt like I hit a wall after blocking out the space. I was too reliant on the systems filling out the space and had to figure out how to do other things. I was mixed with over confidence and under confidence of what I could do. But in the end, I learned a lot and did more than I thought.

Patrick: Yeah we planned the dialog system being a super simple system and it ended up being way more work than expected. At the end of Saturday night, I realized I would need to and rewrite the whole system in the morning. This created a mad rush to the end of the jam which made the endings very bugged.

Jacob: Having such an important system that took up time from other people does not help with the short time-frame of a game jam.

Ryan: On the art side we forgot to art the lamp.

Jacob: There were certain assets that were super important like the map, but we weren’t able to get it in soon enough because in order to create it, we needed to lock down the story. It would have been better if we had the ability to play with the space with where that stuff is.
We should have decided our lighting set up sooner. Ryan wasted some time making lightmaps before we fully moved to a dynamic system. Always try to plan everything out before working.

Asher: I could have labeled the script better. It was a nightmare to parse through.

Patrick: Yeah, the mine route story line didn’t get hooked up with the initial launch.

Jacob: Not being able to leave the radio created some weird play.

Patrick: Yeah that was to prevent bugs since I had to rewrite things so late. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Ryan: Unfortunately, we never got a pause menu in and people would accidently close the game.

Jacob: Also having moments trigger where players should be looking in a certain place didn’t always register with the player. It’s hard to nail down that composition without a lot of iteration.

Ryan: Honestly the response was the most surprising thing. I couldn’t have imagined the response especially since it was so frustrating getting things working this game jam.

Jayce: Yeah none of us knew what this would really work until we finally had a full playthrough and we were so happy with what we played. And then it blew up on the internet.

Jacob: It’s funny because so many people saw that comparison to Firewatch, we think that drove a lot of the initial interest in the game. Let’s Players could have keywords to drive people to their videos.

Ryan: It had some similarities, but we definitely made a story and choices have unique feels to them and flipped it around.

Asher: Our past game jams were well established archetypes. Sweet Home was a haunted house. Antiseptic was survival horror. This was less of a used horror story and more of an urban legend. There are so many legends out there that have so much appeal. Having more a more open-ended setting gave a lot more breadth to the story.

Patrick: I’ve overseen our social media aspect of Space Octopus and the response of this game has been a huge learning experience with how to communicate with everyone. The response has honestly been overwhelming and that’s a great thing.

So there you have it everyone. We hope you enjoyed our little conversation about what it took to build the game in such a short amount of time and seeing the inspiration behind it. And what is going to happen now with Do You Copy? We all want to make it into a full game somehow. We are still figuring out what exactly that would mean, but don’t expect anything soon. Making a full game takes years. The big thing is you all have inspired us to want to do that.

Thank you again for sticking with us and supporting us.

Sincerely,

-Space Octopus Studios