PLEASE START US OFF BY INTRODUCING YOURSELF:
Hi! We're Ghost in a Bottle, a small and greedy game development studio focused on world domination.
TELL US ABOUT OCTOPUS CITY BLUES.
Octopus City Blues is a graphical adventure about life on a giant mollusk. You follow and interact with NPCs as they go about their daily schedules. You learn interesting facts and rumors, which can spread over time. There are a lot of difficult choices to make with a branching and somewhat open-ended narrative.
The idea started as an amalgamation of several distinct ideas about an oppressing living city, a cowardly murderer, and utilizing knowledge as a currency. The writing and design were also influenced by other works, including movies such as The City of Lost Children, Brazil, and Existenz; games like Shenmue, Fallout, Beneath a Steel Sky, and Star Control 2; in addition to the works of Jeff VanderMeer and other "new weird" writers.
HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN
It's been long, challenging and fun despite all the ups and downs. We've been working on this one project for over a decade. That was partly due to the ambitious ideas we had, my lack of management experience, and a lot of different life events we had to deal with over the years. We still love Octopus City Blues as much as we did the day we started, and we hope players will appreciate all the love we've poured into it.
WHICH GAME ENGINE DID YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?
The engine is a custom one written in a combination of C++ and Lua. That's probably another reason it took such a long time to develop! It's an open-source engine but I doubt it's really usable by anyone else: https://t.co/IsdjkyR283
WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR?
The ridiculous amount of design, testing, and implementation work needed to present a story with meaningful choices and consequences. There are different ways to approach every quest, and the price of giving players that freedom is a mountain of art, coding, and bug fixing that makes it hard to estimate things.
We're getting better at it, and a lot of bugs are now caught by automated tests, but it's still a real challenge when developing a branching story with a small team.
ADVICE FOR FELLOW DEVS?
Learn from our mistakes and start with something simple, but also make something you would enjoy playing. Don't reinvent the wheel unless you have to. Get people to play test your prototypes as soon as possible, especially if you can watch as they play.
Oh, and invest into good debugging tools. Adding a little cheat code console to Octopus City Blues to enable things like change the location or set a flag is something I wish I'd done earlier.
ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?
Thank you, and remember to SAY NO TO OCTOBLOOD!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1192230/Octopus_City_Blues/
-Ghost in a Bottle
❤️
