Interrogation - A noir psychological game

[dapetcu21]

Hi!

I haven’t written here in a long while (mainly because I was too busy actually working on the game to talk about it on the forums). A lot has happened: Our team grew, our art style changed, our gameplay feels more natural, the game now has a story and campaign intermissions, we had a photoshoot with about 40 actors, and so on…

This week we got accepted into Square Enix Collective. We’d really appreciate a vote and some feedback on the game’s Collective project page!

Secondarily, we’ll have a booth at Gamescom with RGDA (Romanian Game Developer’s Association). If you’re at Gamescom, come by if you’d like to chat or play the game.

To get a feel of what the game has become, here’s our trailer:

[britzl]

Looks great! The game has come a long way since you announced it beginning of 2017!

[dapetcu21]

Hi, Defold forum! A few days ago we launched our Steam page. Wishlist it, if you wish it!

With that out of the way, here’s our status half a year later: We worked really hard on two fronts.

1. Polishing the game overall. From techy things like gamepad and keyboard support, an intl refactor to UX things like cleaning up UI and reviewing various user interactions.
2. Endlessly iterating on the narrative-gameplay content (plus all the tooling support the Writing team needed along the way). This is the bulk of the work in this game. We built an in-house level editor for our narrative puzzles, which allowed our writers to increase the complexity of the writing and game design. It still takes forever to design, write and test an interrogation (and I honestly don’t think I could ever do what Writing does), but I must admit it’s super satisfying at the end when Writing asks us (the Programming team) to help out with testing and play a level.

There’s still a lot to do, but the end is in sight and things are getting exciting.

[Ivan_Lytkin]

Great news, you should have it done long time ago. Now work with steam community - publish some art, news, etc in game community hub.

Edit: also I recommend to translate it at least to Chinese and German.

[Pkeod]

Added to my wishlist! How many have you collected in the few days it’s been up so far?

I bet the Papers, Please dev would be interested in making a Steam bundle with your two games at some point. I’ve done bundles on Steam with other devs before and they do make an impact.

[dapetcu21]

That’s a pretty good idea. Thanks. We have about 100 with just some limited promotion on Facebook so far. The plan is to start working on putting a community together in the coming months.

[sergey.lerg]

Just saw the game on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKhz-2K1378&t=17s
Good job!

[dapetcu21]

Oh cool! By the way, we’re launching in a couple of weeks on the 5th of December! I didn’t have time to post about it here yet since I’m neck deep in pre-release work, but yeah, that’s finally happening!

[dapetcu21]

Our post about the art direction of Interrogation got featured on the main page of Gamasutra:

How we combined film and comics to create the noir aesthetic of Interrogation

[dapetcu21]

And the devlog series continues with an article about how we approached political topics in Interrogation:

How we approached non-partisan politics in Interrogation

[Pkeod]

When people say they don’t want games to be political, they mean heavy handed propaganda to the point where it is obvious that an agenda came first above quality of the game. It is the propagandist who hand-waves away this sentiment, because they are often dishonest to begin with – gamers don’t mind games with politics in them, what they hate is those who attempt to indoctrinate others into their worldview through dishonest, partisan, polarizing tactics (often involving silencing those who they disagree with either with the power of the state, the corporation, or the bullet) which attempt to re-frame history, reality to fit their own worldview. Because when games are made with (identity) politics (or other religious views) as a priority, they usually suck. I do not wish to be lectured or preached at when I am playing a game, and neither do others. I reject the idea that all games are political (though some certainly are crafted as political tools in one way or another by those who are themselves tools of other’s ambitions), the idea that games are political is itself a propaganda of the fool who is so desperate to swindle minds as to make the cruel wish of robbing games of their formal purpose - escapism. It seems like your game is not propaganda, and is a game which many people of various worldviews can get lost in, which I appreciate, and I look forward to playing it.

[88.josh]

I also disagree that all games are political (…although I see what dapetcu means). Candy crush, for example, is difficult to describe as political. Pong is not political. But the problem with the argument that “games should be escapism and games shouldn’t be political” isn’t that it doesn’t really work for, say, gay people who play online shooters because they want to escape real-life homophobia.

That’s obviously a very clear-cut example (and I am sure everybody here rejects homophobia). But another more complex example might be, for example, if you’re a woman and you want to play as a female character. 9% of video games at E3 2019 had a female main character. 32% had a male main character. Men don’t have to think about gender politics, you can just play, most characters will match your gender.

but it’s unfair to criticise those who are trying to change the situation by calling for more roles for women in video games. They are just trying to do the same as you: escape from a world in which sexism exists.

[88.josh]

By the way, I played interrogation in an earlier version a few months ago (maybe last year). It was great.

[dapetcu21]

I also disagree that all games are political (…although I see what dapetcu means). Candy crush, for example, is difficult to describe as political. Pong is not political. But the problem with the argument that “games should be escapism and games shouldn’t be political” isn’t that it doesn’t really work for, say, gay people who play online shooters because they want to escape real-life homophobia.

The argument in the article was more rather that lots of games avoid labelling themselves as political to avoid controversy, even though they contain unavoidable political elements. It’s hard to make a game that has a story, for example, and be completely politically neutral, since politics extends to every aspect of our society. And of course, there’s a scale. Whilst Pong may be minimally political, other games like Deus Ex are more political.

But yes, your point is good. People don’t live in a void, they live in the current world and they like being engaged with topics from the current world (like gender politics), that they relate to. The trick is to do it in a way in which you don’t fall in identity politics in a bid to attract a segment of your audience, because you will appear insensitive to and alienate the other “camp”.

[Pkeod]

Congrats on launch!

[Ivan_Lytkin]

It’s time to port it to Nintendo Switch now!

[dapetcu21]

@Ivan_Lytkin indeed, it is time!

Interrogation is coming to Nintendo Switch on the 28th of July!

Our Nintendo eShop pages are up:
Europe: https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Interrogation-You-will-be-deceived-1810591.html
America: https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/interrogation-you-will-be-deceived-switch

Many thanks to the Defold dev team who offered us amazing support during the porting process!

[88.josh]

Looking forward to checking this out on the switch!

[dapetcu21]

Aaaand, it’s out! The eShop links are in the post above.

Also, since not everyone owns a Switch, we also have a sale on Steam to go with it:

[Elpidoforos_Gkikas]

Congrats @dapetcu21 I wish you the best I bought it to help your work … Also from videos seems very good now I download and I will play it , thanks and be well