For those of you who like to follow the development of games, I think that a mention of the upcoming and extremely peculiar game of Lucas Pope (the developer of “Papers Please”) is well deserved.
Return of the Obra Dinn
Description
In 1802, the merchant ship “Obra Dinn” set out from London for the Orient with over 200 tons of trade goods. Six months later it hadn’t met its rendezvous point at the Cape of Good Hope and was declared lost at sea.
Early this morning of October 14th, 1807, the Obra Dinn drifted into port with sails damaged and no visible crew. As insurance adjustor for the East India Company’s London Office, find means to board the ship and recover the Crew Muster Roll book for assessment.
Notes
The 1-bit graphics used in the game are for sure an uncommon artistic choice and it has been a pleasure to follow the development posts written by Pope. He had to find a good dithering algorithm, he had to design a realistic 3D ambient sound system to create the right atmosphere, and of course he had to design also the whole gameplay, which involves investigation and a way to witness past events (maybe a bit similar to “The Vanishing of Ethan Carter on Steam”).
He had also to face serious issues related to the “marketing” of the game; for example using YouTube to publish a video of the game implies that the video service by default will compress the graphics in a very bad way, resulting in a very blurry mess. 1-bit dithered graphics is a b**ch!
If you enjoyed reading the more technical posts of the Thimbleweed Park development blog, I’m sure that you’ll enjoy reading Pope comments as well. You can also download a demo of the game.