Lucas Pope found structure of Obra Dinn "extremely difficult"

Lucas Pope is a game designer that you may remember from the likes of Papers, Please, and his most recent game Return of the Obra Dinn has also garnered a lot of praise as well (including from us). Pope recently spoke to Gamasutra about the development process, and it turns out that designing such a project was a bit of a nightmare at times.

"When I decided it was going to be on a ship, I thought that would be easy because I could model four decks of a ship no problem. That was my first big mistake on the game. But once I decided that, I did a lot of research on these ships and I started building a ship, and I don't know why but I looked at the number of people you'd need in order to sail one of these ships and it was maybe 120, 200 people. And obviously I knew—ok I'm smart enough to know I couldn't do 120 people but maybe I could do 80."

"So my first number was 80 people. And then when I actually made all the characters I realized, damn, the most I could do was 60. I'm going crazy doing these characters, so I'll stop at 60, but this was all before I'd worked out the story. So if I'd worked on the story first, there'd be 12 people on the tiny sailboat basically. But because I worked on the ship and the reality of what you would need to work on this ship, I started super high and I felt like every time I cut it down I was going to compromise the game, not realizing that I was still going to kill myself to try and finish 60 people."

The demo that was released in 2014 featured only four people, Pope explained, which was pretty simple, but way more crew members came a need for more structure:

"I decided to break it all up into chapters or disasters and lay everything out like that. That structure was extremely difficult to figure out, which tied my hands a bit because I might have changed the design in a different way if I hadn't put all that work into the story. But once I put all that work into the story, I was stuck with it and I had to figure out a way to make it work, and that way was basically the book, and focusing more on the identities than the means of death."

Have you tried Return of the Obra Dinn yet?