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Lucas Pope hopes to finish Return of the Obra Dinn in 2016

Scaling up the tools to support full production proved an issue.
Bengt Lemne 7 April 2016

We sat down on a couple of beanie bags to talk to indie developer Lucas Pope (Papers, Please) about his next game, the first person mystery game Return of the Obra Dinn.

"It's set on an old sailing ship," says Pope of the setting. "There's no pirates, but it's kind of an old merchant sailing ship. And it goes out, it disappears, nobody knows what happened to it, but it drifts back into port at some point a couple of years later and your job is to go onto the boat and figure out what happened."

The game has been in development for a while and Lucas Pope offered an explanation that some of the tools he used for an early prototype simply didn't scale well to full production, but there's an end in sight as he hopes to be done in 2016.

"It's hard for me to say exactly, cause I don't have enough of the game to finish it and it'll be good," says Pope of a potential release window. "So there's still a point where I may change some of the design, or change what I've got. But I feel like I can finish it this year."

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