Q&A Part 2, inspirations for the game

Hi! This week it’s another question from the Q&A from a couple weeks ago - what were our inspirations / how did we come up with the game? I dredged up some of the materials we generated while making the game, and I figured I’d share them with you, plus the story of how it came to be.

It started when Andrew and I decided to team up for the GMTK (Game Maker’s Toolkit) Game Jam (Side note: this game jam is happening again this weekend, so technically this is our 1 year anniversary!) For those unfamiliar, a Game Jam is when a bunch of people get together and make games on a theme over the course of a couple days. Last year’s theme was “Out of Control.”

The screenshot below is a list of the game ideas we were considering, I’ve drawn arrows to the one which would eventually become Out of CTRL. As you can see we just had the main mechanic, and the idea for the pun. Andrew had said he didn’t want to make an action game because he made one last year, and once we knew we wanted to make a writing heavy game, we got Cam to join us (the best decision on the project).

From my perspective (my teammates may differ), I was inspired mostly by ideas for mechanics. I’ve always enjoyed using CTRL C+ CTRL V to copy paste and I thought it could be satisfying in a game. I’d also recently made Zenosyne, which is a journaling game, so having a game ask questions of the player was fresh in my mind as well. Cam added the horror aspect of the game, which fit nicely with the rest of it.

Once we’d decided to make this game, we planned out our tasks. This is also around when we contacted Katherine to see if they would voice the main character. We had a pretty nice weekend all told, nobody stayed up super late even though we only had 48 hours to make the game.

Finally, we turned it in with an hour or two to spare. The response was great! We fell off working on the game for a while but returned to fix up a few things once people started playing it more. (plus add the link to the signup for this very email list!)

That’s all for this week! I was going to give a horror game recommendation as well but the email is already a little long so I’ll save it for next week! Let us know if there are other topics you’d enjoy hearing us cover :)

Cheers,

-Ezra