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Papers, Please creator Lucas Pope has announced that his next game will be Return of the Obra Dinn, a first-person mystery set aboard an East Indian merchant ship in the early part of the 19th century.
Pope revealed the game’s story specifics over on the TIGForums.
“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, 1808, the Obra Dinn drifted into port with sails damaged and no visible crew. As insurance adjuster for the East India Company’s London Office find means to board the ship and recover the captain’s logbook for assessment.”
Pope says he wants to continue challenging himself, and as such don’t expect the experience to be anything like Papers, Please.
“There’ll be less creativity with the gameplay and instead I want to experiment with the rendering, story, and a few technical features,” he explained. “Right now I have only a rough idea about the narrative. I’m hoping to capture a compelling mystery with suspense and twists in the limited space of an old merchant sailing ship. It won’t be the typical “collect items and look for clues” structure. There’s a slightly cool gameplay hook but I won’t go into details on that until much later.”
Pope is willing to discuss the art style for the game, which he says will borrow heavily from the 1-bit visuals of old Mac games.
“My first computer was a Mac Plus. I’ve always had a nostalgia-softened spot in my heart for 1-bit graphics,” wrote Pope. “I’d like to capture the detailed black & white look of old Mac games in a realtime 1st person game. I plan to push it grittier and less cartoon-like than those old games; the hard part will be keeping everything legible without it becoming an unreadable mess of dithered pixels.
“One interesting problem with 1-bit rendering is that it doesn’t scale well for images and it compresses to video like s*** – so YouTube stuff may look really poor. We’ll see how it goes.”
Optimistically Pope hopes to have the game finished in three months, but believes six months is more realistic.
Source: TIGForums
