This year, Papers Please developer Lucas Pope released his latest game, the mercantile murder mystery Return of the Obra Dinn.

Recently, Pope was kind enough to join us on the GDC Twitch channel for a conversation about making Return of the Obra Dinn, where he talked about the harrowing engineering and design problems he had to overcome -- and how working to solve those problems is intensely appealing to him.

Solving a complicated 1-bit dithering issue

Pope: Papers Please was kind of a design first project where I had the idea for the mechanics. This one, Obra Dinn was visuals first, so more art focused. I wanted to make something 1-bit. And just kind of banging on that for a while ended up with this setting on the ship, and then after a few months, the core concept of figuring out how people died.

It’s basically me taking what I played as a kid, which was Macintosh Plus games which were 1-bit. For the time, they were actually high resolution. It was only 512x342 or something crazy like that, but it’s on a 9-inch screen so it's very sharp, very striking for me as a kid. And I played a lot of games that way. And I specifically remember never thinking—it’s hard to remember not thinking something—but for me I never thought, "I want more colors here." To me it always looked beautiful in one bit.

And so Papers Please had some level of art in it, but it wasn’t really art-focused. And I like to pretend I’m an artist, so I thought what I wanted to do was take this 1-bit style that I played as a kid and try to make it legible and playable now using modern technology. So that was the idea. And then I mocked up a few things. What’s interesting to me is that the title screen for the game is the first thing I ever mocked up in one bit in Photoshop, and it’s also the first thing I made in Unity. It didn’t change in the entire four-and-a-half years. Basically, once I got that working it taught me that it was possible and it could look cool and that sent me four years down the line.

The first thing I did was I played some old actual Mac first-person games, and the best one I could find was something called Colony. And it’s a very low-poly, just-the-walls kind of thing. But one of the things from playing that game, and also playing some modern 1-bit games, [modern 1-bit games] take the render and they dither it, and it looks cool but you can’t see what’s going on. You can’t see anything in these modern games. In Colony you can see everything very clearly and I decided that everything is going to have an outline. 

So geometric shapes are going to be outlined. If it’s against white it’ll have a black outline, if it’s against black it’ll have a white outline. So it’s always an inverse, so the shapes and geometry are always clear to see. So the thing about that is that it removes any mystery about where you are or the environment. Everything is perfectly defined, basically, which was fine because I wasn’t making a horror game, so I didn’t want to hide things from the player. You could tell where you were at all times, [which is] what I was going for. So that was on the surface, the simple thing, how could I make this work where everything is outlined. 

But as the production progressed, the bigger problem became comfort--viewing comfort. Because you’ve only got two colors to work with and you need to make shades out of those using dithering. But dithering is not a technology that you want to use in a moving picture, basically because it gives you a headache, more or less. There’s too many high contrast, flashing pixels. So the real magic for me in making this work was solving that dithering problem and figuring out how to make it so people could play a four-hour game without getting massively uncomfortable.

The first solution is just to increase the resolution. So your pixels are smaller so that when you dither your eyes are fooled more into thinking it’s a tone instead of just a bunch of dots. I wanted it to be 1-bit but I also wanted it to be low-resolution. That was partly because of production—it makes it easier to create this thing when it’s not super high-res—but also I just like that style more. I like the low resolution, I like trying to do more with less pixels. 

When I decided I couldn’t raise the resolution to solve that, I put off the problem for a long time, couple years, and then finally when I had enough to sort of sit down and play a lot of [the game] full-screen in front of me, I changed the dither pattern, basically. It wasn’t [about the dithering] trying to be shades so much as much as it was trying to be a wood cut, more pattern style. It worked fine to me, it looked ok, but in the Tigsource dev log which I kept for the game, nobody else liked it. Everyone hated it.

I went back to the drawing board and devised a dithering technique that keeps the dither sort of fixed when you’re looking around, so when you turn your head the dither pattern is not sliding across as you would expect; it’s moving with the scene. That took a lot of time to get right, and in the end you don’t really notice it. My hope is that you don’t get sick as much as you would have with the other one. I’m not gonna say I fixed everything, but it makes it much more comfortable to look at when you’re just standing there looking around.

The harrowing experience of scaling up from the 2014 Obra Dinn demo

Pope: I think there were four [characters] in the initial demo for this in 2014. That was easy. Whatever dialogue or characters or text I wrote then was with nothing else in mind. I didn’t have any of the story written at that time, just kind of "ok these guys will be fighting over something and the captain ends up killing a bunch of them or whatever." And that worked for the progress I’d made at that time. And I kind of stuck with this idea, that the game would be about figuring out how people died. I stuck with that for a long time, until I realized that that’s not hard to tell usually. You can usually see that pretty easily.

But it wasn’t until I had a lot more of the game done that I realized the real fun part would be figuring out who they are. Because that would lead into ways I could create clues in the environment and have the player kind of work out a Clue-like or Moriarty-like, it’s this old game, logic puzzle to figure out who people are.

So that design shifted. And that shift happened kind of late, I wanna say. Working out the narrative structure for this game was pretty tough, because you can only tell the story when somebody dies, first off, and then I also needed to have this almost unbroken chain of bodies going back through time which, you know, probably isn’t that normal.

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.

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. 

At that time I wasn’t thinking about much in arranging the story, or the player’s experience or anything, I was just thinking about “I need a bunch of people for this ship and I’ll figure out the rest later.” And I had the manifest still, and that’s all I had was just a list of names. So the project kind of scaled at different times. At some point this doesn’t scale so I gotta scale up. And then I move over to some other thing and that doesn’t scale so I gotta scale up. And they all kind of scale in different ways, without really changing the other elements of the game because I didn’t want to remake them. Or I felt like I could still do something good with them so keep those and scale this guy up.

But everything that I had for that demo did not scale. So the fact that there were four characters there, I was already pushing up against all the pipeline and tools, custom things I created to make those four guys. So there was no way that the tools and the systems that I had would scale up to 60 people. That added almost another year of scaling up to the point where I could make the full game from the demo. And this is true of every game I’ve ever worked on. If you look at the first prototype of anything, it’s hard to imagine how much time it took to go from that to the final thing, because in a lot of cases it looks just like the final game with some small differences. But in most cases, you had to change everything about your production and how you made the game to get from that first initial thing to the end. 

Thinking like an engineer who's looking to solve problems

Pope: When it comes to design I’m a big fan of rigid core mechanics. [In Obra Dinn] something very basic and simple that you’re doing is you’re kind of filling out a matrix of features for your list of identities. Something about simple and core, just as a slightly OCD engineer--I like that. That’s where I come from on the design side.

On the other side I really like taking those things and making something interesting out of them story-wise. You know, there are people around the world who do all kinds of jobs all the time and many of those jobs are boring and mundane but those people have interesting lives to me. 

I like trying to capture the interesting parts of a mundane experience. And that works really well when you like mundane mechanics, because those two interests go together really well. It’s kind of what directs me to pick an idea and then develop it and then evolve it into a full game.

In every project I do, I approach it like an engineer, as if there’s a problem that needs to be solved. If there’s no problem, then I’m not that interested. But if there’s a problem, if there’s some restriction or some limitation, then I’m interested suddenly. That’s why I have one bit, that’s why I have simple mechanics that you wouldn’t expect to build a story out of--because solving those problems are the most interesting and fun parts of game development for me.