Daniel Benmergui knew his innovative indie-game concept could work. He didn’t know it’d take him 15 years of development hell to put it out.
were minting fortunes for small developers outside of the conventional games-publishing ecosystem. He wanted to make a puzzle game, called, that tasked players with creating stories using the visual language of comic strips. One puzzle might call for a simple romance told across two frames. In the first frame, you could drag a character named Adam up, so that he’s standing alone; in the second, you could drag Eve to join him. Success! Now the next puzzle may call for heartbreak.
Great idea, right? Benmergui quit his job at a traditional game developer to pursue it full-time. In 2012,won the prestigious Nuovo Award from the Independent Games Festival, given to a title with groundbreaking mechanics. By this point, Benmergui had run out of money from his old job, so he moved in with his mom, but he felt an incredible sense of momentum and possibility behind. “My ego was the size of Jupiter,” he says in the Fuckup Nights talk.
But Benmergui, ever-cognizant of the power of narrative, ends that Fuckup Nights talk with a twist. After detailing his riches-to-rags story to the audience for 15 minutes, he concludes by revealing on the sly that work onIt was like a new, empty frame appearing at the end of a tragedy. The smaller, more mechanical games had helped Benmergui build the design confidence to tackle’s thornier problems.
, the solution to one puzzle is to change the setting from day to night. That one idea — allowing players to determine settings, rather than just characters — ended up being the way Benmergui was able to wrangle the player’s attention , forming scenarios out of clusters of settings. Instead of just dragging and dropping objects, as in the prototype, now they could be placed inside a throne room, a dungeon, a cliff, and so on — all leading to specific types of stories.
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