DGC Ep 438: Gone Home Bonus Interview with Karla Zimonja

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we revisit our series on Gone Home and walking simulators with an interview with Karla Zimonja. We talk about Karla's early career before transitioning to talking about Minerva's Den and get a lot of great gems from the development of Gone Home. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary.

Podcast breakdown:
01:02 Interview
1:21:00 Break
1:21:30 Outro

Issues covered: early life and education, stop motion animation and puppetry, Squigglevision, no usual paths into games, transitioning to 3D animation, getting on the content mill, getting in, repetition and burnout, doing tons of research and visual design, picking the soundtrack and working on voice, a small team covering a lot of stuff, putting together clipped out letters, covering all the bases for graphic design/props/and more, digital hoarding, moving to Portland, having a great production, making the bros cry, getting onto Steam, critical acclaim getting you to market, taking out the combat, removing rather than replacing, environmental storytelling, setting the game in the 90s, being aware of the world and having no cellphones, setting yourself up for rigor, pacing, tying together time and space, knowing where the player will go, going to the second floor vs the first floor, putting chunks together, a mind map, callbacks between props, forgetting you're in a video game, the story doesn't exist without the player putting things together, the IKEA effect, situating the journal in Sam's perspective, audio logs, Katie knowing what her sister's voice would be like, not being a little game designer, avoiding artifice, avoiding goofiness, three parter audio logs, cutting out logs you didn't need, not holding the player's hand, dumbing down too far vs letting people be uncomfortable, finding the voice via research, being able to generalize from the highly detailed specifics, getting handwriting, magic and Unicorn Cloud 7, being just as easy to put in the supernatural story but resisting that, wanting the fantasy, how to think about game structure, "the team makes the game," putting story in the ephemera, constraints and applying them to generate the tension, award-winning, the indie space and the blogs, indies banding together, thinking about a game when you're not playing it.

Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Asheron's Call 2, Zoo Tycoon 2, 2K Marin, Bioshock 2, Minerva's Den, Fullbright, Tacoma, Open Roads, Wanderstop, Sonderlust Studios, Generation Exile, EA, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, Olive Jar Animation, MTV, The Critic, Nightmare Before Christmas, Tom Snyder, Soup to Nuts, Dr. Katz, Home Movies, Mitch Hedberg, Trainspotting, Animator Pro, Turbine Games, Lightwave, The Last of Us, Something Awful, Fallout (series), Bob Hope, Maya, Johnnemann Nordhagen, Karina Veronica Riesgo, Inkscape, Steve Gaynor, Rachel Gaynor, Steam Greenlight, Independent Games Festival/IGF, Dear Esther, Call of Cthulhu, Street Fighter, NES/SNES, IKEA, William Goldman, Alien: Isolation, Kate Craig, Final Fantasy VII, Horse Master, Oddity Roadshow, Carl Lumbly, Alias, John Wick, Lance Reddick, Outer Wilds, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia, Bratmobile.

Next time:
TBA!

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