The Indie Game Magazine May 2014 | Issue 37 | Page 16

AAA has been the ability to understand an audience;
in AAA, if you get this wrong your product fails on
metacritic and in sales, but in indie if you fall short
your audience doesn’t get your message and as an
artist that can be massively disappointing. Learning
to make something personal but not for yourself
has been my biggest takeaway from the big show.

IGM: You want to “explore games that express
the human experience.” Which human experiences
are you thinking about in particular? Which ones do
you see explored the least by video game designers?

IGM: How’s it been for you working in a much

smaller team?

Josh: It’s been a challenge at times; I think the
stability of a large company seemingly offers a safer
future and more established direction that’s difficult
to replicate. It’s hard to keep a team oriented and
motivated, especially when our goals are different
from what most games are pursuing right now. I
think the biggest challenge has been having parttime contributors; one of the biggest reasons I ‘went
indie’ was because trying something new requires a
lot of commitment. I think it’s incredibly challenging
to invest yourself in new ideas, and most video game
jobs involve extraneous workloads that eat away at
your discretionary time.
IGM: Going away from balancing multiplayer in

games like Dawn of War and playing competitively,
what’s it like to switch to designing a very different,
emotional experience?

Josh: I think the transition was a bit awkward at

Josh: I like telling peoples’ stories and letting

them feel like they have been understood; I simply
seek the challenge of conveying difficult experiences,
whatever they may be. In the case of Oscar, the
human experience is that of having problems we
can’t explain or seem to get addressed. When the
people we love and trust the most ask us how we
are, why do we lie and say we’re fine sometimes? 
I think most games today explore power, fantasy,
and fun. Personally I feel these are bigger players in
our lives growing up, but as adults I don’t think they
capture or represent the parts of us that have come
to replace fun and imagination as the dominant
forces. I think there’s a huge spectrum of human
experiences that hasn’t been tapped because we
still struggle to accept that games can be more...
substantial. 

first; After several years you get in the groove and
it becomes a habit. At the same time, I would say
the transition was my primary motivation. I used
design methods I was taught during my last couple
years of AAA and tried applying them with goals of
emotion and empathy instead of gameplay depth
and challenge. I quit my job when I realized I could
not only make much better RTS games, but I was
enabling all sorts of different experiences with good
design process.
On the other hand it’s immensely demanding
at a personal level; deriving gameplay to reflect
human experiences can be grueling. Pursuing fun as
a design goal is usually palatable, but trying to make
a game that resonates with your most personal fears
and experiences as its primary goal isn’t always
enjoyable. I think that comes with artistry though,
which is how I treat game design to a certain extent.

IGM: Being a composer as well for the project,
how has that affected your relationship with your
project?
Josh: Hmm that’s a tough one. As I mentioned

previously, my original goal in the industry was to
be a composer; I think it’s the discipline in which I
have the most talent. At the same time I was able to

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