Iron Circus Comics has made a habit of fostering unique graphic novels and new voices, and has used crowdfunding to raise over five million dollars over the course of 40 campaigns.
Now that Iron Circus has the crowdfunding graphic novel game down, they have decided to branch out with a partnership with game creators Indiepocalypse for their first video game anthology on Backerkit, which pairs up Iron Circus Comics cartoonists with programmers and game creators.
We spoke to Indiepocalypse founder Andrew Baillie and game designer Farbs and exodrifter about the debut collaboration in this exclusive interview.
Andrew Baillie:
How did you become involved in the project with Iron Circus?
Andrew Baillie: I emailed Iron Circus and pitched the idea and they agreed. Simple as that! I feel collaboration in the indie space is often not any more complicated than that.
This is Iron Circus first foray into games, what advice were you able to give them based on your previous experiences with indie games?
Baillie: Just make whatever you want to make. There can be this pull into making something you think some hypothetical audience wants but not only is that difficult to predict but you never know what is going to resonate with people.
Also, make smaller games.
Which of the games are you most excited about?
Baillie: It sounds like a cheat answer, but it really is all of them. I am aware of the high concepts of the games but have purposefully not looked into the games too specifically to see what sorts of games they even are. Once the chaos of helping organize and run the campaign is over, I’m looking to sit down and play through the collection fresh along with everyone else.
Farbs:
Your game Taleteller blurs the lines between picture book and videogame. Can you further describe this concept?
Farbs: Right from the start Jess wanted to make something that felt like a children’s story book, and the more we talked about it the more fun we thought it would be to really commit to that. So now, as well as being a story about storytelling, it’s told as a story. The game is presented as a book on a table, every beat is told with a flip of a page, it’s all written from a narrator’s perspective, and it’s even framed in a nice hand-illustrated border!
It’s also a videogame though, so sometimes you’ll flip to a page where you run around a 3D world, sometimes it’ll be a page where you solve a puzzle, and sometimes it’ll be a page that tells you what happens next. Games very rarely have anything like a narrator outside of tutorial instructions and menus, so it was really interesting to see what happens when you add one.
You worked with Jess M. on the game. How is doing a game like this a collaborative effort?
Farbs: Making a game requires a lot of different skills, and although I sometimes make games by myself I’m not very good at drawing, 3D art, or writing. Thankfully Jess is great at all of those things! So, together we were able to make something pretty cool. My specialty is gameplay programming, which glues all the pictures and 3D models and sounds together and determines how they interact with the player and each other, so Jess made all these little pieces and I assembled them into a game.
exodrifter:
Your game, Voluntary Commitment, finds players committed to a strange facility. Where did the idea come from for a game in this type of setting?
exodrifter: Voluntary Commitment is inspired by an event that happened a few years ago, when I was admitted to a psych ward against my will. It was a traumatic experience for me and I wanted to write about some of those experiences, like the people and staff I met there and the darkly funny situations I ended up in. Evan Dahm, the artist I’m working with, also wanted to make a game about a Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
In terms of game play, how would you describe Voluntary Commitment?
exodrifter: I would say that it’s kind of like Animal Crossing in the sense that there are a bunch of characters who have their own schedules as they go about their day. You can chat and do a few things for them. There’s a real-time component too. Your stay at the facility will eventually end, but this is dependent on how compliant you are with the staff. Evan Dahm did a great job creating the art for different characters for you to meet and making the facility feel sterile and empty.
Check out the details about the games and how to back the project right here.
