Shownotes
Thomas Vestergaard & Oliver Cohen Chime make up Woodhound, the Danish game studio behind Desecrators - a 6 degrees-of-freedom shooter set in the distant future of 4096. Our conversation ranges through unconventional storytelling, player agency, co-op gameplay, the many games from the line of Interplay's Descent, the Danish indie game development scene, futurism in art, and what's next for their studio after the game's release. | Follow Desecrators: Steam | Website | X | YouTube | Discord | In The Keep | Support In The Keep | Theme Song by Jon of the Shred |
Transcripts
Tyler:
[0:00] Modern means of communication, the power afforded by print, telephone, wireless, and so forth, of rapidly putting through directive strategic and technical conceptions to a great number of cooperating centers, of getting quick replies and effective discussion, have opened up a new world of political processes.
Tyler:
[0:19] Ideas and phrases can now be given an effectiveness greater than the effectiveness of any personality and stronger than any sectional interest. The common design can be documented and sustained against perversion and betrayal and can be elaborated and developed steadily and widely without personal, local, and sectional misunderstanding.
Tyler:
oted by Edward Bernays in his:Music:
[0:49] Music
Oliver:
[0:59] The original idea also, at least on my side, grew out of the frustration with the fact that no one else was making these games at that time. And still, that's like one of two games since then, right? Since we started, that's four years ago, I think.
Thomas:
[1:14] It's less than one game per year on Steam.
Oliver:
[1:18] Yeah, it's depressing. So, I mean, I really wanted to play those games again. And so I think that was the spark, at least for me, to start on this idea.
Tyler:
[1:28] Yeah. And you had told me that you were born to make such a game, right? A spaceship style, whatever it is, as long as you're flying spaceships around in zero gravity, you're happy. But I kind of want to know, why is it? Yeah. Yeah.
Oliver:
[1:43] I really like, for some reason, any game about sci-fi vehicles. There's a fascination with that concept since I've been, yeah, I don't know, since I can't remember anything. So when I saw nobody was making these games and I was looking for a game to make, it seemed like it was my duty to make it, yeah.
Tyler:
[2:05] When was the first time we remember maybe drawing or designing a spaceship? Were you one of those kids that had the rockets with different chemical rockets in the backyard and whatnot? I don't know how legal that is in Denmark.
Oliver:
[2:21] No, rockets are legal all year round, but it came another way around, actually, because, of course, I drew spaceships when I was a child. Everybody drew spaceships, sure. But I think what really started it was my dad was working in software back then. He had a big computer at home and he would bring these disks he got from work, which were like disks filled with pirated games. I don't know where he got them from, because it was not like the popular titles, it was all these weird Eastern European games usually. So at a young age, I didn't actually play things like Doom or Quake or anything like that because they weren't on those discs and that's all I had. But they had all these weird Eastern European sci-fi titles, and most of those, they were like, it was some sort of aircraft, a tank, and there was really a bad story, but they had pretty good gameplay and atmosphere. I feel like Eastern European games are still kind of in that vein. Like they don't have the budget to really do the big narratives. They said to have all that atmosphere and interesting concepts. And I think just playing those games for years and years, that developed, you know, my taste for how games should be.
Oliver:
[3:37] So I always really wanted to make games like that. These weird games that are not the traditional narrative where you are some.
Tyler:
[3:46] If you look at the US,
Oliver:
[3:48] The US makes most of the games that are popular. You're usually some kind of person running around with a gun. If we're talking about action games and you're fighting something that's definitely evil, like demons or aliens invading, things like that. But these weird games I played, it was never that simple. It was always some strange concept and it wasn't really clear who was who or what you were fighting. But yeah, I liked it a lot.
Tyler:
[4:14] I think um what's what's really interesting about what you were saying is like the the kind of clear division between good guys and bad guys sort of like stems almost from like tolkien fantasy where you know it's very clear you know good guys bad guys and then you have that like actually leading into even the american west where you know if you watch like an old western movie or even like wrestling from you know way back you would have like the good guy always wears white boots and the black guy always wears black boots and like the it was just so spoon-fed to the audience that you're you're not really left to have any sort of nuance then later that that sort of changed with the kind of concept of the anti-hero and there are classic literary examples of that too but yeah in your game it's you don't i don't even think it really ever tells you if you're good or bad at all i mean it's just you're you this is what you're doing you're kind of plundering around for stuff and uh i mean in the description given in steam it kind of gives you some backstory which i also thought was a really cool kind of throwback to the way games used to give you story you just kind of find out iteratively while you play instead of it being cut scenes and you know you don't have like a star wars roller at the jump of the game that tells you this is the situation you just kind of figure it out make it up for yourself even to some degree until you get later in it's cool
Oliver:
[5:37] Yeah, I think that describes it well, that part about making it up a little bit as you go. It's not that we don't have... Of course, we have a picture in our head what's going on in the game, but I also like when games, they just expose you to the world, the mechanics, and if those things are well designed, they should actually just tell you the story. You should understand what's going on.
Tyler:
[5:58] Right.
Oliver:
[5:58] And you shouldn't need text or voiceovers and so on to really explain these things. Of course, if you want characters and a traditional linear narrative, you probably need that. But when we're talking about a procedural game that's really about the moment-to-moment gameplay and making that feel good, I don't think you... I mean, if we had a limited budget, we would do it. But with the resources we have, we just didn't think that was that important.
Tyler:
[6:26] It's such a... Almost, you know, in the terms of video games, like an ancient concept, having a spaceship that you know you kind of fly around you get little upgrades and you shoot around in multiple directions of course this is three-dimensional and that's been done for a long time but i mean going all the way back to games like asteroids other clones of the similar like on classic computers i personally like when i was a kid my grandma would sit me at the computer and put on asteroids and tell me you know just leave me alone and it was awesome and as you said there's no like it doesn't give you a story it's just like Does this mechanic capture you? Does it create an addictive game loop so that you're just having fun and progressing? Even things like Ski Free. Forget about spaceships. That was kind of the hallmark of a good video game. Pong doesn't have a story. Does the mechanics on the screen capture you? Play it. Do you like it? What were some of those games for you guys?
Oliver:
[7:22] Games that captured me. I mean, of course, Descent. You can tell from the game we made that captured me a lot, um, but I didn't, I've spent a lot of time in Descent, but I'm trying to remember some of these Eastern European games. The problem was back when I played them, I couldn't really read, especially not English. So it's really hard for me to remember what they were called.
Tyler:
[7:44] Gotcha. Yeah.
Oliver:
[7:48] Like, you know, the predecessor to Stalker, it's made by the same company, I believe. It's called, it has kind of a similar concept, except it takes place in the U.S. Or Mexico or something, and you're these soldiers moving into this area that's contaminated with something.
Tyler:
[8:04] Do you know what I'm talking about?
Oliver:
[8:06] It's not that popular.
Tyler:
[8:08] I'm trying to do a little Google food search on that. Let's see, Stalker, developer, let's see. I didn't even ever think about what they might have made before Stalker, which is a kind of a shitty thing to do as a journalist.
Oliver:
[8:22] Yeah, but it was a really clunky game, but it was, back then I didn't know there were games that weren't like this. I just remember that had a big, yeah, made a bit of an impression because it was kind of scary and realistic for the time. And it had this, yeah, concept with these aliens in the middle of the US, in this area.
Tyler:
[8:40] Any chance it's Heroes of Annihilated Empires?
Oliver:
[8:45] I'm afraid not. It's quite bad. I can't remember what it's called.
Tyler:
[8:50] American Conquest. Fightback. No, that's not it. That's like Revolutionary War Times. They've made a lot of games before Stalker, actually. What are they called? Somebody's getting angry at us in the show notes right now. Angry comments are getting tight. GSC World Publishing. So I'm looking at the wrong thing here. We want the developers.
Oliver:
[9:10] Odename Outbreak. That's the one.
Tyler:
[9:13] Odename Outbreak.
Oliver:
[9:14] Excellent yeah I think outside Eastern Europe it's pretty much I'm not sure was it even sold in stores I don't know I just got it on this disc and I thought it was pretty pretty cool I.
Tyler:
[9:28] Don't even see what you're talking about is not even listed on their Wikipedia page so like yeah it's a deep cut, man.
Oliver:
[9:34] Maybe they're embarrassed.
Tyler:
[9:37] It could be.
Thomas:
[9:40] One game that had a build that affected me, I think you have heard about it, Limbo. There's not a lot of direct speech or text on that, but it still tells the story very strongly.
Tyler:
[9:56] There was sort of a time period. How old are we all? I'm 29. 39 39 okay so i mean whatever roughly 10 15 years ago there was sort of this slew of really cool very story-driven solo dev games that are side-scrolling on you know built-in unity and they were coming out on say playstation for you know part of the past there was just so many of these limbo being one of them that i played uh uh fez another one that i remember like getting on the playstation pass that kind of stuff but just such a good slew of those types of games and story driven very very deep you know into the you know emergent story, nevertheless, because you're kind of, you're first introducing the mechanic and then you continue to learn as you go. But yeah, Limbo was such a good title. I'm really glad you brought that back to me. I might replay that now. There was, I think around the same time that I first played Binding of Isaac, I probably played Limbo shortly thereafter.
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