Unpacking with Wren Brier
Unpacking (Witch Beam)
As soon as we added toilet paper hanging, we knew we needed this.
Welcome to Talking Simulator, a series of short conversations about video games with interesting people who play them. I'm Jordan Erica Webber. And in this episode, I discuss the soothing puzzle game Unpacking with my guest, Wren Brier.
Hi, I’m Wren. I'm the creative director of Unpacking.
Unpacking is a gentle puzzle game in which you learn about a person's life and relationships over the course of a couple of decades by unpacking their possessions each time they go through a move, stacking books on shelves, plates in cupboards, clothes in drawers, and so on. Light limitations restrict where you can put these objects away, and through these intuitive rules, the game tells an almost wordless story. If you're listening to this episode on the day it came out, then Unpacking was released today, but don't worry, we keep spoilers light and don't reveal anything about the parts of the game that elevated Unpacking from something I was excited to play to one of my favorite games of the year.
So the first question, I guess, is an obvious one, but I think with a game like this, it kind of needs to be told. Where did the idea come from? Because it is so different.
Yeah, it's interesting at this point, we've got a well-rehearsed answer for this because everyone wants to know that. So, the idea came from when my partner moved in with me. We were unpacking his stuff and I realized there was something kind of game-like about unpacking things.
So, you take things out of one box and empty it, and then you unlock the box underneath and you’re, like, collecting sets of items from the different boxes. And there's just this general, like, sense of intrigue and surprise and delight when, like, things come out of the boxes, especially ’cause we didn't label any of them. So, yeah, it was like, oh, there's some things about this that are very game-like. Maybe this could be a game.
And it was kind of a joke, because my partner is always coming up with game ideas, and I usually don't but he's always like trying to encourage me, ’cause we're both game developers. And yeah, so he kept encouraging me and being like, ‘Okay, so in this unpacking game, what's going to happen? Like, how would this work?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, um, I guess, you know, this is the idea, this is what you do in it. These would be the main mechanics, the main verbs you have. And so on.’
And then after that, I guess after a few days, I was like, you know what? This could be interesting if we, like, had a story where you followed one character through the different moves of their life from, you know, childhood to adulthood. And it's funny just how early we had, like, the story beats, almost all of them. Yeah, it's weird. The idea became fully formed, like, pretty fast.
Yeah. I was going to ask how much the game changed over its development, kind of from conception to release, but you're saying it basically was fully formed when you first thought of the idea? Or did you add stuff later on?
So in some ways it was fairly fully formed. Cause I don't want to be like, ‘Oh yeah, it hasn't changed at all,’ because it has. But a lot of the things are still the same. And, like, the number of levels, for example, initially we had seven planned, so we added one more somewhere in the middle. Level five was originally not there and it felt like it needed to be there to make some things work better.
But in terms of, like, the direction of the game, something, I guess, that changed quite a bit was initially we imagined the game more as a puzzle game where you're, like, Tetris-ing your items together and trying to fit them in into quiet, like, cramped places. And it became more of a self-expression game because we found that, you know, because this is a game about really familiar spaces and items, people expect to be able to put things where they can put them in real life.
If the game is being really judgy about where they can put things, it's very frustrating for players. So we were like, ‘Okay, what the game wants to be is less of a puzzle game and more of a game where people can just kind of zone in and decorate to their liking. And the puzzle is a bit more like a side thing.’
Describing it as a self-expression game is interesting. Is that why you added a photo mode? Cause that's something I noticed that maybe wasn't there in the demo, I feel like?
Oh yeah. So, in the demo we left out, like, the photo mode, and we left out a few other features. I don't know if you noticed the gif maker?
No.
Yeah, so we've actually very recently added a little bit of tutorialisation so people would notice that. It was, like, literally the last thing we added to the game. My partner was like, ‘Oh my god, please, this is so last minute.’ And I was like, ‘No, this is important. People will miss the gif maker.’ So, yeah, this is proving me right. Yeah, in the album, on any page, there's a little video camera icon that you can click and see, like, a fast-forward play-through of your entire level, and it can record a gif or you can just, you know, record your own video of it.
So, how much of that is feedback from testing and because you saw that people wanted to express themselves and how much of it is canny marketing, knowing that if you give people the tools to share things on social media, it will advertise your game.
It's a bit of both, you know, like, things have come from all kinds of members of the team. Like, I can't take credit for the gif idea. That was Sanatana, who’s one of the co-founders of Witch Beam. He's actually not working on Unpacking, but he's been, like, a big champion for it. And the first time that we put the game in front of him, one of the things he said was, like, ‘You should add an option to, like, record fast-forward gifs.’
So, the game, like, it first kind of went viral because of a gif we posted, like a fast-forward gif of the kitchen. So we were like, ‘Okay, people like these gifs, people like watching these.’ And so Sanatana was like, ‘You should give the option to record those.’ And we were like, ‘Hmm.’ And so, like, that's something that had been on our mind for, like, more than two years before we finally got to implement it, you know. It's a lot of features like that.
MUSIC
So, you mentioned that gif that went viral. Were you expecting that reaction, like, when you put that out there? Were you thinking, This is a game loads of people will love,’ or did you think it would be really niche?
Oh yeah, absolutely not. I thought I was making a really niche game. We were just like-, we made an account for it, and that was the first gif we posted on the account, like, that wasn't a retweet of just the stuff we were posting on our own personal socials. Yeah, we thought we were making a niche game. We actually thought that it was the kind of game that could never go viral. We even, like, said that outright to someone who was, like, giving us a talk at Stugan, which I can tell you about later.
So, someone was giving us a talk about, like, making games that, like, can attract attention online. And I was like, ‘Okay, but what do we-, what do we do with a game like ours that, like, has no chance of ever going viral? Like what kind of audience do we reach out to?’ And then the game went viral and I reached out to the guy and was like, ‘Hey, the game went viral.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, cool.’
That's amazing. So tell me more about Stugan then. What did you get from that experience and how did that contribute to the game?
So, Stugan is a games accelerator program in Sweden that accepts people from all over the world. They take something like 15 teams, every intake, and they get to go be in Sweden for two months in a cabin in the woods in essentially, like, a ski resort in the summer, and make games together. It's, like, little teams of one to three people. So people would just pitch their games, like, it could be something that is brand new or something that you've been working on for a while, and if it gets accepted, you get to go to Stugan and work on it there.
What did you get out of the experience as far as this game in particular? Like, how did it help with the development?
It meant that we got a ton of testing for the game, because there were always other people around other developers and, like, visitors to Stugan. It was, like, friends of Stugan and, like, mentors and stuff coming to visit, and giving us talks and things. And that really helped. But any mentor or visitor that came, they'd be like, ‘Do you want to try everyone's games?’
And so we got a ton of testing through that, and it taught me really, like, how valuable it is to get the game in front of people really, really early on. And, you know, it helped shape the game. It helped us see what was good, what was bad, what to lean into, what to put in more of, and what to tone back. Like the, uh, judginess, for example, was one of the things that went early, thanks to Stugan.
Is there a particular value to getting testing from other developers versus just, kind of, regular video game players?
I would say that you need both, it's really important to get, like, just regular players of all kinds to play. Like, both, you know, more core gamers and more casual. They'll give you different perspectives. But developers… I guess the thing is that when a player plays your game and gives you feedback, like, that this or that bothered them, they're always right about their feelings about it. They're always like, ‘Okay, something here was not good for them,’ but they're usually not right about what caused that or how to fix that. And I think maybe a developer could give you a little bit better insight to that.
So, if you want an example, it's like, someone was telling me, oh, they couldn't put the washing basket, like in this one spot in the bathroom in the final level. And I was like, ‘Oh, I was sure that we allow you to put it there, and that it fits there.’ And after a little while I realised-, like, after messing around a bit, I realised that she meant that she couldn't put it there next to the laundry hamper. They didn't fit there together at the same time. And I was like, ‘Okay, that's a fair criticism. Like, some people would want both of them there, and it looks like they could fit but they just barely don't.’ So I added another few like nodes there of the grid.
Oh, so ‘nodes of the grid’, that's a little peek behind the curtain. I'm really interested in the way that this whole thing works, because something that people really loved about the gifs was the way that you could kind of slot all these different items into different spaces, and they kind of changed depending on where you put them. So give us kind of a broad idea of how that works behind the scenes.
So, my role on the team is very diverse. I do art and, like design, level design, UX, UI, and also production and business development, all kinds of things. But on the actual game itself, I think my biggest roles are art direction and level design and general design. So, I did all the level designs in Unpacking, but that also involved doing the first pass of the art of every single level. And those two were so intrinsically tied together I just worked straight in an art program to draw these rooms.
So, basically I would draw a room and it would be, like, really basic, everything would be really blocky. And then I'd put in grids where items can go, so they'd be, like, on shelves, on the bed, inside, like, cupboards, inside drawers, and, like, align them just so, so everything felt right. And then I would take this into Unity and construct the room out of, like, all these pieces of the furniture. Like, I'd have to split off all the furniture into bits that go in front and bits that go behind. There's a lot of layers involved.
So, the game is built entirely on grids. You’ve got grids on every surface that you can place items on. And I mark, like, which grids you can leave stuff on permanently and which grids you can't. And items fit on this grid, like, very neatly. So everything is made of these little blocks. So our minimum unit is like 10 centimeters cubed items, I guess, they're our smallest ones. And then we construct the bigger items out of, like, more of these cubes.
Okay. So kind of like Lego, I guess.
Yeah! So all the items fit inside cubes. And even though some of them have very like non-square shapes, we always try to make sure that they take up as much of the kind of volume of the cube as they can. So over the course of development, there's been a lot of, like, adjusting items to be a little bit wider or a little bit taller because they'd be, like, an item that, like, it looks like it can fit in this cupboard, but it doesn't, so we're like, ‘Okay, the item needs to be a bit taller than, so it looks like it can't.’
MUSIC
Because of the kind of zoomed-out view of the levels, so you've got this kind of-, you can see the whole room at once, right? And you've got these kind of tiny objects, like you said, like a 10 centimeter square. Some of them are difficult to identify and you haven't really used text. So how did you approach the challenge of making those very small objects recognizable without being able to kind of label them?
Hmm. Yeah, it was really important to us that items would be recognisable without text. Cause like a lot of people are just like, ‘Why don't you just have labels for all the items where, like, you can click a thing and it'll tell you what the item is?’ And I'm like, ‘But that's part of the puzzle, is figuring out what the items are. If we just gave you an option to check what it is, that's what you will always do. You won't stop to think about it for as long.’ And it's also okay if an item is not instantly recognisable. Like, it's okay if all you can tell is like, ‘Well, this is a kitchen appliance.’ Cause you know what you can do with the kitchen appliances and you know where that needs to go.
So in terms of how to make them recognisable, it's a lot of back and forth between me and our other artists. And sometimes we would remake items that were harder to recognise. All of the items, all of the smaller items rather, are a bit chunked up. So if you think about it, like, nail clippers in the game, for example, are really large. They're like 10 centimeters. But that was, like, as little as we could make them and make them recognizable and make them take up the right amount of space. We've also got, like, an eyelash curler that's, like, 20 centimeters or something, you know. It's like, it doesn't make sense if you really think about it, but it's like, ‘Eh, it's close enough that it feels okay and you can tell the details.’
As you mentioned earlier, the level of challenge and the restrictions placed on the player, the judgment as you said, are kind of very light. So, for example, sometimes one of the boxes will contain objects that are actually for a different room than the box was in, but not too often. And, you know, at the end of the level, anything that's not in the right place will kind of flash, but you're quite loose with what you define as the right place. How did you decide which of those rules to enforce, as far as object placement? And were you ever tempted to just make it completely free play?
Yeah. So there always has been a bit of a temptation there, but it's always been such an important core part of the game that, like, the character that you're playing is not you. We want you to understand that this is someone else and they have preferences, and those help us with the puzzle aspect of the game as well. Like, some of the most, I think, important moments of the game have to do with the character going, ‘No, you can't put that there.’
And we try to keep that very light touch. We wanted to have the players trust that, like, when we tell them an item can't go here, it's because that makes sense. So for the most part we try to make sure that items have a lot of places they can go, like at minimum it'd be two places but often it's a lot more than that, and they can also go to different rooms and stuff, which was a huge logistical nightmare design-wise, to make sure that any item can go in any room that makes sense in any level. But it felt important.
Basically, again, like, because this is a game that's in such a familiar environment, players have certain expectations of how things should work, unlike if you were, like, on an alien planet and dealing with, like, weird alien things. You'd be like, ‘Well, I trust whatever you say about how this thing works.’ But you're like, ‘No, I know where a kitchen pot can go, and I leave mine on the stove top. So, like, why is your game not letting me do that?’ When we tell the player, ‘That item can't go there,’ we don't want the player to think, ‘But why? Like, that makes me annoyed.’ We want them to think, ‘Oh, of course. That makes sense.’ So that was our guiding principle.
What made it a logistical nightmare to make objects available in multiple rooms?
So, we have, I think, 1,040-ish items in the game, and 35 rooms altogether, and I think, like, something like seven room types. So whenever I make an item, I have to define where it can go. Each surface is labeled, like, internally. So, for example, in a bedroom you'd have floor, you'd have shelves, cupboard, desk, bed, under pillow, all kinds of zones like that. And so for each item, I look through the dropdown for that room and mark which surfaces can it be on in that zone.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah. And if it-, and so if this item appears, like, just in the first level, which is just the kid's room, then it's not too bad, because it's just the one room and I don't have to worry about the rest of them, but some items travel all the way to, like, late in the game, and essentially you should be able to move them into every room.
So, for example, if there is an item, that's like, say, a music player, right, and it's in the bedroom-, let's say it starts off in the bedroom, and you were like, ‘Actually, I want this to be out in the living room. If I hadn't zoned it for the living room, then the player would be like, ‘But wait, why can't this be in the living room? That doesn't feel right.’
So sometimes people would find these little things. Someone, one streamer I saw playing the game, wanted to put a cup of water on the bedside table and he wasn't able to, and he was like, ‘Oh, that's the one thing that bothered me about the game.’ And I'm like, ‘Oh no, I never thought about this. It didn't occur to me to let the player just leave the cup on the bedside table. I feel like, yeah, that should be valid.’ And so after I saw that I did allow that in the game.
Oh, wow. Did you tell them?
Uh, no, but maybe I'll get to one day. I've never spoken to them. There's been quite a few things that have come from playtests, ’cause we've shown the demo in so many places. So we've seen people play it at live shows, but also I watched a lot of streams. Like I said, I watched yours.
Thank you!
I really appreciated, by the way, when you noticed that the boxes obscured the drawer in the kid's room, and once the box was gone you could see the drawer, and you were like, ‘Oh, was this intentional? That's clever.’ And I was like, ‘Yes!’
MUSIC
So speaking of the demo, how did the demo go generally? Like, was it stressful to put it together and figure out a vertical slice and things like that?
So, figuring out a vertical slice was actually pretty straightforward for us because it is just the first two levels of the game.
Our very first demo was actually the prototype that we made, which was the kitchen. It was, like, the level 8 kitchen, which has a ton of items and a ton of space in it. And we decided to go with a kitchen to begin with for our, like, test level because we didn't even want to, like, go into the storytelling aspect of the game yet. We just wanted to prove out the mechanics first.
And we were like, ‘Okay, kitchens, like, there's a lot of items in kitchens that are not personal and that I can just, like, crank out a ton of items. I can think of a lot of items that could go in a kitchen.’ So we ended up with, I think, 70 items in that first kitchen. And even just playing that, people seemed pretty into it. And it took people a lot longer than we expected as well. Like, that kitchen took, I think, 20 to 30 minutes for people to play. Yeah. Maybe more like 20.
And so, once we were done with that we were like, ‘All right, let's start building the levels.’ And we actually just built all the levels chronologically, like, started with the kid's room and then just went level by level.
And with the demo that we put up online and showed at later shows and such, we were like, ‘Okay, so to prove out the storytelling we need to have at least two levels, but because the game itself is not huge, it's only eight levels total, we don't want to give too much away.’ So we were like, ‘Okay, so we need to show time progression,’ and our first two levels are our two smallest levels, pretty much. So we were like, ‘Let's start with those’ And the length ended up being pretty good ’cause playing them together takes people, like, half an hour to 40 minutes usually, sometimes more. Yeah, that worked out.
And when you were watching people stream the demo, apart from getting ideas for changes to make to the game and things like that, what else did you gain from that experience? Like, did you notice that people played it very differently?
So, I think the most informative play-throughs that we saw were, like, some of the earliest ones, because we were still, like, learning a lot about our game. So, the first really important thing we learned was that the game is fun for other people to watch. So, we thought that we were making, like, a really solitary kind of experience that you play on your own with headphones on and you just, you know, zone out and play this game.
And turns out people like to do this with a bunch of people with them, or at least like, you know, one person and, like, someone is backseat driving, someone's heckling. You know, the game teaches you a lot about the person who is playing because of the choices that they're making. And everyone has opinions about where items need to go in a house. So it was really fun to see people reacting to other people's play-throughs.
So the first time we noticed this was when we showed the game at Day of the Devs, and at Day of the Devs, the way they had it set up was, like, all of the monitors that people played on were, like, quite high up and were very large, and people were playing standing up. So you could see from the line the game, quite well. And you could see what people were doing, the choices they were making. So people were standing in the line and, like, making little comments to one another about what the person that was currently playing was doing.
And they were already interacting with the game and thinking about what they would do once they played. Like, we thought,’ Oh, you know, they're already seeing the whole demo. Like, they probably don't have much of a reason to play now,’ but it's like, no, that actually motivated them even more to want to play because they were like, ‘I can do this better. That person was doing it weird.’
Speaking of personal decisions, when playing the game, at what point did you decide to provide the option to hang the toilet roll backwards or forwards?
As soon as we added toilet paper hanging, we knew we needed this. Strong opinions about which way it should go, but we wanted anyone to be able to hang it however they wanted, and we figured it would be something kind of funny. The big decision was which would be the default. So we decided to go with the version that we thought, like, ‘This is the correct way.’ as the default one, but my partner Tim was like, ‘Maybe we should just make it, like, the opposite way just to troll people or, like, to force them to realize that you can rotate it.
And you were like, ‘No, I can't bear it.’
Yeah, I was like, ‘A lot of people probably won't realise that you can rotate it and will just be frustrated. I don't want that. This game is not meant to stress people out.’
And the default way is forwards, right?
Yes, over. Do you agree?
I agree. Don't worry.
Good.
MUSIC
So, what do you think it is, then, that appeals to people most about this concept, about this game? Why do people love to play it?
Oh, that's a really hard question. Why do you love to play it?
I mean, to be honest, when I first saw the concept I was like, ‘It feels like this game was made for me,’ because I'm a person who's moved house more than 20 times in my life, and yet I love to pack boxes and I love to unpack things and to decide where things go. It gives my life a sense of order. I guess, as you can probably guess, being someone who's moved more than 20 times, my life has been pretty chaotic, and the ability to choose where things go, and to know where everything is, kind of gives me a feeling of order. I guess I feel like a lot of video game players probably have that as well, because a lot of games are instinctively about cleaning up, you know, like about getting rid of all the enemies, collecting all of the things that are in the world and making it tidy again. So I guess that's my instinct. It just feels like a very video gamey thing, but I don't know. What do you think?
I think you answered the question better than I could have. Cause I was thinking about, like, how I would answer as you were answering, uh, thank you for letting me stall for time, but yeah, it is very much that thing of, like, every game is essentially about bringing order to chaos, and this just takes it very literally.
It’s got elements from other games, like The Sims and Animal Crossing and whatever else that, like, let you make a home, like, nice. But it's also, in addition to that, got some other things. It’s got, like, the storytelling and, you know, a bunch of other elements.
But in terms of yeah, why that's really appealing to people, it's like, I think it's a small space that you can control, and you can make it, like, pleasant for yourself. And I think, like, more and more these days, I think we need a little bit of space that we can control, because uh, life is so chaotic. And I think organising things even around the house in real life, like, gives me a sense that I am in control, that things are not as chaotic as they seem most of the time.
And so I kind of wanted to give that to people in game form, and take away all the lousier parts of unpacking, like lifting heavy things and, you know, all the struggle and the mess. And you can instantly put it away and come back to it whenever and you're not like, ‘Oh no, I'm living in a mess now.’
Speaking of the storytelling aspect, then. So, each level moves the story forward a few years. You're often in a new location, though not always. How did you go about designing the rooms so that they reflected the time in which they're set? So, like, obviously the first one is in the nineties. Did you research, like, nineties toys?
So this game, I would say the premise and the time period came about out of, um, laziness. Like, I wanted to go with something that I would not have to research really heavily. I am not a very confident storyteller or story writer. I am a pretty new game designer, I would say. My background is in art. And so this is my first foray into game design.
I wanted to do something that felt within my wheelhouse, within my frame of reference. So, my partner and I, we have, like, eight years between us in age, so we set the character’s age right in the middle, like, between our two ages. We both essentially grew up in the nineties. He grew up a little bit more in the eighties, but you know, there's a fair bit of crossover.
And yeah, it did involve some research. Like we were like, ‘What year did the Tamagotchi come out? All right, we're safe in, like, ’97 then, there's a Tamagotchi, we can put that in.’ So we’d check these things, but there was a lot of, like, referencing our own lives and our friends' lives. So, for example, I never owned, like, a Simon, but I had friends who had a Simon and it feels very much like a relic of the nineties, so it felt like it had to be in there.
Without spoiling it then, Unpacking really cleverly uses its mechanics to tell its story. Did you know right away, when you knew that you wanted a story, what story you wanted to tell, and then kind of design mechanics to fit that? Or did you look at the mechanics you had, so, you know, placing objects so they fit appropriately in the space, and highlighting ones that aren't correctly placed, and then kind of figure out the story after that?
It's kind of both, which I know is kind of a boring answer, but it is like the story is influenced by the mechanics and the mechanics are influenced by the story. And when we came up with the story was before we even made the prototype, we just, like, had talked about what we wanted the mechanics to be. And then we went, ‘Okay, so we want the story to be like this, and these are some of the things we can do with that.’
So for example, I will talk a little bit, like very mild spoilers, about levels, say, three, and four. So, we talked about how in the first level we wanted it to be small and very self-contained, so we wanted it to be a childhood room and you only unpack that room, because you're a kid and you don't have a lot of responsibility beyond your own stuff. So it worked really well for tutorialising the game. But then the next level we wanted to show, ‘Okay, now we're introducing multiple rooms.’ So you have three rooms, but they're all quite small.
And then the next level we're, like, introducing that sometimes you live with other people, and so there's items already all over the house that don't belong to you and you can't move them. And we thought that was important because it reflects, kind of ,the character's state of mind. You move into a house with people-, even if they're your friends already, which in this case, like, our intention was that they were, even then you don't want to, like, start going, ‘Well, I'm putting all my DVDs here, so I'm moving yours.’ Like that would be really weird. Like, if a housemate moved in and did that, I would be like, ‘Red flags,’ you know. You can't move other people's stuff. You just arrange your life kind of around theirs.
And then in the next level, you move in with, uh, the character’s first boyfriend. And because of the level of closeness you're allowed to move this person's stuff around. And it's interesting, ’cause players had just played a level where you can't move stuff, and so we were worried like, ‘Oh, will this confuse people? Will they understand?’ So we had to design the level so that people had to, they had to move his stuff. So it was pretty fun organizing it in a way that was like, as, like, taking up space as possible, to force the player to be like, ‘Come on, move your stuff.’
And it kind of fed into the story. Like, we always wanted this relationship to be maybe a little bit, like, not so good, like ‘this probably wouldn't last’ sort of relationship. But it became a little bit like the character's personality, I think, kind of grew out of the mechanics as well. So, like, how he takes up all this space and doesn't make space for you, the main character of the game. And so you have to make space for yourself. And that kind of gives personality to both of these characters through the gameplay.
Playing Unpacking, and especially those moments that you just mentioned really reminded me of playing Florence. And there are lots of other games that try to do this kind of storytelling without words. Environmental storytelling, right, is a huge thing. It's obviously a huge thing in Unpacking. What other games do you think use this kind of storytelling really well?
So our inspirations for Unpacking, yeah I'd say Florence was definitely one, like the whole moving scene, but in general, like, telling the story of a character's life with very few words and through, like, these little snapshots really appealed to me. But another inspiration was Gone Home.
Now, Gone Home has, like, audio diaries and it has, like, letters that you can read and such, but it is a game entirely told through-, well, almost entirely told through environmental storytelling. Like, you are traversing a house and picking up little clues about several lives and learning their entire story. And it's like, I loved that so much.
So that was something I wanted to do with Unpacking, but, like, with lower fidelity items. You don't get to hear audio logs and you don't get to, like, read people's notes or to each other, or, you know, pick up an item and, like, find that it has, like, a little label on the back that says something. But we were like, ‘What can we do with items that are this small and this low fidelity, and still tell a story?
How much do you think you can learn about a person in real life from the objects in their home?
A lot. A lot. I think definitely a lot of the inspiration came from, like, you know, that time that Tim and I were unpacking his stuff, but some of it also came from when we were packing up his stuff in the first place, because we had only been dating for-, well, you know, it was a while, like a year and a half, but like, it's very intimate to, like, help someone pack up their life and help them decide what they are going to take with them. Because we were kind of downsizing, my place was smaller.
And you get to hear the stories of all of the items, where they came from and stuff. So, like, scarves given by friends to him, or like, uh, ‘Oh, this was my first game for this console,’ or, ‘I got this at this time when we were showing our previous game in Japan.’ You know, so everything has a story.
And I think, you know, I know ‘materialism is bad’, but items, like, carry a lot of meaning for us, and they have stories. And so I think it's so interesting what you can learn from them. And there are some things that you will just have to infer if you don't have the person there to tell you, ‘Oh, this came from here,’ but there are some things that you can kind of figure out by yourself, like a detective.
Tim actually gave this example the other day, which I quite liked, which is on our bookshelves we have two copies of The Animator’s Survival Kit, which is a classic, like, book that any animator-, is a must have for them. And we have two of these, and we were thinking like, ‘What would someone who was going through our shelves think when they notice that we have two of these?’
And in our specific case it's because both of us are originally animators and we each individually bought one and had it for many, many years, and we moved in together and now we have two. But you can come up with a couple of different scenarios. Like, maybe you have one for the office and one that's, like, serving as a coffee table or like, you know, one you used to take to work and have at your work desk and one at home.
It's interesting that you can come up with more than one scenario, and that's actually been something that's been really important to us with the game, because sometimes we have people ask us, ‘Okay. But what does this mean? What is this item for real?’ Like, we've had people ask us, ‘Is the drawing of the fox girl in the second bedroom, is that her fursona?’ And I was like, ‘I'm not going to tell you. Like, if you think that's her fursona, that's great. You can be like, ‘She's a furry.’ That's great.’
But it's just important to us that people can interpret the game in more than one way. Like, yes, we had a certain thing in mind when we made an item, but, like, the story doesn't just belong to us anymore. Once you're playing it, once you're playing it, it's your story. And whatever you get out of it is great.
So the game is full of little touches, that kind of coax a smile out of players who've been paying attention, I guess. So, one of my favorites is, there's the mug from the earlier year and then the next year it's cracked, so it's in the bathroom now and you're putting toothbrushes in it, right? Like, such a familiar thing. What's your favorite example of that kind of little touch in the game?
Oh, that's hard. We've put in so many little things like that. I really like the chicken collection. I was like, ‘I am designing these personally. I don't care. Um, I know they're not even that important, but I'm making each one of these myself.’
Basically, I have always been a collector. That's probably not surprising considering I made a game all about items. So I wanted our main character to have some kind of collection. And somehow it ended up being these little plush toys of chicks. And so you start off with, like, one, like, big mama chicken and one chick. And then the next level you have, like, two more little chicks. And every level you get, like, one or two more, and they just keep multiplying. That's my favorite.
It's a nice way to imagine the life continuing on past the end of the game as well.
Giant chicken farm.
MUSIC
Unpacking is out now on PC, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch, so do check it out. If you share your gifs on Twitter, you can tag Wren @wrenegady and me @jericawebber. If you're listening to this episode on the day it came out, then I'll be streaming Unpacking live on Twitch tomorrow, November 3rd, at 8:00 PM UK time. Follow me at twitch.tv/jericawebber so you know when I'm live.
This podcast is on Twitter @talkingsimpod, and you can even email us at talkingsimulatorpod [at] gmail [dot] com to suggest games or guests, or just let us know what you think of the show, though the best way to do that, as always, is to leave a review on Apple Podcasts.
Our music is by Jazz Mickle. You can find her @jazzmickle.
Talking Simulator is mixed by Lemington's loveliest audio person, Dan Parkes. If you need to make something sound good, you can find him @dancparkes.
I'm Jordan Erica Webber. Talk again soon.
Yeah, you know, I've been really looking forward to this call because, like, there's not a lot of people I can talk to who have played the whole game.
