Game Designers today are far more experimental, with indies carrying the torch for quite some time now; be it Journey or Thomas Was Alone, the gameplay along with a touch of narrative has found a place in audience’s heart. Back home, games from Seven Summits Studio – Picto too has ventured into that space. Now, Delhi based studio Lucid Labs is set to release its new game – Stay, Mum and we get chatting with founder Chirag Chopra to understand what’s the game all about!
“Stay, Mum is a narrative based puzzle game about the story of a mother and son. This is our first attempt at creating something unusual than what we normally see on the App Store,” he reveals. Speaking about why a game about a relationship between mother and son, Chirag explains, “The relationship of a mother and son is a very sweet topic and we rarely see any games built around it. I was always interested in making a game around this theme and Stay, Mum fit perfectly.”
Chirag was inspired by games from game designer Jenova Chen like Cloud and Journey, and wanted to add an emotional sentiment to it. The idea for the game came to him while he was still doing his internship for his Masters curriculum, but could not pursue the game for unforeseen reasons back then.
Stay, Mum in a free to play market will be a premium game and Chirag believes that the game is carefully crafted to deliver a nice calming experience with a sweet narrative and with F2P, it could have had the same experience without hampering the content.
“It is impossible to deliver such an experience in a F2P form, as it doesn’t do justice to the game. We want our players to get most out of it and don’t want them to drop in the middle or lose interest after playing a few levels just because of money or time barrier. We want the player to enjoy it till the end without any restrictions.”
Chirag and the team completed the game in about 3 months but the major issue that they faced was around the narrative of the game and how could they fit the small but informative visuals to deliver the story and do that without using a single piece of text.
“A mother and son’s relationship tells the player that he’s going to get an emotional experience out of it which is nice for us to get exposure for the game. The game is built around a narrative with a soothing background score and is conveyed with visuals without any text. The narrative is tied with the gameplay, which was necessary to deliver the message, because in the end, it’s a game and people want to interact with it with some goals in mind.”
Talk to him about today’s game developers and the narrative games and how popular is the genre, Chirag has high praise for Asar and his game Picto, “Picto is an amazing game, definitely one of my favourite games of all time. I don’t know if this is a new fad but I believe there are people who want to play such games and there are developers who are interested in making games on such subjects. And don’t you think it’s a nice little break from the usual shooting and killing?”
Since being a story driven game, the level design of the game is something one has to work carefully so as to balance the narrative and the gameplay, Chirag explains, “It doesn’t change much because the gameplay is based around a puzzle mechanic. But since we have a narrative and different characters in the game, it was important to keep the flow going as per the narrative, and design the puzzles keeping their personalities in mind. It was fun working with cute characters and their odd behaviour.”
When talking to Chirag, we can’t help but mention ROTO, the first game from the studio which not only won accolades but also bagged a publishing deal – a rare feat for a first time indie developer.
“We’ve learned a lot after ROTO, particularly about how the industry works and also we believe games like Stay, Mum can provide a more engaging experience than just competing with friends on high scores. And with the help of data we got from ROTO, we have improved a lot on designing the pacing of our levels and how to make them more fun. But we have a long way to go when it comes to creating highly-polished games with good UX and monetization capabilities. And I hope we’ll learn a lot about these topics after Stay, Mum,” says an anxious Chirag.
Stay, Mum will be out on 29 October, with the game first receiving an iOS release and an Android release in works for the later dates. The studio already has an online multiplayer trivia in the works which Chirag says is very different from Trivia games seen on the stores these days.