The Croatian studio Gamechuck recently released the historical point & click adventure Paws of Coal

Unfortunately, what the situation is, Zagreb Film does not have any funds for this, but we were left to ourselves to find funds, but luckily, today it is also not difficult, so HAVC, for example, rushed in with part of the funds. Now we are looking for publishers to cover the rest, but it will be very interesting, and through that project we met the people who actually worked on Baltazar. Who actually drew the original Baltazar in the early seventies, and they are, of course, now deeply retired, but when they see that some great project is being done and that we have that respect for that brand, people are interested and want to help, they want to come. Even Branko Teslić, who drew Baltazar, he is retired, but he came to help and work on it, and now he is interested in the video game industry and so on. He was even on Reboot. An incredibly interesting moment happens where that one industry that somehow died out somewhere in the nineties, all those animation studios, that whole Zagreb school of animated film, is connected. Somehow it slowed everything down, but now in the world of video games it could be revitalized and we are dealing with it. I am very happy about that and I hope that we will succeed, that it will not be just some micro attempt, but that it will spread further. Baltazar is the first step, if someone was at Infogamer or Reboot, at some of those festivals, they could play it, but I think we could soon release some kind of demo for the online audience to play as well without any major problems.

How do you reach a publisher and is it difficult, for example, to reach a publisher who is interested in exactly that game?

Why even have a publisher? Why not release your own game? The main reason is that when you're a small studio and you don't have a hit yet, you can't really judge whether your game will be successful or not, and you don't have the funds to complete it and you don't have the funds to invest in marketing. So publishers are the ones who should somehow take over in the case of small studios that are not yet successful, they need to take on a certain risk: financial risk, marketing risk, etc. And of course, publishers are the ones who have a lot of connections and acquaintances and can perhaps play safer better than arranging some kind of exclusive deal with some platform, etc. When I explained all that, the goal for us and many other small video game producers is to find a publisher and present the project to them.

Since there are so many of us from all over the world involved in video games, it is very important that your project is as good and as developed as possible. That vertical slice, that's what it's called, that little demo you present should be as polished as possible and be something innovative, that is, new. For them to say ok, this is actually something we haven't seen yet, and yet it's not too new, it's not too innovative, but we can fit it in somehow. We see that there will be some audience, but this is where we struggle the most, because often people tell our projects that they are too innovative. In the sense that they simply don't have a way to find that niche or when we combine two genres, which is what we did recently. Then they say well, we know that this genre succeeds, that maybe the other one will succeed and very often they say that we are brave, but since we are not purely marketing, we cannot assess whether it can succeed or not.

So they often ask for some kind of feedback. Some kind of proof if the player feedback is positive. They ask us to show them whistle list numbers, did we go to any event, so the game grew on Steam because of that. That's the same thing we can show them, so we don't have bad experiences, we've managed to get publishers for almost every project. One project we haven't gotten a publisher for yet, and have been looking for a while, is Ark Fantastic. This is really something that may be a problem in the entire industry that such kind of narrative point and click titles with a lot of text simply cannot find a publisher. Very probably because their time has passed, now there are other trends, it's much easier to find a publisher for something more action-oriented, etc. So that's something we had to come to terms with. Here, the decision was to come to terms with it and start releasing that game independently, and that's why this Paws of Coal as the first episode in a series of long stories is the first step.

On several occasions Gamechuck received funds from the European fund Kreativna Europa and you are the first Croatian game developers supported by the Media subprogram. What does this mean for you and for a studio in Croatia? Is a good picture also sent to other developers in Croatia?

We were the first to get Creative Europe and we just got it for Ark Fantastic. That's why, let's say, when you start Paws of Coal, you have that logo, it's no longer an obligation, that is, only an obligation during development, but since they helped us in this way and that was at the beginning of the company, we want to be as honest as possible and then we will stick that logo whenever we can. Because that project is very similar, it's part of that same universe. We were only the first, but we were not the only ones. After us, a year later, I know because I used to help people write those projects a lot, so I roughly know who got everything. It was later won by Spektar, Pine, LGM, Mazinger Games, it is a small and interesting studio and this year we won again, and we are one of the rare studios, rare even in Europe, that won it twice. Now we got an interesting game that I can't really talk about because it's still being worked on, but if anyone was at Reboot, they probably saw some kind of 3D combination of genres. Unusually innovative, we'll see what kind of success it will have, but it's at least some way that if you're already doing something that's a little on the experimental side, there's still some way to finance at least part of it through funds.

On the other hand, Paws of Coal is quite a small game. It takes people maybe three hours to finish it, it depends on how good you are, or if you read everything. It is quite a small game and we could release more such games, but they are too small games to be financed by any means. It's something we can even finance ourselves, it's just a matter of sustainability. I've seen that it's been working for the last 24 hours, but it's going as you would expect for a point and click game, it's a very niche genre, especially if the brand hasn't been built, and we're only now in the phase of building that brand .

Why the animal kingdom and the 19th century? What is the idea and inspiration?

You've got the whole tradition of Watership Down and Animal Farm, maybe people followed that the most. You tell some kind of story through an allegory with animals, somehow that was the closest to me and the animal kingdom is an obvious kingdom. You have some kind of emperor, so it is interesting to wonder when the animal kingdom we know will become an animal democracy or something else, that political moment is purely interesting in its name. Why the 19th century? Well, when you talk about it as issues of monarchy, revolution, reform, democracy and the like, that era is, of course, clearly the era of the industrial revolution and the era of the People's Spring. We want to tell a story, but it is difficult to tell a story about a revolution, a social revolution in the Middle Ages, and it would be strange to watch some medieval knights talking about exploitation, about the proletariat, etc. Now, the main problem is what we will do, will we just retell European history or we want to give a broader picture.

I would like that through all these games some kind of abstract thesis is given that we abstractly think about monarchy and its pluses and minuses, democracy, some kind of anarchy as three different systems of electing leaders. In anarchy, there is no leader, but everything is somehow self-governing, and in a democracy, the leader is democratically elected. You have some kind of procedures in the monarchy where the leader is chosen in advance by some kind of higher power. These are, in my opinion, interesting enough questions that it might actually work in a completely fantastical world, but since we as players are born into a world that has certain tropes, one of those tropes is that the revolution takes place in the 19th century and that the revolutionaries have those small caps. It's just the way it is and you should accept it and enjoy it in that world. They could have been Roman emperors, they didn't have to be animals, they could be aliens, but this is how it goes.

We in Paws of Coal try to find out why the disease has hit the rabbit population. Can we somehow connect it to COVID-19?

Yes, we were definitely strongly influenced by what was happening around us. The pandemic was in the real world, so we put the story of the pandemic into a video game. However, the story about the pandemic is not interesting if it is not mentioned what we are actually dealing with, which is that the writer of that story is Jan, he problematized not only the pandemic, but the main social issue is who should pay the cost of this pandemic. People are sick, you need to pay, and in this context of our real world, you had to invent that vaccine and pay for it, who pays for what those people are not at work, etc. And that is actually the reason for the strike of those rabbits.

Those rabbits actually want the management, that badger who is in the administration of the mining town, that he actually pays you as the main character, the hedgehog who is a scientist, to research it and to discover a cure for you, because if you do it yourself, because you are character from an RPG game who likes to solve quests for the love of everything, that actually creates a problem for them. Then it gives the message that in the future the management does not have to pay anything, everything will be solved by itself. At the very beginning of the game when you talk to those strikers, there is the first social conflict between everyone wanting to solve this pandemic, but if you solve it on your own, you're actually doing a big problem to the labor movement, and you shouldn't be solving it until you get paid. Of course, the badger understands that and he doesn't want to pay you, but now you're getting into some kind of moral problem, are you going to help those rabbits to solve this disease, and thus you pay off because then every future disease and any problem the management will also raise your hands or you will set a precedent and say no, I as a scientist have to be paid for it and management has to pay me. This is just one example of those social movements that need to be talked about, but also that should have been talked about 200 years ago when it was on the news and in the real world, but it's never too late, so this thesis will also be in this video game, and people while playing will be able to think about it a little more.

In Paws of Coal, there is this unique journaling system that we use to reach some conclusions and preserve clues. How did you come up with that idea and how did you do it?

When we started to think of that system, we didn't find anything similar. Meanwhile, there were a couple of games that did something very, very similar, for example, Sherlock Holmes. The idea is actually that you collect different clues, evidence, parts of conversations, physical things, anything. Any clues you find you connect and you choose how to connect them depending on which clues you put in the journal and which ones you don't. You can conclude certain hypotheses and let's say now, depending on what you put, you can indicate the conclusions. What is even more innovative with us is that it is not that the game leads you to the exact solution, nor that there is an exact solution in the sense that it may exist ontologically, but it does not exist in the sense that the video game tells you it's game over. If you, for example, solved the pandemic in the wrong way and now clicked that all the rabbits should be fed so and so in order to solve it, the game won't stop now, it won't say game over, you killed the rabbits, you have to try again. The game goes on and you hand it over to the doctor, the doctor does something and the story continues. Maybe someone gets fired if you conclude something wrong, maybe you conclude something wrong and some rabbit gets even more sick, so that's a big problem. These are all things that you see later on, and that's our idea through the next sequels, basically, just to deepen it to even refer to a couple of the previous games that happened. That you simply go ahead with your conclusions, without ever knowing what is right. You just click submit, it doesn't say bravo, right or wrong, but you will see through the world, and sometimes you won't, what was right and what was wrong.

You used the Godot engine to develop the game. How famous is it and what makes it better than other engines?

We have already used so many of these engines in the company: GameMaker was for Speed Limit and for our first comics, we use Unity for Midwinter and Godot for Paws of Coal and other games. Godot is open source, which is a plus because then you can do what you want in it. You have the entire code available and you can then connect to other systems, other people help you and then develop their own things, etc. That's ok, but there is a big minus, which is that it is not as commercially strong as Unity and Unreal.

So there are some things where, if you want to make a commercial video game and if you want it to be very big, you will have some small problems that you have to polish before it comes out. It's not impossible, it's just some kind of additional work that is solved in some other engines. For example, something related to shaders might be a little easier to solve in other engines. If it is about some hobbyists or small games then it is not a problem at all, then I would even recommend it. Maybe I wouldn't recommend it because there aren't many people who work in Godot, now especially in Croatia there are so many Unity courses and every year 20 people come out of Novska who know how to work on it. Then maybe I wouldn't recommend the Godot engine when there are so many people here who know Unity and have their own little interesting community in Croatia, it even has a Discord channel. These are quality and capable people. What's certain is that when you're looking for a Unity developer, you can get a junior who's bad, and when you're looking for a Godot developer, you can't really get a really bad junior. The worst you can get is someone who obviously entered the engine on his own and obviously had to learn it well, but that's my experience.

Which engine do you think is better - Unity or Unreal?

We haven't worked with Unreal yet, it's the only engine we haven't used. We've used GameMaker, Unity, Godot, even some that nobody's heard of, but I hear all the best about Unreal in the sense that it's great for some AAA graphics. That it has a blueprint system that non-developers can work in, not to mention that their payment system through Epic and Unreal games is simple. How much you have to pay in platform royalties is much less and not to mention the fact that Epic Games is a brand, all these things in terms of business, technology and development of a studio make sense for Unreal. You just need to find people who know it. As a studio, we started with 2D. We've been making 2D games and we're just now starting with 3D, something small, but simply Unreal wasn't really focused on 2D that much, so it wasn't really a logical first step for us. If we start doing more 3D stuff, we'll probably switch to Unreal like many other studios. In fact a lot of studios that went into 3D stuff just switched to Unreal.

How long was the development of Paws of Coal?

We developed it as Ark Fantastic, the story was written for Ark Fantastic and then it was reworked, so the art style changed many times, etc. It is very difficult to say how long it was developed. It's been a long time since nothing was done on it because we were working on other projects, but it was really hectic. I can't tell you personally, I know it's less than four years because we didn't even start four years ago. Maybe two years, I would have to add it up and say that's how much. Not everyone worked on it all the time. Let's say about two years.

The whole game is drawn by hand and a special classical music was composed? How did you decide on that?

We paid a lot of attention to the process here. The process was very important to us. The composer was the one I mentioned from Manchester, Fenton Hutson. He made all that music in the style of the 19th century, that is, the leitmotifs of Wagner. Each location has its own music that starts and ends. Transitions between locations were also thought about a lot. The soundtrack can also be bought because I really think that it is of extremely high quality and is a very good piece of classical music in my opinion.

The visuals are also a lot of effort, in fact they are even drawn in a much higher resolution for 4K. This is just regular FULL HD, but we have it all in 4K resolution if you ever need it. The characters themselves are animated, although every frame is literally animated by hand. For example, this is best seen on the old rabbit Gart, because he trembles, because he is very old, and you can literally see in the trembling that he is not drawn the same every time. Which again is a huge effort. The animation was done by Ivana Radić, she previously worked on the animated documentary Chris the Swiss, which was even at the Cannes Film Festival. In my opinion, Paws of Coal is visually beautiful, musically good, narratively interesting, and programmatically it's also fun because you have some interesting mechanics that we haven't seen before, that diary system, so you decide some things yourself, and the story goes in that direction, etc. Yes, I think it is unique and the question is whether people will recognize it. I think it will after a while, especially if we keep that brand and start doing more.

So when could we see the green light for Ark Fantastic, and is there a demo?

Basically, people can play Trip the Ark Fantastic, and in the demo version that's on itch.io the visuals are different, they're not the same visuals as in Paws of Coal, they're more modernized. The music is completely different, more reminiscent of 20th century Hollywood, not 19th century Wagner, but it's still a good game, it's still very high quality. Will it find a publisher and funding for the future, I would like to say yes, but it is not in my hands. The main goal is to one day make that big story in that world of the animal kingdom, which is a story about how that animal kingdom is transformed or not transformed depending on your decisions. So, we'll see, it's hard for me to say now.

Apart from the games you mentioned and mentioned, what other games does Gamechuck develop?

Besides Midwinter, Trip the Ark Fantastic, Baltazar, a game that we got funding from Creative Europe, which I can't talk too much about, we're doing another game called Jay and Silent Bob Mall Brawl 2 that we got the rights to. Jay and Silent Bob are famous characters, now I don't know who remembers from Kevin Smith's channel, they are a team, smoking weed in front of a shopping center and talking nonsense, now in a video game they enter that shopping center and fight, so the team asked us to work two, there is a part of the team working on it. We do a lot of Work for Hire projects for some money, in fact we do a lot, even too many things, so we are a little bit all over the place. Somehow these things are completed, quite slowly here and there we finish something.

At some point we just sit down and say, let's focus on this and finish that. That's how it was, I remember, in 2021 with Speed Limit, so we said let's put a lot more resources into this to finish it. So it was at the end of 2021 with Midwintar where we said, ok, we have this, but we need to polish it to find a publisher. The whole team focused on it, or at least most of the team, and then of course the publisher came. There are those moments when we really decide that 100 projects at the same time is really enough, let's focus and then the most amazing things happen.

What is the secret of Speed Limit's success? You released it two years ago and the game was well received?

It was well received, it has very good reviews, I think it's about 80% positive on Steam, and it was on PlayStation, Switch, Xbox. That porting was our first experience of being on consoles, and people liked that retro vibe. This game was designed by Igor Kolar, co-owner of the company, he imagined it to be an ode to retro games, and in this way each level helps another genre of retro arcades. The first is obviously an homage to sidescrolling games, for example, Metal Slug, and then when the character jumps into the car, the perspective literally changes, then it is an homage to top down racing games, that is, racing shooters like Spy Hunter. Basically, every level changes your perspective and genre. There are people who appreciate it, there are people who will appreciate such an interesting concept. There may not be many of them, I tell you, that game is not a mega hit, but 10,000 copies is ok. You're happy when you see that all these people are happy, that it's a fun game for them. That game is actually very short, since there are so many different levels and each one is different, and in total it takes about an hour, let's say, to go through it all. All those who finished it could comfortably press a refund on Steam and then you are glad when you see that no one clicked it or very few people did it. People respect what is offered in that game, I think we caught a very good combination of having some kind of innovative spin, having a pixel art style, having something retro in you and that it's action, that it's fun, that it's fast-moving and that yet today passes. That may be the best formula. Like when you do some slow games with a lot of reading, it's cool, but you can't stream it, you can't go on Twitch and watch people read the text. It is much easier to do dynamic shooters, actions and that.

And Gamechuck has its own arcade system, what can you tell us about it?

It's another one of those projects that have been in stock for a very long time, like many comics, so are those arcades. As a studio that has so much stuff, some of that stuff has to be put on ice. Then those arcades have been on ice for a very long time, but they are moving slowly. You can go to one arcade, I don't know now, if someone is reading from Zagreb, you can go to Crni mačak in Zagreb and play there, it's literally standing there on the bar, that is, next to the bar in Mesnička street. There is a Speed Limit right there in that arcade. The second arcade is in the Zagreb Innovation Center, where our office is, where you have 100 companies and our arcade is in one corridor. These are all prototypes, before we start sending around coffee shops and arranging some leasings, we have to make a final prototype and say that's it. This requires us to focus again only on that and after X months we finish and say here it is, that's it, it's over and now we can go out with it.

In your opinion, what genres do Croats like to play? Mostly Croatian studios release point and click video games.

It is interesting that our studios like to release point and click titles, Saint Kotar for example. People like to play action games the most, we are no different as Croats in that regard, probably also RPG games. We worked in a cluster of video game producers and did that analysis where we asked students what they play and how much they spend, so at some point I even saw that data from students. That should be analyzed in great detail so that I don't tell you something wrong. Let's say, we could do such a detailed analysis, it's not difficult, we even have some data already, but here, I don't know it by heart. You noticed well, at least when we look at the developers, a lot of people are keen on those point and clickers, I think part of the solution is that in the 90s you could run those games on old computers. A lot of people who can play video games today, so they are somewhere around 25, 30 or 35 years old, they were at the age to play these games so that it would be interesting for them. That was the golden age of adventures, Monkey Island at the end of the nineties, the rest of the games from Lucas Arts, Sierra's games... That was exactly that era, and now if you grew up in that era, of course you find it very interesting, you want to recreate it and you don't spoil it, actually that genre is easy to do. Ok, you need a very good story, it's typed in, but you don't need some crazy code, you just click and the character moves where you clicked and then you have some dialogue. In fact, programmatically you can't fall into some development hell, only maybe narratively.

On the Internet, I can read comments on different websites that as soon as we Croats see that the game is ours, we immediately buy it, how true is that, what do you think?

Very good question, here, I really don't know. Honestly, I'm always against those ideas that a nation is special because we're different, it's great for jokes, it's great like when you make jokes about the Irish or Scots who are stingy and the Croats who are like this or that. Absolutely all the things that happen here, also happen elsewhere. I also lived in Brussels for a while, it's more or less the same for you. It is good that the question is asked so that people can answer for themselves.

Why do indie developers, especially in Croatia, like to make their own games and break into the video game industry in such ways, and then it takes them a long time to release their product? What's your opinion?

I think that everyone has their own different motivations, and in most cases, including in my case, it's because you grow up with a medium, that is, you grow up with video games. I grew up with Game Boy, the team grew up with Nintendo, PlayStation and you just want to produce content like that. You just have to get the team together and that's it. Now is the best time for it. Starting to make video games in the nineties was a pain because then there were no engines that you can download online. There were no YouTube channels where you learn tutorials, there was no support from HAVC to let you hunt to make a video game. There were not many things in the nineties and 2000s, even in the 2010s. In the early 2010s, it was a pain. I am lucky that I started it with a colleague in 2017 - we made a video game in 2018, and even then it was the first time that the Ministry of Culture and Media financed the game; In 2019, we won Creative Europe for the first time in Croatia; 2021 was the first time that HAVC gave money etc.

Now it's actually kind of, at least in the sense that there are funds, there are projects and some kind of educational projects, exactly in that same period: in 2018, PISMO started in Novska; In 2019, the Edu for Games project started at the Academy of Dramatic Art, just like that for video games; now Algebra has its own course, a graduate course for video game programmers, and VERN has that transmedia dramaturgy that is what video games are. Siniša Mahun teaches game design there. There are a lot of things that didn't exist five years ago, literally in five years in the field of education, finance, personnel (that education creates some personnel), some kind of events, let's say seven or six years ago there were no Dream Cups games at all. Now you have a relationship, on Fridays the team meets and hangs out, even if you are not in the industry you can enter it and hang out at one of those game dev dream cups and meetups. All these things, when added up, show that we are in a kind of renaissance of Croatian development, and now it's great to get into it. I didn't know that, I came just before that, but now I'm glad and I see that it's much easier for everyone else who starts, it used to be much more difficult because you had to make much more difficult decisions and you had to pay a lot of attention to it. These are well-known stories, people worked for years from their mother's basement, but that is no longer the case. People don't have to work in the basement for free for two years, now everything can be accelerated.

What games do you play in your free time and what genre appeals to you?

I usually like to play adventures, point and click narrative adventures. Right now I'm playing It Takes Two, that is, I'm finishing it. Before that I played Untitled Goose Game, it's not really a narrative adventure but I had a lot of fun. In the last five years, the strongest game for me was the one I played in the 2020s, Disco Elysium, it's not exactly a combat RPG, but an extremely good one. Lately, I quite like the fact that RPG elements are connected: skill trees, experience, leveling and that it is put in some kind of setting that is completely without combat, without the fact that you now have to hit the goblin 10,000 times to get 50 000 times + 1XP. Only the most interesting things from the genre are taken, at least the most interesting to me, and that's not beating goblins, but quests, solving quests, leveling, skills, roleplaying, character development. That's interesting and I'm glad that the focusing on it now. I would like to play some games that I still can't because I don't have a PlayStation, but let's say I've never played The Last of Us, now there's also a series. I would like to play that. Besides, I've played the Witcher and it's not the best game of all time. I like RPGs like that, but not now that they're the best things ever. I like playing Disco Elysium ten times more.

Can you talk about any significant challenges or considerations in developing games for different age groups, such as children or adults?

In the case of Baltazar, it is very simple, because we want it to be family friendly, maybe there will be a joke that will be funnier, wittier and will make an adult laugh. The principle of Disney and Pixar, as children laugh at one thing and parents laugh at something else. You really try to make it family friendly and that there is nothing excessive, like swearing or something. When you play Paws of Coal, there's no swearing, no blood, nothing like that. It can be played by a ten-year-old kid and he may not understand all the themes, but he can play it. As for these games that are more action-oriented, in my opinion it is very important to have some kind of PG moment (parental guidance), anyone can play, but you don't get anything special. Now if you put five curse words into the game you won't gain anything special with it, but you will lose that someone who is too young won't be able to click "buy this game". On the other hand, of course they will want to buy that game, you can deliberately go and buy games that are +12, but you can say that all the things in the game are family friendly. Ok, if you're a werewolf slaughtering in villages, of course it's not family friendly. We already know today that our whole society is such that, more or less, kids also play games and watch movies with a lot of violence and everything. That's not even a problem. Interesting things can be told without it. We don't have a strong position in the sense that now I say in the company we must not make a game where you can see blood, of course not. In Speed Limit, we had guns that you shoot people with and spit blood, but that's all cartoon violence, it's nothing worse, it's nothing you'll have nightmares about. It is a pixel art character that shoots pixel art blood. It's abstraction in a way, it's a lot more abstraction and levels of abstraction than some kind of hyperrealistic Call of Duty. I don't think it's even a problem. I think literally anyone can play games and no one will have a problem. If the kids didn't have a problem watching Tom and Jerry hit each other with those pans and smash their heads in, then they won't have a problem with pixel art violence.

Do you think that Paws of Coal can be transformed into a cartoon, that is, screened - we have a moral message, educational elements, an interesting story and detective motives?

The main problem is, of course, performance. If it was a mega-successful title or if that whole franchise became mega-successful, of course Netflix would probably call us and say let's do cartoons. We are far from that. You're right, it's all kind of drawn by hand, it could be really interesting, we could make it look like a cartoon. After all Balazar, we literally need to cut out the parts that are playable and here are the episodes of Balthazar. If you played it on television, no one would realize it was from the game.

Thank you Aleksandar for this conversation, we wish Gamechuck all the luck and success, and we may hear from you and see another opportunity when we receive new information related to games coming from your studio.