Copychaser Games is a small studio. It could even be considered a microstudio, which a developer once told me described, in his mind, a studio that could entirely fit in the back of a taxi. Whether that’s a regular three-seater or a more spacious London cab for six, Copychaser fits the bill. One third of Copychaser is founder, writer, and former journalist Ben Gelinas, w♊ho is calling on all his experiences to create “weird indie games”.
The second of those weird indie games is 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Times & Galaxy, in which you take on the role of the first ever robot intern at an intergalactic newspaper. Your job is to attend the scenes of newswor♛thy events, interview alien witnesses and extraterrestrial police, and puzzle together your story from the pieces of information you gather. You’re thrown in at the deep end on your first day, flying through the stars to see the aftermath of a shuttle crash. It’s a lot to take in for a newcomer, an outsider.
In many ways, it mirrors the development process that Copychaser has undergone over the development period. Copychaser has grown quickly over the course of working on Times & Galaxy. The core team of employees still number just three𝕴, but numerous contractors have put their own stamps on the game as it has grown. Unusually, Gelinas tells me that he sees indie games as an “opportunity to bring in people who have never worked on a game before,” and many core members of the development team are new to the industry. Time & Galaxy’s character artist and two of the game’s four writers have never worked on games before, but it doesn’t🃏 show as you play the demo or beta, both of which are currently available. An outsider story written by outsiders.
500 readers can access priority spots in T☂imes & Galaxy’s clo💯sed beta pool by following and entering the code THEGAMER
While the legion of contractors pouring their souls into Times & Galaxy each brings their own experience, Gelinas has a range of experiences to call on himself. As well as his training and experience working as a crime reporter in Edmonton, Gelinas has worked as a writer and editor for studios like BioWare and Remedy on their biggest games. He keeps a balance between his triple-A and indie work, and likes it that way. But his triple-A experience informs his indie games in more ways ꦗth🙈an one.
“I saw the act of being a journalist as a really good – I don't want to say mechanic, so much as an excuse to get out and explore in a story setting like this,” explains Gelinas. “I've said this so many times to people as I've been pitching this game, but it's a reason to explore a galaxy without shooting people every ten minutes. At Bioware especially, I really came to have a full grasp on branching dialogue and really getting into the nuances of having a fictional conversation with a fictional character and making it feel like you're participating in it.
“And interviewing is a really good reason to do that, right? And it sort of gamifies it without gamifying it. And you get different reactions based on the way you compose yourself, the questions you ask, and you may or may not get information out of that. That leads me to the second kind of gamification, which is like treating information as a collectible. So it's not just like I'm collecting – well, we have seeds too, but… – collecting small things, coins or puzzle pieces. They are puzzle pieces in a way, but they are pieces of information that then you're using to assemble a puzzle in your story.”
As a ♏little insight into how I do my job, I have treated stories, and especially interviews, as puzzles. You run throu෴gh the transcript, you piece together the throughline, you start fitting the best quotes into the story you want to tell. I’ve done that with this very story, piecing together preview impressions with interview segments to give you a taste of what it’s like to play, and make, Times & Galaxy. Sorry if that got too meta for you.
You choose how you play Times & Galaxy. You choose what kind of stories you file, and what spin you want to put on them. You can choose to be a sensationali𝕴st or report the facts. You can add alien intrigue, and of course there are multiple stories and perspectives to tell at every event. I went for what I dubbed a ‘bad playthrough’, where I was a sensationalising tabloid reporter with an agenda to pursue and no caꦅre for my interviewees. Gelinas, however, deliberately didn’t put ‘good’ or ‘bad’ outcomes in the game. Instead, you see the consequences of your choices play out as the game progresses. I’m excited to see future interviewees turn down my requests for information as my ‘bad’ reputation precedes me.
At the end of each level, which takes place over the course of a day, you build your story by piecing together the information you gathered. The storybuilder system is quite unique, showing you all your options gleaned from conversations as well as blacked out stories that would🐼 have made themselves available had you chosen different dialogue options. The system uses the old school journalism tenet of the inverted pyramid technique of information, and Gelinas’ BioWar🐈e experience is evident in the branching dialogue trees and three-way Paragon-esque morality system. But the joy of making an indie game is that he can take more risks.
“This feels a lot more like making little indie movies,” he explains. “You can really try new things in ways that don't need to be as fiscally responsible. My whole model with making indie games is I look at low budget horror. The idea is not to try to emulate what those larger studios I've worked for or grow towards that, but instead be like, ‘we purposely have a small box to work within, how can we fill that box to its complete potential and give players an experience they haven't seen before?’”
After the case you return to your spaceship and your brain-in-a-jar commissioning editor to get your next assignment. I have to know how much of the game, how many of the characters, are based on real people and experiences from his time as a journo. He says he’s taken industry stereotypes (like that of an assignment editor) and put the fingerprints of former colleagues on certain roles, 🌸but generally steered clear of translating experiences 1:1.
“What I covered [as a crime reporter] was almost entirely very dark,” Gelinas says. “I was day in [and] day out asking people questions on the worst days of ꦇtheir lives, and people going through unimaginable trauma. [It was] very far removed from what I do now.”
He was cautious of cheapening the real experiences of the people he met, but some of his assignments from early in his career – like reporting on a group of bunnies that had taken over a car dealership – informed the𝓡 zaniness of intergalactic journalism. He was keen to make Times & Galaxy a light-hearted ga🎀me. While there may be car crashes and self-aware AI that yearns for death, this is a funny, colourful game. Partially because Gelinas thinks there are “so many grimdark indies out there” but also so the team could have fun with aliens. Times & Galaxy is a non-violent game, meaning that you wield a dictaphone rather than a pistol.
“It's not that I have anything against violence in games,” he says. “One of my therapy games is Doom 2016. I like a lot of different types of games, but I get sick of [violence] being the reason to do things, the gun is the primary tool in your hand. I wanted to make a game that could explore a kind of action in games that you don't see very often. This is why I love working in video game narratives in general: how much potential there still is. We're still so new in the narrative possibilities of video games, and I want to push that where I can.”
It all comes back to taking risks with indie games. Doing something new. Gelinas doesn’t want to reinvent 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Obra Dinn, he’ll just play Obra Dinn. He wants to push boundaries🌌 and do things that risk-averse triple-A studios will avoid. But among all the risks, there’s a plucky young robo-reporter trying to be good at their job.
