“I think had to do with kind of drifting away from religious faith as I grew older, but still having that echo of wanting something to be there, that is beyond what's visible. “I think that mortality is why you have these thoughts,” he said.
And while Roberts lost his dad when work on Gorogoa was all but completed, he acknowledged the importance of questioning mortality in his approach.
As it turns out, I and Roberts both lost our fathers in the same year.
This thought process is naturally intensified if you’ve recently lost a parent or loved one. Human beings, especially those approaching mid-life, often ponder their own mortality and the meanings of their lives. And it sort of has to be mysterious, that larger structure.” Whether or not we might struggle to actually believe it in reality… I'm drawn to that, and that informs my design decisions. “And that is compelling, and comforting, as a concept. And I think that's a theme that I will carry forward into future projects, just because it's something that is compelling to me, kind of like taking the everyday world, and then looking at it from a different perspective, an outside perspective, so that you can see the larger, and hopefully beautiful, structure that it's a part of. “It's the desire to feel like you're part of a larger pattern than what you can see. “I wasn't specifically thinking about that, but I see how it resonates,” Roberts remarked. I couldn’t help but wonder if this idea of dualities and other realities was in part inspired by this hypothesis. There are a number of scientists, including the late physicist Stephen Hawking, who’ve entertained the idea of a multiverse. So it's, I think, more about duality, and the nature of the world and in people.” “In the game, that other world is represented by this mysterious creature, and a character's kind of yearning to find his way to that invisible world. “I'm thinking of looking at the solid, everyday world, and seeing another sort of reality, or something larger, something invisible, and eternal, or magical, superimposed on that,” said Roberts. Roberts wants us all to examine the duality of, well, everything. It’s about the nature of life, of the world, and the entire cosmos as a whole. It’s a narrative without any dialogue, similar to fellow Annapurna Interactive published title Florence from Ken Wong.Īs the player gets deeper into Gorogoa - quite literally, as the game has you factoring in the Z axis as well - the veneer of the puzzle mechanic is eroded so that the meaning of the game becomes clearer. The player moves around and stacks tiles of hand drawn art (clearly inspired by comics and graphic novels) and those actions then result in certain animations taking place to tell a story. Gorogoa, on the surface, is merely a puzzle game. Jason Roberts of Buried Signal (Image: Kotaku) I just wanted to make a big project that had lots of colorful drawings that I could do, so I was as much motivated by desire to do a big art project as I was to make a game, and then found a way to make those two things synergize.” I had long wanted to make a game, and I also wanted to make a visual art project. That proved that something could be done. “It was a successful game, and it was made by a very small number of people, and I didn't even think of that as possible.
“I think it was when Braid came out, that made a big impression on me a lot of people,” Roberts said.
#GOROGOA FIRST TRY FULL#
Discoverability hadn’t quite taken a turn for the worse yet, and the indie renaissance was in full effect, as numerous developers gained inspiration from Jonathan Blow’s Braid (among others). I didn't want to go through the whole career path, career grind, of working for a big game company.”Īs Roberts noted, when he decided to start working on Gorogoa in 2012, the marketplace was different than it is now. I didn't think it was possible for one person to make a game. “But they never seemed, the designs never seemed too practical. “I had been designing games kind of in my head since I was a teenager, I think,” he told GameDaily. And for the most part, the bulk of Gorogoa was created by Roberts himself.
#GOROGOA FIRST TRY SOFTWARE#
He quit his job as a software engineer in 2012 to pursue his vision. He didn’t go to design school or team up with his buddies to work on a project from his basement or garage. He’s new to the scene, but he’s in his 40s. Jason Roberts is not your prototypical game developer. Gorogoa: How Jason Roberts' Grappling With Reality May Have Created A New Genre Roberts talks about how he got into games, the state of indie development, and his next project being a conceptual relative of Gorogoa.
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