About the studio and its projects

What were you actually doing all this time?

We’ve been working. Throughout this whole time. None of those who stayed at the studio by the end of 2019 had any vocations longer than 2 weeks.

The release of the Haruspex hasn’t come easy. To be clear, it’s been really rough since the very beginning. The reason has lay not only in the financial side but also in the moral one: everyone has spent themself on cranches, burnt out emotionally, and barely crawled the way to the finish line. Then a large part of the team has dispersed. The studio quickly entered a slow regeneration mode. In such conditions, we had to solve three problems: rejuvenate to make the further work possible; find a new source of income and at the same time make the two remaining scenarios in good faith, without cloning the same game "with different dialogues”.

Then why did you get distracted by other games?

The first rescue plan that came to our minds was this: we decided to give up exceptional work on Pathologic and switch to a few smaller projects: Known by Heart, Franz, NeuroTale (which has now become Mythastasis). We assumed we would make it quickly, solving 4 tasks at once. Firstly, to get at least some funds for the development of the Bachelor (the studio has been strapped financially). Secondly, to have a rest from the Bachelor ourselves and to generally reboot the perception of his universe. Thirdly, to cope with burnout by switching from large long-term construction to small projects. And lastly, to rebuild the management of the studio, learning how to conduct several developments simultaneously by decentralizing processes in which the participation of already exhausted Nikolai used to be a “bottleneck”.

You haven’t succeeded with quick small games, have you?

Yes, Franz took us longer than we would expect. Mainly because there was only me, I had to deal with two projects - both Franz and Bachelor. It is more difficult than it appeared at the beginning. 

So you’re saying that the core of the team hasn't been working on it all those 3 years?

Yes. A small team of people and I were involved in the pre-production of the Bachelor throughout the year. There was also a separate independent team that worked on Ayrat's “Know by heart...” game, and did not influence the development of Pathologic 2 in any way. We understood that the game was expected, but we simply did not have the resources needed to make a Haruspex-like project. We began to think about how to come up with a concept that would allow us to make new gameplay out of the maximum number of ready-made assets and without the expensive development of new systems. Such a concept cannot be invented quickly even in a fresh and vigorous state. It has been exhausting work.

And why are you developing such a new game considering the regular remake is awaited?

First of all, not everyone’s waiting for just a regular remake. The world doesn’t stay in one place and the development of Haruspex has shown that the concept from the late nineties doesn’t work quite well nowadays. We announced on Kickstarter that all three heroes will be completely different from each other and this wasn’t about different replicas in the dialogues.

I fundamentally did not want to make a clone of an existing game, where the core gameplay of the Haruspex would migrate with the individual characteristics of this hero and, most importantly, with his former shortcomings. That includes the combat system, controversial economy, and the attempt to imitate a small-scale open world under the limited technical capabilities. The problem of streaming a large city on consoles, which rose to its full growth during a porting, also did not go away. All this had to be taken into account.

Therefore, when we got over the crisis, we immediately began thinking about how to make the Bachelor' root different from the Haruspex’ on one hand, and with an adequate budget on another. At the very beginning, it was supposed to be made more like the Marble Nest, the game in which survival is presented without any need of going through the dumpsters, and in which the main accent was aimed at the plot and the individual structure of the mind map that everyone liked in Haruspex.

Thus, we should be waiting for something like the Marble Nest?

No. Even developing a “low-key Bachelor” we had to create not a piece of old game, a full-fledged gameplay. We’d taken in account mistakes of developments, and this time started without pernicious arrogance, trying to do it the right way: with creating a bunch of gray box prototypes. The first version of pure cabinet gameplay we prototyped in a really low-key way: in fact, the whole story there should have been taking place in one location we called the Stillwater. During the episodes of strolls through the city players could receive impression phrases. It would appear when some urban detail fell into the player's scope, scattering in a cloud of phrases, as in the BBC Sherlock. Players had to catch them like mosquitoes with the further haul result appearing in the mind map.

All in all, we barely created a Fruit-ninja with thoughts and phrases that players had to immediately evaluate and find the necessary ones were playing a role of fruits. If the phrases didn’t fit, players would have to go hunting it again. This kind of gameplay still seems beautiful: maybe some kind of it would be presented in a current version of the game.

As a joke, I called it the combination of Her Story and IT’S WINTER. We wanted to show the intellectual hero and display the process of critical thinking through the game interface. In essence, it was a puzzle that tests memory, attentiveness and the skill of combination impressions.

Sounds terrifying. Especially for fans of the old game.

The second prototype was a story with a non-linear narrative, where 12 days were deliberately  placed not in chronological order, but mixed up, as in Pulp Fiction. The subconscious desire to create a convincing imitation of the sensations of an exhausted person had its effect. The player could move between different days, as if "remembering" what happened on the eleventh day and what happened on the sixth one. Bachelor’s had its own timeline, so did the player and the town with its citizens. And all of those three conditions sometimes had “go visiting” each other by the way.

For example, a volunteer hired by Dankovsky on the seventh day, when returning on the third day, had also appeared there. Sounds okay. But how should they act, when this meeting proves to be the first one chronologically, the second one for the player and obviously the third one for the hero. Dialogues have been written from the author’s reality, where the same volunteer on the third day could know what would happen to the Bachelor on the seventh day, and the Bachelor could not react to it. And so the idea of ​​changing the active hero in the process of dialogue arose. It remains in the final version. But, in general, this kind of approach was too confusing. Both players and us were totally flipping out.

And so now you’re working on the third version of gameplay, aren’t you?

Yes. It’s not the city or even the plague that matters to the Bachelor, but Simon and, more precisely, the question of how he technically achieved immortality. And this question is directly related to the different types of time that I wanted to show through the gameplay. It has been only during the playtests of the second prototype that it’s become clear that in the concept with a “jump cut” the player's experience of the time’s flow had completely gone! Totally! Time had been so complicated the players have stopped noticing it. And we wanted them to be able to compare various types of perception of a time within a short interval. Therefore, we focused on what techniques and activities make players experience time within a short interval, like in Nolan's film "Memento".

At the same time, a game with a different time course had to be combined with a tactical “street” gameplay. The interaction with infected zones, particles and objects should affect the flow of time.

If you’ve been preparing the prototype you like for such a long time, how long will it take to create the game itself?

Firstly, Know by Heart.. is released, and Franz is already on its way. A lot of employees are able to work on the Bachelor now. Secondly, at the end of the last year, we entered into an agreement with a major well-known investor. And despite how feverish the world is now, today we still have a deal. Therefore the team has expanded and since the beginning of this year it has working on a game at a full capacity.

Okay, but what about the production? What stage are you at right now?

The third prototype is what we’re working on right now. And, in fact, its design pillars have already been approved. Some of its details still don’t suit us all. But it's Okay. By the beginning of October we are making an alpha version. Since mid-August, we are launching intensive production of new assets and gameplay systems. 

In this post, I must apologize not only for the chaotic information about the status of the project, but also for the optimistic assumptions that were once voiced. All this was due to a vague assessment of our capabilities and assumptions about what exactly we are releasing. I have already wrote that a year and a half ago we almost faced death and were ready to release a very modest game with the cabinet gameplay. This should have been simply to keep a promise and make at least some kind of release.

The majority of fans mean the Haruspex-like game when asking “What’s about the Bachelor?”. There were 25 people working on Haruspex at the same time, apart from outsourcers. For the studio it was the maximum number of specialists. Still this amount of people and the budget I’ve mentioned early is not nearly enough for a game of such scale.

But the situation and our opportunities have been changing. We’ve been testing one prototype after another. Now we have the right prototype and an acceptable budget. Moreover, we have a sufficient number of employees, the number of which continues to grow. That’s why we will be able to give an adequate time frame after testing the alpha version.

How will the Bachelor differ from the Haruspex?

Daniil Dankovsky works with the technology of mortality. He is interested in how a person naturally “ends” and what can be done about it. Immortality and death are problems that primarily rely on how time works. The aging processes of the body are associated with its irreversible and irresistible flow. But time works way more complicated in the modern scientific picture of the world. Its foundations were laid by Einstein, Planck and Mechnikov. They all are conditional contemporaries of Dankovsky, and he, as an intellectual, should know about their work.

Therefore Dankovsky should perceive time not mundenly, but differently. Changing his concerns about the time, he would start to use it as a tool to understand not the not the physiological immortality of the cell, but the immortality of man as a thinking unit. 

There are precisely a number of philosophical questions that we want to focus on while working on the plot of the Bachelor. Firstly, that includes the dilemma of death and immortality. Secondly, it’s about time and being lost in it, as well as managing time itself or changing its perception. That is what gameplay changes are connected with. We have to decide on what the hero can do in our world model, what he can influence, and what, on the contrary, is not so important for him.

The open world.

The original Pathologic, as well as the Haruspex, tried to imitate life itself. That was the natural and philistine perception of reality. Time was passing linearly and unstoppably, the hero wanted to eat and sleep. It was obvious he couldn’t be in several places at once. We wanted people to perceive the fantastic situation in the city on Gorkhon as the most realistic one. So the game felt like everyday life. Twenty years ago, such a task seemed really daring and important. The perception of the game was different from now, the process of interaction of person and the game was different.

Because of such an extensive complex of meanings of the “open world” phrase, it’s better to clarify what we are really talking about. There will be no continuous streaming of the city. Now the hero arrives at the point needed, solves a problem there and then moves to another destination in time and space. There also will be no more a number of artificial humans standing round the streets pretending they have some kind of business. It won't be possible to engage in combat with any passersby. There won’t be any stats imitating physiology, but the system of markers to control the time instead.

Haruspex’s survival.

The three heroes of Pathologic have different approaches in solving the problem of surviving. Actually, it’s the problem of their limits, including mortality. Haruspex was rough and unconsciously solved it through love. He was the down-to-earth hero, the man of family and responsibility. Haruspex had spread both his body and individuality to the boundaries of the whole city, which then became his new body. Becoming a father to people who, strictly speaking, are not his children by blood, he restored the broken ties of the city’s body. Moreover, the player literally realized this in the gameplay, watching the city from the everyday and physiological side.

Bachelor is rational and solves this problem in the opposite way. He is an egoist, a man of his mind and an analyst. That’s why he does not connect what has been disassembled, but, on the contrary, breaks the world into its component parts. He comes to the city to make sure that some individual, homo sapiens, has learned to live forever. To understand this "trick" about the technique of achieving immortality he needs to reconsider the main categories of the world. That includes the nature of time, space and the causality.

And Dankovsky, too, must go beyond his ego through the gameplay, dividing the unity of his life path into parallel, mutually exclusive parts. The fight against the epidemic rests on the denial of reality. This epidemic, by the default, seems to be the only correct thing. It is as it is, you just have to understand its structure. The way of pragmatic fight against evil is possible only in this dimension.

The story of the Bachelor is about the necessity of a new synthesis from the fragmented and rethought world. It’s the only thing coming to my mind right now. It seems that nowadays without a systematic habit of this process, it will not be possible to survive at all. So we can say that survival, as the genetic code of the game, has also been preserved. But only now it becomes real, not imagined.

The combat system and stray passerbys.

The combat system has never been Pathologic’s strong suit, alas. We never really wanted to make complex action-oriented gameplay. Players could kill 3d npcs just to understand their vulnerability. I see the everyday, physical world of the Bachelor as more conventional than in the plot of the Haruspex.

The characters will not disappear from the streets. But for me it’s much dearer to me when they just prop up poles or sit on benches. As soon as they begin to move, their artificiality and limitations immediately appear. I was certain about that back to 2002, I’m still certain about that right now. Each time I yielded to insistence on doing active behavior and each time I regretted it.

Barter, robbery and profiteering.

It really doesn't suit the Bachelor. He is a famous person, distinguished guest and head of the epidemic control headquarters. Due to the status he has in the city, he should not have problems with materials. Even against the backdrop of general impoverishment and a shortage of basic necessities. This should not bother him, he has a different kind of deficit. I can still reassure those who like to save and suffer from a lack of values. There’ll be a huge number of economic manipulations in the game. I really like to accumulate game values ​​in a shortage and rejoice in successful acquisitions too. it's just now this economy will be about other values: time, people and facts.

The game with a reticle and plague clouds.

I want to close the old gestalt and finally do what was not possible either in 2005 or 2018. In the old Pathologic, the players, as it seems to me, did not physically feel the danger of infection. In fact, people in the game, as well as heroes, were infected according to their script. And the game just threw lots if they got infected or not. That’s why the players did not quite feel that work with infection is work with the environment. I wanted to ensure that any interaction with any object entailed a risk of infection that could not be reduced in any way. But it turned out that the person played not with a sense of danger, but with the state of the scale. Now we are working on how to fix this and create a sense of the constant presence of risk “in the air”. It shouldn’t be marked clearly like the subtitle: “you currently entered the infected area, fasten your seat belts and eat a pill”. 

Contagion particles will become smarter playing a much more important role than in old Pathologic or Haruspex. There will be more types of it and more complex behavior. Player will have to find it, figure it out and interact with it. It will be like an endless waltz with the plague. That is what’s going to be the core of interaction with the space of a game.

New city district’s conditions.

Bachelor travels not only through the past and the future, but through the exact moments as well. He creates his own way like a mosaic out of dots of memories or assumptions.

But due to the lack of a clear change in the stages of the state of the district (healthy, infected, boarded up), the city is now divided not as much into areas with quests, but into different states of air, emptiness. Particles of the contagion will be everywhere, but its evolution will depend on time spent by the hero in specific coordinates of spacetime. This exact find we’ve been testing in the last prototype and it fulfilled all my expectations. Personally, now I have almost a tactile sensation of living disease. It feels alive, volatile, it breathes and moves. It’s become a more contemporary variation of old mambo-jumbo with clouds.

By no means a chronological order of story.

Remember how in the classic Pathologic the pressure of uncontrolled time did not allow you to complete all the quests being a participant of all game situations? Bachelor won't have this opportunity too. But since he has confused time, and he studies its fabric, sometimes the Bachelor will manage to manipulate it. Or maybe it’s all just a memory and sense of reality confusion? Is the narrator even reliable? Anyway, players will be able to plan the time allotted to us until the physical death of the hero. They will come back to previous days to make up for the findings they didn’t manage with the first attempt. But all deeds still have its cost.

Volunteers.

I was sick of the status majesty and lofty eccentricity of the majority of chief citizens. I cherish them like a family, and they will remain in a new game, it’s just how it’s going. But still, they aren’t well-suited to solve the immediate tasks of fighting the epidemic. Therefore, about two dozen new simpler characters will appear in the game. Bachelor will have an opportunity to hire them as volunteers, so they can free him from his routine. Those volunteers will also save his precious time that he definitely doesn’t have enough for the entire volume of the game. In fact, the Bachelor will have to divide and extend himself in order to cover at least some main facts with other people's eyes and hands. Those findings will afterwards complete the hypotheses that excite him.

Furthermore, in this game some new locations will appear. One is extremely far from the City on Gorkhon, the other is extremely deep inside of it.