Nominee | Excellence in Visual Art
Created by Jumpsuit Entertainment.
Each year at GDC, MFA students from the NYU Game Center interview the Independent Games Festival nominees, asking them three questions about their development process. In addition to this interview, you can read all the insightful interviews from 2017 here. These conversations, and much more, will happen when the Game Center returns to GDC in 2018. Learn more about the Game Center at GDC 2017.
Corey: What was the initial inspiration for this or was there a problem you guys wanted to solve?
David Priemer, Game Designer: There was never really an inspiration or an idea that we had. I started to work on it as a student and I just was trying new things with Unity engine. I didn’t actually plan on making a game. I was just messing around with code snippets. Over time some kind of puzzle game emerged that I kept working on.
Corey: Oh, so you weren’t even planning on making a game!
David: I especially wasn’t planning on making a puzzle game. I was working on an action game actually.
Corey: Interesting. Where were you at school?
David: Germany, in a town called Kassel.
Corey: Was there anything in particular you were inspired by as you got further into the development process?
David: Yeah, well Daniel, the illustrator, was kind of inspired from a comic book called Moebius. Game design wise, I was inspired by games like Hitman Go, which is a really good puzzle game for mobile.
Corey: When you were working on this, did you have a particular tool or method of working that was instrumental in building out the game world or the levels?
David: I did most of my work with pen and paper. So most of the level and game design didn’t happen on PCs. I was just sitting in the kitchen, drawing sketches and thinking through with my head. When I finished something I implemented it in Unity and just tested if it works the way I intended it to. I have a huge pile of sketchbooks with level design sketches. I think Daniel did kind of the same, doing sketches in a notebook. If you were to visit us in a usual situation, we’d just sit there without computers I guess, both of us.
Corey Bertelsen, a recovering structural engineer from Minnesota, is studying game design at NYU. He likes synaesthetic games, improvised music, and pancakes.