Fictiorama Studios' Luis Oliván discussed how the team decided to work on the Do Not Feed the Monkeys sequel, delved into the creation of the game's puzzles, and shared the team's strategies for discovering and engaging with the audience for the game.
Introduction
I am Luis Oliván, co-founder of Fictiorama Studios and also a producer at the company. We created the studio a little over 10 years ago, and Fictiorama is the first video game company the other two co-founders and I have worked in.
I’ve been a part of the four commercial video games developed by Fictiorama: Dead Synchronicity: Tomorrow Comes Today (2015), Do Not Feed the Monkeys (2018), The Fabulous Fear Machine (to be published in 2023) and Do Not Feed the Monkeys 2099 (to be published in on May 25th 2023).
Fictiorama Studios
Fictiorama was created in late 2012 by my two brothers, Mario and Alberto, and myself, so it’s literally a family business! The three of us had so many good times playing narrative-driven video games together when we were kids and teenagers, that we decided to gather again, decades later, to create, together, the narrative-driven video games we’d like to play.
Whereas the training and professional background of the three of us could be applied to video game development (programming, narrative creation, media production, etc.), neither of us had worked in professional video game development before.
However, during that several-decade hiatus, the three of us had followed creative paths one way or another: via music, films, literature, etc. So "all" it took for us was to learn the intricacies of the video games industry since we thought (and still think) that, nowadays, video games are the most powerful means to tell stories, convey emotions, etc., and it’s also an amazing tool to convey commentaries about the world, as we do with our games.
Since we knew nothing about how to make video games, for our first project we decided to go with quite a "regular" old-school point-and-click adventure, Dead Synchronicity: Tomorrow Comes Today. We knew nothing about game design (not even that there was something called "game design"!), so we thought making a game similar to the dozens of adventures we played in the past, made total sense. And it did: making Dead Synchronicity was a significant learning process for us, and also we got a sturdy, great-looking, finished game in the studio’s portfolio.
After finishing the development of Dead Synchronicity (and learning what "game design" was!) we thought we were ready to approach "less regular old-school games", while still addressing a commentary about the world, and also including different kinds of mechanics, in order to target different kinds of players. That’s when we came up with the idea of Do Not Feed the Monkeys, a digital voyeur simulator that included different sets of mechanics while addressing lots of different issues about our current world.
We've followed the same approach with our two upcoming games, both The Fabulous Fear Machine and Do Not Feed the Monkeys 2099.
Do Not Feed the Monkeys 2099
We started to think about a sequel for Do Not Feed the Monkeys shortly after the game was released. The response from the community was (and still is!) amazing, not only in terms of the amount of people that bought the game but especially because of how engaged the players feel.
It was mind-blowing to read so many reviews on the Steam page of the game, overwhelmingly positive, but especially to follow the threads on the Steam discussion page. Players immediately started to share their views on the game, and also ask how to interact with this or that story, trying to unveil every little secret of the game, suggesting features, and mostly asking for more content: like more "cages", more characters, more puzzles, etc.
So we started to think about ways to fulfill those requests, especially the "more content" thing: for a while, we evaluated the chance to create a DLC for Do Not Feed the Monkeys, but then this idea of making a new game set in the future came in… and we immediately knew it was going to be really fun, both for the players and for us, since it allowed us to include space ships, and aliens, and other planets, and androids and lots of crazy stuff.
Once we decided to create a new game, we also started to look into other stuff that the community was asking for, specifically some features that we knew could be really great.
Actually, that has been the main approach for Do Not Feed the Monkeys 2099: instead of including as much content as possible, we decided to focus on improving the art style so that it depicted life in the year 2099 in a beautiful way, also including some stuff requested by the community, adding some new mechanics here and there, etc., while sticking to main chore mechanics that the community of Do Not Feed the Monkeys loved from day one.
The Game's Puzzles
This was one of the trickiest parts when creating not only Do Not Feed the Monkeys 2099 but also when we came up with the concept of Do Not Feed the Monkeys. But, at the same time, we think the way the narrative and the game mechanics intertwine is one of the reasons why players love the games that much.
Basically, the first step is to come up with interesting storylines and plots, some of which can include different kinds of interactions from the players (you know, the "feeding the monkeys" thing!). In the case of Do Not Feed the Monkeys 2099, this has been even funnier, since there have been even fewer constraints than in the original Do Not Feed the Monkeys when it comes to the kind of stories we could tell: we could include robots, aliens, and new planets. Lots of even zanier stuff!
Then we follow some kind of reverse process: I mean, the thing is to visualize the big picture about those story-lines, in terms of potential interactions from the players, and how the plots are going to divert and get to different outcomes depending on the interactions… and also depending of those plots being time-sensitive or not. All the stories in the game are based on scenes, but, whereas those scenes will be looped in some storylines, others will end by themselves in one specific way if the players do nothing.
Then comes the funniest part: how are players going to be able to trigger the potentially different outcomes? How and when are we, as creators, going to give the players the tools to do so? Since one of the main mechanics in the game is based on managing actual "words", the next step is defining an interesting set of keywords that players might write down on their tablets, and how those words are going to group together. The scenes themselves will depend on these keywords (since they can be written down in specific moments), but also the keywords must adapt to the scenes, as sometimes we use polysemic words to create more vibrant scenes.
And then, of course, we intertwine these words with the main "investigating" mechanics in the game: searching those words in a Google-like search engine and finding (or not!) more keywords that can also be written down, using those words as "topics" for calls or chat sessions, using those words as “answers” for the assignments from The Primate Observation Club… and also in a "fill-in" mechanic, that’s new in Do Not Feed the Monkeys 2099!
Then of course the "narrative-driven" mechanics mix with the resource management side: depending on how players interact, they might get money, or gifts that they can sell, and hence that will make their "survival" side in the game easier or not.
As you can see, some kind of exciting "clockwork" process!
Resource Management
The resource management side was included in the original concept of Do Not Feed the Monkeys since the very beginning, and hence it is also essential in Do Not Feed the Monkeys 2099. For us, both games are, mainly, narrative-driven games, but including this set of resource management mechanics allowed us to, firstly, expand the narrative of the game itself: each item of food, each available job, each assignment from the Club, each visit from the food delivery person, adds depth to the narrative content.
Also, it allows us to expand the way the game makes commentary about issues that we want to address as creators: temporary and underpaid jobs, expensive healthy food, moral dilemmas…
Finally, and this was also key from the very beginning, we thought this set of mechanics could be some kind of a moment to relax from the narrative, and intense stuff, and also something that drew attention from other kinds of players. Actually, we really enjoy the speedrunning videos in which players beat Do Not Feed the Monkeys as soon as possible, just by focusing on the resource side of the game and not even caring about the storylines!
Regarding how it’s organized and tweaked, we work with a spreadsheet in which the main values are included. For the first game, it was all a trial and error process, trying to get a balance between how fun it was to manage the resources and how much it "interfered" with the storylines. For Do Not Feed the Monkeys 2099 we’re lucky to have the feedback from players of the first game.
Finding Audience
It’s true that, except for our first game which was quite "old school", at Fictiorama, we lately try to explore unique approaches for our video games, whether in terms of mechanics or subjects… or all of it at once. This usually involves some risks, of course, since sometimes it might not be easy to spot the right audience for these kinds of projects.
Do Not Feed the Monkeys 2099 is a special case because, although being quite a "different and unique" game, it’s the sequel to another "different and unique" game that already has a cool community. So it hasn’t been like trying to guess if there’s a potential audience for such a game, because it’s been proven that there’s an audience for the first installment. The goal, hence, is to reach that previous audience and also new players, since Do Not Feed the Monkeys 2099 can be fully enjoyed without having played the first installment.
As for the feedback from the community, we definitely keep a close eye on it. For instance, we read every comment about our games on the Steam discussions forums and I can assure you that, for years, we read every single one of the thousands of reviews the original Do Not Feed the Monkeys has on Steam. To the point that some of the suggestions that players made have been included in Do Not Feed the Monkeys 2099.
We have social networks and now we have a Discord server in which the interaction with the community is even more direct, so we encourage everyone to join!
Fictiorama Studios' Roadmap
At the moment we’re 100% focused on the current content of Do Not Feed the Monkeys 2099, polishing and improving things here and there for the release. We always have future plans for our games, but we’d rather not reveal them, since most depend on how games do commercially.
Also, the release of our other current development, The Fabulous Fear Machine is quite close, so stay tuned for exciting news!