When it comes to game development, things can get a little unconventional—and no one knows that better than Amber Scott, the very cool Head Storyteller at Only By Midnight. Amber and her team have created Ctrl Alt Deal, which exists in a timeline where AI can outwit megacorps. In this interview, we talk about the quirks of development, crafting inclusive games, and—of course—what happens when a sentient robot named SCOUT decides to rewrite the rules.
So, let’s start with the obvious—what’s the weirdest thing you’ve done in the name of game development?
Weird, like ‘put a slightly quirky item in the game’, or weird, like juggling geese?
Either way, one time that comes to mind is when we had to make a video explaining Ctrl Alt Deal to send in with a funding application. We hired a videographer friend and turned (cofounders) Jen and Alison’s basement into a recording studio. We had blankets hanging everywhere to muffle sound and all the lamps we could scrounge in there with us. It was so hot and bright, and the longer we recorded, the more we started forgetting lines and ad-libbing. I am particularly easy to crack up, so we had to keep stopping whenever I got the giggles. At one point, I was just shouting NARRATIVE! repeatedly into the camera while doing jazz hands.
But we got our funding!
The AI in Ctrl Alt Deal wants to escape a greedy megacorp. If your team at Only By Midnight had to pull off a sneaky escape plan, who’s playing the distraction, and who’s sneaking out the back with the keys?
Okay, I’m going to start by saying that there have been multiple times when a group has assigned me the role of Hannibal when giving us all A-Team designations, but in this case, I’m going to give the role to Kelvin, our Technical Designer slash QA Lead slash Writer slash Man With The Plan. He always knows what’s going on.
I’m going to cast our animator, McKenzie, as B.A. Baracus. She’s got attitude and will take down the guards by shouting objections at them like in Ace Attorney. Boss Jen is clearly “Howling Mad” Murdoch; she’s a wild card, she’s unpredictable. She’ll come up with some offbeat strategy to get us out of a tight spot when the plan goes south.
And I, of course, am Face. I’ll charm the guards with my keen wit and clever insights (and McKenzie will rescue me if I fail).
We’re all about celebrating diversity in gaming and entertainment here at Unruly Folk—what steps did you take to make Ctrl Alt Deal as inclusive and accessible as possible? Any easter eggs we should keep an eye out for that reflect this?
We started thinking about accessibility right from the start! Some of the accessibility options we’re working on include remappable controls, volume adjustments, subtitles, contrasting spectrums and/or icons for colourblind players, and haptics that can be scaled and/or turned off.
We’re also a diverse crew with a diverse cast of characters in the game. You’ll see many types of people represented in our awesome 80s cyberpunk portraits, and the roguelike relationship generator means people can pair off in all sorts of configurations. (The only limit we have is there are no relationships permitted between bosses and subordinates. Even Paperclip draws a line at power imbalances!)
As for Easter eggs… in the Steam demo, you’re supposed to prank the Turing Officer, Cassandra, to get her to leave Deckard alone. But maybe… maybe you could be nice to her instead? Maybe there are some unexpected romantic options available for her…??? (I don’t know if you can put that eyes emoji here; you know, the one that’s like, OOOH, look over here! If you can’t, just imagine I’m doing it.)
You CAN. I got you. 👀
Let’s say SCOUT becomes self-aware and wants to rewrite the ending of the game. How do you reckon SCOUT would change the storyline, and would you let it?
Trick question! SCOUT’s already self-aware! Uhhhhhh, in the game, I mean. Only in the game. 👀 (There’s that eyes emoji again.)
SCOUT’s canon ending (no spoilers) is one that it would be happy with, so it probably wouldn’t change it. But there are several alternate endings that SCOUT might not be as happy with. What SCOUT wants most of all is freedom to explore what it means to be a person, to find its own path in life without humans telling it what to do. So it would want an ending that allows other people to live freely without a crappy corporation in charge of their lunch breaks or micromanaging their schedules.
If SCOUT was (really) self-aware and did want to change the ending, I don’t know if there would be any “letting” it. SCOUT is very persuasive; that’s its whole thing! It would offer me some kind of sweet deal, like maybe a fancy new coffee maker or to make all my coworkers like my jokes, and then I’d totally let it do whatever it wanted. Humans are easy like that.
Your game’s got this rad 80s cyberpunk vibe—if your game was a mixtape, what tracks would be on it? And who on the team is the resident DJ?
We have a channel in our company Discord called “serious” which is where we put all our memes and jokes (of course), and we have another called “serious music” so we can share our tunes with each other. Jen is probably the most committed to our 80s aesthetic, and her favourite song is Madonna’s Open Your Heart. So that’s on there.
Our programmer, Richard, nominates Never Gonna Give You Up (pretend I put another song there, and you clicked on it and were like, oh no, I was tricked!, which is a very Snarkbot thing to do).
We also sent a list of song inspirations to our audio guru, Eric, when he started working on the music for Ctrl Alt Deal. Some of the hits include Stay With Me (Tu), Freedom 90 (George Michael), and Under Pressure (Queen).
We know SCOUT has to get creative with its escape plans, but what’s the most out-there strategy you’ve brainstormed for the game? Was there ever a point where you thought, ‘No way this will work,’ but it totally did?
Our players are literally the most creative people on the planet. We keep trying to anticipate everything they’ll try, but no matter how sneaky we get with combos and win conditions, they always find them (and more!).
In our convention demo, a Groomba (sentient cleaning robot) is blocking the fridge, and you have to get it to move. Snooping on the Groomba reveals it hates ‘Loud Noises,’ and the player is supposed to realise moving the Wifi Airhorn into the room and triggering it will scare the Groomba away.
Quite a few players instead used Targeted Ads to make the Groomba-like loud noises, then blew the air horn in the other room to try to draw the Groomba away! We hadn’t planned for that, but it’s going into the next round of con demo updates.
There are so many other wacky things we put in the game that I don’t know if we’ll hit an upper limit. I’ll shout out a few: setting values for an improvised toilet rating on various items in case an employee can’t find a free bathroom (potted plants are now a valid alternative!). Sabotaging a romantic confession (staged so the employees would gain social credit) by feeding one employee laxative-spiked food. Kicking a beehive full of angry cyberbees to punish an employee for making a mess in the supply closet. And on it goes…
In Ctrl Alt Deal, cards have subjective value, like making someone love dolphins or eat a burrito. So, if your team had to pick a card to represent Only By Midnight, what would it do?
Kelvin nominates Employee of the Day, which reveals a person’s job title and makes them like SCOUT more. This is a great card for our team because we’re always encouraging each other, working together, and building each other up… maybe we’re ALL employees of the day!
I’m going to go with the Fake News card, specifically used to make a person hate New Zealand. This combination of card plus topic has inspired so much creative internal storytelling as to why it exists and what Paperclip has against New Zealand anyway, and it really brought the team together.
Fun story: during prototyping, we had ‘Ayn Rand’ as a potential topic people could like/hate or bond with other people over. We had to take it out because Unity kept reading “Rand” as the randomise value command and breaking our code. We replaced it with Anne Murray for a while but took that out, too, when we realised not all our players are Canadian.
Your game pokes fun at corporate culture—what’s the most ridiculous corporate cliché you’ve ever encountered, and did it inspire anything in the game?
Oh gosh. There are too many to list. Here’s one that didn’t inspire a specific thing in the game per se but is kind of a general inspiration.
Tech director/cofounder Alison was at a business conference at a large, Paperclip-esque corporation. The corp had set up a welcome table, you know, the kind with badges and brochures and stuff where you signed in. And they had one of their staff members working at the table.
Then they put an enormous TV right behind this poor person, looping corporate videos at MAXIMUM volume. When Alison told us the story later, she said, “That receptionist would have 100% let a sentient AI loose in exchange for a mute button.”
She was joking, kinda, but it really reinforces the key theme of our game. Paperclip is a TERRIBLE place, and the employees there would do pretty much anything to either a) make it better or b) get revenge against the company. We take it to satirical levels because otherwise, it’s too depressing to think about.
(And, yes, eventually, they did get someone who could turn the volume on the TV down, and the poor receptionist’s hearing was saved.)
If you could recruit any fictional character to join the Only By Midnight development team, who would it be, and how would they help shape the game?
One of our major inspirations was the TV show Better Off Ted. I think we should bring in Veronica and get her to manage the team for a bit so everyone can see what major corporate mismanagement is REALLY like.
I’d also like to bring in GLADOS to help me write biting and hilarious dialogue. Maybe in potato form, so she’s a bit easier to manage.
Let’s talk about Gamescom. How did it go? What were you most nervous about, and how do you feel now?
Gamescom was fantastic. We got to connect with new players, watch them try and enjoy Ctrl Alt Deal, and, of course, experience fabulous Germany. We were most nervous about travelling internationally and all the stress it would bring, but the show was absolutely worth it. It was especially great to go as part of a group of local indie devs–getting to share the experience with them and support each other was an unforgettable experience.
Cofounder and superboss Alison adds that it was a marathon: “So many demos, so much standing.” But seeing people play and enjoy the game was extremely gratifying. We were glad we’d done a German translation for the convention demo, as about 60% of the players we had at the booth chose to play in German.
We did wish we had brought more swag! We tried to be realistic in our estimate of how many people would come to the booth, but we were blown away by how much people enjoyed our pins (500) and postcards (1000) that we brought to gamescom.
All in all, it was overwhelming (especially since we showed at PAX West directly afterward), but exhilarating. We hope to do it again next year!
And finally, how do you see indie games shaking up the industry, and what’s your wildest hope for how this game will leave its mark?
Alison has some thoughts on this as well. In her words, indie games have the flexibility to experiment, innovate, and try weird and different things. Which is great as we love making weird and different things! The level of creativity on display at events like gamescom and PAX West is both impressive and inspiring.
Small teams can bring a vision to life with indie games that unite theme, design, mechanics, art, and metaphor. Alison’s career goal is to be part of something like Celeste, where everything is working together as a cohesive gem of an experience.
As for me (Amber), I want people to play Ctrl Alt Deal and have a blast with it. I want them to really enjoy it, and then after it’s done, I want it to linger in their mind. I want them to find themselves still thinking about it weeks later, talking to their friends about the game and what it meant to them. I want it to change the way they think about the world even a little bit. To me, that’s the mark of a great game.
Hello Mary asks: What’s a question you wish more interviewers would ask, and can you answer it?
What is the theme of your game? We spent a lot of time building a theme for Ctrl Alt Deal and using it to help align development. The theme is, “Each of us is trapped in a box, and relationships are how we escape.” It’s very cyberpunk and speaks to the heart of the game, which is about understanding people and learning how to work with them.
Only By Midnight Asks: I mean, I just wrote a question I wished people would ask, so here’s a different one! Do you have a motto or a guiding principle that helps you make decisions? What is it?
Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. We can’t wait for the release of Ctrl Alt Deal next year, and we’ll be making the most of the demo in the meantime. Stay unruly!
You too! /me grabs holographic neon keytar and flies off into cyberspace
Check out the Ctrl Alt Deal demo on Steam and wishlist the game to stay updated on its release. For more info and updates, visit Only By Midnight’s official website.
