Golf Club authors: Wasteland: “We are creating games for a generation that will witness the end of time”

Igor Simich, CEO and Creative Director of Demagog Studio

Oleg Nesterenko, Editor App2Top.ru : Hello, Igor! To begin with, tell us a little about the team that made Golf Club: Wasteland.

Igor Simich: Demagog Studio was founded by four people. We’ve been friends since high school. After university, we decided that we could try making video games. By that time I had already achieved some success in the field of contemporary art and cinema. We made two games as an experiment to test a few ideas and see how we work as a team. We did it, so in the end the team wanted to do something with commercial potential. That’s how Golf Club appeared: Wasteland. Thanks to our work in the field of art and cinema, we met our current art director Nikola “Stepko” Stepkovich (Nikola “Stepko”Stepkovic) and sound director Shane Berry, who joined the Golf Club: Wasteland team.

In your earlier games Crisis Expert and Children’s Play, you speak out on socio-political topics. This also applies to Golf Club: Wasteland. I understand that social commentary is an integral part of your creativity?

The first two games were completely experimental. The task was to test us as a team. In these games we wanted to test certain ideas, etc. We wanted not just to make a statement, but to create something more like an interactive satire. At Columbia University, I was a cartoonist editor (I tried to do cartoons in the style of the New Yorker magazine, but it turned out so-so). In general, we tried to create satirical works, only in the format of a game. From the very beginning at Golf Club: Wasteland, we wanted to focus on history, peace and atmosphere. Something like a short, but well-made film, so that people who bought the game would feel that they had not paid money for it in vain. The game is based on an absurd idea, the gameplay can be simple at times, but I want to believe that its main value is experience. Our studio has a strange motto: “We create games for the generation that will witness the end of time.” Therefore, there will always be comments on certain topics in our projects. We understand why only a few studios want to follow this path. But it’s important for us to do it creatively.

The backbone of the team hails from Belgrade. Does your Serbian origin influence the games you make?

Most likely. Well, that is, none of us says: “What should we add to the game so that it is clear that it was made by a team from Eastern Europe?” All this happens naturally. Perhaps our origin does affect us, but it happens rather unconsciously. After all, we were all born in Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists. So we are very sensitive to all kinds of crises, the fragility of the world. Ideologies, leaders, regimes and fashion trends are all transitory. And probably our black humor can be called Balkan or Eastern European.

Let’s talk about Golf Club: Wasteland. “Humanity has perished. The earth has turned into one big golf course for the super—rich,” sounds like a great pitch. Did the idea of the game arise immediately in the form of this formula, or did you first come up with the basic concept, which you eventually turned into this one-line oxymoron?

We had several sources of inspiration. Around 2017-2018, the news was always talking about Donald Trump. A dubious businessman obsessed with golf now runs the most powerful country in the world. At the same time, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos talked about their private space ambitions. It looked like they were preparing an escape route in case things got really bad on Earth. Plus, a photo with golfers on the background of a large-scale forest fire in Oregon was taken. All these disparate ideas got mixed up, and it seemed to hit me. When I shared my thoughts with the team, they liked it. Initially, I described the idea as a crossover between Desert Golfing and Blade Runner, and our short slogan appeared from this formula. Less romantic, but the determining factor was the scale of the game. At the beginning of development, everyone in the team had the main job. Therefore, we had to choose a concept that was catchy on the one hand, and on the other hand, simple enough in terms of gameplay and visual style so that we could work on the game in the evenings. It was this idea that met all the criteria.

Eagle Creek Fire, photo: Christie McClure, Reuters

The game was originally released on mobile devices. But mobile is a completely different ecosystem, dictating completely different creative solutions compared to PCs and consoles. While working on the game, did you think about some kind of target platform?

Initially, we focused on mobile, because we needed to save money. The success of Monument Valley has become a kind of example for us that premium mobile games can still pay off. At the same time, we could count on the help of local companies that have already achieved success in the mobile market. However, the ultimate goal was to focus on the story and the world, to create a game that could then be released on PC and consoles. For us, mobile was the starting point. When we made the PC and console versions, we were able to significantly expand the game with additional content.

It seems to me that Golf Club: Wasteland is somewhat similar to tantric sex. The mechanics of playing golf are not important in itself, its meaning is to immerse the player in the true gameplay of the game, that is, in the experience of melancholy through music and visuals. In a sense, music, history and visual are the main mechanics of the game. Or am I wrong?

Unfortunately, I am not an expert on tantric sex, I did not have such provocative ideas. Rather, I thought of the game as an interactive audiobook. Playing golf is just a way to navigate through post—apocalyptic ruins. You play to yourself, and you listen to the radio, immerse yourself in the stories told on the air. But you’re basically right. Golf in the game is just a mechanism that forces players to move on without turning the game into a walking simulator.

I have seen several reviews whose authors claimed that playing golf is the weakest aspect of the game. Like, sometimes it’s fun, but often the gameplay becomes monotonous, you do the same thing, and the result depends more on luck than on skills. Well, the puzzles themselves begin to infuriate over time. What do you think? Is it possible to say that you paid the least attention to the mechanics of playing golf? Are you least sure about her?

You could say that, yes. As you yourself noted, the goal of the game is not in golf, which is why it may seem as if this feature is in some way incomplete. We were not going to make a golf simulator where you would have to take into account the wind speed, choose clubs, etc. But that doesn’t mean we just added this mechanic retroactively. There were several iterations. To be honest, we tested versions that just matched the wishes from those reviews. In them, the blows are more predictable. But these prototypes were terribly boring. When a player is 90-100% sure where the ball will land, the game turns into a point-and-click — you just need to send the ball to the target. Therefore, we decided to rely more on luck and experience (I would say that this element is also important for real golf). As compensation, we have reduced the level of bounce and sliding of the ball on the surface. The hitbox for getting into the flag has also become quite gentle. We’ve also added a story mode that doesn’t punish players for taking too many hits. This is by no means an ideal system. We did everything we could, but we really didn’t pay as much attention to this mechanic as to the other elements of the game.

Nevertheless, our team has grown and learned from this project, so that the gameplay in our future games will be smoother. We will think more about how the average player will perceive a certain element after X hours.

Personally, it was difficult for me to follow the story and solve a riddle that got on my nerves even in story mode. Maybe a more relaxed and casual gameplay would be better suited to the emotional experience that your game gives? I mean, there is her general relaxed atmosphere, and there is this besyachy ball, which you need to fig knows how to throw on a besyachy platform. Don’t you see a contradiction here?

There is a contradiction, of course. But again, we didn’t want to do a walking simulator. It seems to me that fewer people would want to get acquainted with our history if it didn’t have this strange hook when you play golf among the ruins of our world. What we could really do differently is give people the opportunity to listen to fragments of the radio broadcast or speed up the time for repeated strikes. If it were possible to simply rewind the story back, “undo” the mistake made, perhaps the players would be less enraged that they missed some piece of the plot. Live forever — learn forever 😀

Then let’s talk about those elements of the game that everyone liked. What guided you when you worked on aesthetics?

From the very beginning, we knew that the idea would work only if the wasteland would convey the melancholic mood of the protagonist and the emptiness of the world of the future, but at the same time it would have enough funny visual elements to cheer up the player. We wanted the wasteland world to be permeated with irony.

To do this, we resorted to styling, simplifying each element of the environment to a silhouette and choosing a minimalistic color palette. This way we could quickly sort through ideas, maintaining a single visual style and not fearing that we would break the general mood, even if we had frankly stupid ideas.

Other important aspects of the visual style were fog and sources of pink neon light scattered across the landscape. The fog helped us to make the post-apocalyptic landscape gloomy. Combined with the pink neon, the bluish fog created a strange contrast, which was the perfect visual platform for our message. These neon signs kind of say: “We were here.” They remind you that not so long ago people lived in this world.

In one sentence, our visual style can be described as: “gloomy minimalism in colors and shapes.” There is also modernist architecture in the style of urban landscapes of Central Europe and Yugoslavia, the ruins of which symbolize the collapse of the ideas of progress. There is also a “millennial” pink neon, referring to modern problems — especially the ideology of Silicon Valley — as well as social and cultural memes, reinterpreted borrowings from other languages and neologisms.

The soundtrack of the game is a masterpiece in itself. Whether it’s songs on the radio “Nostalgia from Mars“ or stories told by former earthlings. Tell us about its creation.

Our sound engineer, Shane Berry, has real-life radio experience. He also voiced the DJ that you hear throughout the game 😀 From the very beginning we knew that we could make the sound not just an addition that plays in the background, but a key part of the narrative. The lyrics were specially written to match the spirit of the game and the plot from the very beginning. Shane and our creative director Nikola Stepkovich worked in tandem. Stepko sent levels to Shane in the process of creating them so that he could be inspired and feel the atmosphere of the game. We had a strange approach to writing the soundtrack. Since the show is based on nostalgia, we wanted the songs to evoke this feeling in the players themselves. We tried to imagine what songs will be written and listened to in the near future (around the 2040s) to match the chronology of the game. We started from modern music, because these years are not so far from our time, but at the same time it was necessary to give our soundtrack a fleur of futurism.

Soon after we sorted out the songs, we came up with the idea to introduce into the game the stories of those who got through on the radio. When we wrote the songs, we realized that they can’t carry the whole semantic load, you can’t just create a feeling of nostalgia at their expense. Otherwise, I had to concentrate more on the story than on the music itself. Then we decided to add calls from listeners to the broadcast. We had additional points of view/impressions that could be woven into the radio show. This allowed us to make the world more real. Well, the songs began to sound more natural, without excessive subtext associated with the theme of the game. As if they were simply written in the spirit of that time.

As for the stories of the listeners who got through, ideas came to us from everywhere. Everyone in the team had ideas that we eventually used. Even some of the voice actors told us something that we liked, and we included it in the plot. This is logical, since the topic touched upon in the game concerns anyone, we all have to go through something similar.

Another interesting point: as a player, you first identify yourself with golfer Charlie, especially in those moments when he sniffs angrily after a miss. And when you read the diary of an albino child, you no longer associate yourself with a golfer whose story remains a mystery for most of the game. Why was this alternation of points of view necessary?

And there is a third layer: Charlie’s own diary, which opens when certain conditions are met. We originally wanted to create a world and make it the main character of the game — it is he who draws you in. What happened to the world? What happened to people who are already dead or still alive? Without going into the details of the stories of Charlie and the albino child, we were able to focus on the world itself. At the same time, we were able to reveal the stories of two characters without stretching the narrative. The player doesn’t get too hung up on them, but when something interesting happens to the characters, it hits the emotions a little harder.

Which of the systems developed for the game was the most difficult from a technical point of view and why?

You will be surprised, but from a technical point of view, Charlie’s jetpack flights have become a problem and a constant headache for us. Despite the fact that the player himself does not control this process, it turned out to be extremely difficult to find the right route every time. I also had to work a lot on the animation so that it didn’t look clumsy. Then it was necessary to choose the right speed. If Charlie moved too slowly, it would be annoying. And if he flew too fast, it would make him look like a cartoon superhero. We had to adjust again and again where and how exactly Charlie lands relative to the ball. And, of course, it was necessary to test each level and make sure that its design allows all these landings to be carried out correctly. I hope now it is clear why the player will not control the flight 😀

Can you tell us a little about your next Highwater project? It seems like it will have a similar melancholic/apocalyptic atmosphere, but with different mechanics?

In fact, we have two games in development. To cover my ass from a legal point of view, I’m not going to tell you anything right now, but I’ll tell you this: if you’re interested in our style, how we create worlds and stories, stay tuned in 2022. We continue to explore the world of Golf Club: Wasteland as both new games are set in the same universe. However, the game mechanics will be much more difficult and this time without a golf club.

Igor, thank you for the interview! I look forward to returning to the Golf Club: Wasteland universe when you finish working on the sequels!