Double Fine's Tim Schafer & Lauren Scott on Psychonauts 2 & more - Stevivor

Tim Schafer, Double Fine: Well, I mean, anyone who’s been in the indie studio knows it’s like a rollercoaster, and so just surviving is a huge thing.

Like just, you know, ’cause we made some tough choices along the line to be not just surviving but intact with what we think is our culture — our special culture — intact and still making fun creative games and always doing it like, Frank Sinatra, Double Fine does it their way.

But, you know, [we’re] still really proud of our games?

But we’re very fortunate and we had a great team — a series of teams – over the years that have led to that success.

Stevivor: Lauren, is there a bit of comfort or safety going into a company that has such a long history instead of a startup or like a new indie studio that you know may or may not be here in a year or two.

But it’s sort of a different feel when you have you know, people that literally worked on the first game like so many years ago and have been here since the studio’s inception and are still like really excited about being here.

Schafer: We both want to appeal to new gamers and also really, it’s very important with a game like Psychonauts — with a very devoted following — to be very true to what fans of the first game expect, what they loved about the first game.

There’s a certain trust when you start a game, you can almost tell right away if you feel like you can trust the developer.

Stevivor: Now it’s still kind of insane to me that if we think about Psychonauts 2 six or seven years ago, this kind of got off the ground because of Fig.

Now flash forward to today, and if Psychonauts 2 wasn’t a thing I’m sure you could maybe walk up to Phil [Spencer] now and just be like, “I want to make Psychonauts.”.

You know that that’s there and checking that big thing off your list is like, “[now] what do I do with 50% of my mental time now?” and then the answer is, think about the game.

Schafer: Well, they asked us what we would do if we weren’t constrained by things like finances and stuff, and one of those like, well, we just finish the game properly with the right amount of polish and also take the time to add back in things that we had to cut, like our boss fights and things like that.

Even though we’re independent, it’s nice to get together with different disciplines and talk [with] someone who does your job at another company.

Not just for bugs, but for usability, diversity, inclusion, mental health and all the different things that they – accessibility — they can test, and give us notes and make us help us make changes that make the game more accessible to more people.

Stevivor: If you could — if you wanted to — take an IP from Microsoft and make a game, what would it be.

That’s why I made that joke — at the announcement where we announced that were acquired — I made a joke about how we were going to work on Excel and stuff, but it’s the opposite.

Stevivor: It’s in The Guardian from, I think, two days ago — and I’m paraphrasing, of course — “if they want to make Psychonauts 3 they can, but we’re not going to force them to”–.

They vetted us before – they were like, “we like the games you’re making and… they would be a great addition to Game Pass” and we see how we fit into Game Pass really well.

We get to do — if anything — just more creative, more Double Fine games because we don’t have to think, “well, could we get a publisher to sign this before our money runs out?” which is what we usually would think about.

I did, like very, very briefly for a really small outlet that I think is gone now — just a little bit — ’cause I used to write a lot, and not just like journalistic, but fiction stuff?

Games have their constraints, but I feel like this space is just a lot more unbounded; there’s a lot less explored space in games, I think, which is like the intriguing part for me.

I mean, I know what I like — I don’t know what game design is good or not, but I know like when I play it — but then, if you’re going to work professionally as a designer, you have to actually be able to say stuff out loud about why something might work, which is hard.

It’s really hard to look at like why is this jump is fun, but this jump isn’t fun?

Scott: I think we started out just soliciting ideas from the team because we just wanted to see — you know, ’cause no one person like knows every single part of the game — so there might be someone on a different team that knows, “oh, there’s this thing that you can do in combat, and it’s like this really cool trick, and if you do it, then you should be able to get like a secret Achievement or something.”.

I’m fine with more — it’s, like, if you have an Achievement in your game that’s like, “spend 700 hours doing something” I’m going to be upset with you, especially if it’s worth 10 or actually, even if it’s worth 100 gamerscore?

I’m sorry — back on track with Psychonauts.

How do you guys both feel about the original Psychonauts on Xbox One or Xbox Series and seeing how crazy it looks now.

You can play the original on Game Pass right now and you never know, someday — now that we have more resources — we could remaster that someday?

I think the original game really holds up in a lot of ways, especially the stuff that was rendered in-engine ’cause a lot of its style comes from the shape language of the characters and stuff, and that still is kind of evergreen.

I went back to play Psychonauts to kind of do a comparison after I played 2 and it was like, “oh no, no — right thumb down!”?

Our new camera programmer, Aaron Jacobs, has been masterfully writing really, really elegant — so you don’t even notice the things that it’s doing sometimes — he just does these crazy things.

So that’s definitely one of the areas — along with combat – the two things we wanted to make better: combat and camera?

Learnings or things like that, that maybe I haven’t noticed, or wouldn’t know to notice.

Stevivor: I know there’s a big opening that kind of tries to catch you up — and it’s literally events that occurred, you know, days or hours before Psychonauts 2 — but how did Double Fine approach trying to catch people up in case they didn’t want to play the older games.

Stevivor: Yeah, like was it like an all-hands kind of, “what are the important plot points,” or, you’ve said you had 2 in your brain since the original Psychonauts, so did you just lay out what was important and needed to be retold?

I knew the little things that I stuck in the first game, like the stumps around the campfire and all these things that paid off in the second game and so I feel like I had to call up all the stuff that you might not understand if you hadn’t played it.

I wanted to make sure that we at least touched on everything — it’s kind of like when you watch the “previously on the TV show” and they show a scene like, “oh, I bet that character is coming back ’cause they showed him the previously on.”.

The funny story about “Ram It Down” is that that whole level was taken from a game concept that Asif Siddiky, one of our Project Leaders in Amnesia Fortnight, which is our game jam — Lauren was also one of those Project Leaders.

He did this game and it was really cool and it was sitting around and were were like, “hey, that would make a great level for a game.

Everyone in the studio has a chance to pitch their game – like, anybody in any role — Asif was actually a documentarian and came from behind the camera to pitch a game idea.

Then, the team votes – and Tim votes too — in the top few games, and the top few games get to be worked on for two weeks and then we have prototypes and we try ‘em out and it’s really fun.

Stevivor: Can we speak about the theme — it’s a giant theme — of mental health.

They’re really just like us; we all have brains, we all have periods where go through something like that.

And so, the game itself has always tried to demonstrate — the first time on accident, but this one more intentionally — that you meet someone and they’re doing something negative, like trying to take over the world like Coach Oleander.

Stevivor: That idea of empathy — there’s the kind of counterbalance of “don’t meet your heroes” — Raz has always wanted to be a Psychonaut and then he gets to meet the crew and he’s kind of realising that they need his help more than he needs theirs.

How did we get to this point where, like, we’re not just going to kind of skirt around the issue, we’re just going to like point at you and say “you are the problem here.

We’ve always wanted as many people as possible to enjoy our games, and narrative-based games like way back in terms of Secret of Monkey Island 2, we put in difficulty modes because we heard a lot of people who are like, I really like the story in these games, but I can’t handle these puzzles, I want the flow to go more easy.” And we’re like, “well, who are we to tell people how to enjoy the content that we made.”.

We made a video of watching a speed runner play Psychonauts 1, and the beginning of the video, you can see how horrified we are that he’s skipping all our content by speed running past it, but by the end of the video were all cheering him because we’re like,”oh my God, he’s found a different way to interact with our game that he loves, that we didn’t plan,” and you’re so lucky if someone does that — puts in the work to find a new way to enjoy the theme.

To bring that back, it’s not up to you — when you make something, a creative work of art, it’s not up to you to tell people how to look at it; how to enjoy it.

Scott: Yeah, and I’m just glad that it broadens the pool of people that can play the game, because for some people it’s either this key accessibility feature or not playing the game.

There’s couple of like combat-related ones that you have to do things — like sort of combo-like things — that maybe if you turn on certain ones like the narrative mode that makes you do more damage, you might kill things too fast to do to get an Achievement or two….

So if you need to do a ton of combos, you can just swap accessibility features so that you can get your combos in but you’re not being damaged, and it’s sort of like the same thing

Schafer: We haven’t purposely purposely prohibited it; also, I feel like we’re we’re more interested in everyone being able to enjoy the content we made rather than making sure everyone can get every single Achievement

You don’t have much time — you said a day after Psychonauts 2