Ghost on the Shore Interview

We are developing Ghost on the Shore, which is our exploration adventure game. We’ve been working on it for about, I wanna say three years, but it’s not really three years ago - we had the idea to make this game, but we started making it after another five months or something.

Ghost on the Shore is a relationship adventure game, where lead character Riley arrives on the Rogue Islands after a storm. She hears a voice, and that voice turns out to be a ghost stuck inside her head. Together they explore the islands and try to figure out what happened to him, that way they can figure out how to get him out of her head. That’s the summary of it.

Yeah. Sure. The initial idea came from this film trailer for Jimmy Marx’s thing. The tagline for that trailer said “How far would you go to be remembered?” and that’s what, I thought of a very powerful emotion like we all want to be seen, we all want to be remembered, we don’t want to disappear. How far would you go?

And then I remembered a dream I had a couple months earlier about me having died and having turned into a ghost and going around the house that I still lived in and seeing the people I loved trying to carry on with their lives, but there was no way for me to get to them. They couldn’t hear me, they couldn’t see me, and when they started to move on with their lives, it’s really hard and even when I woke up there was this feeling of abandonment that I woke up with and that stuck with me. So those two things we combined into the core idea of Ghost on the Shore.

That was the idea of the concept. But then we needed to think about, like, what kind of game are we going to make? And even though through our first game of Marie’s Room, we knew what like Charlie was about. We knew what we wanted to do, but we started looking for inspiration. And then we looked to games like, um, what games?

Oxenfree was one of the main inspirations you can see, or Firewatch maybe as well. I really liked going back to the romanticism period of paintings and stuff. Maybe even like impressionistic things, like the colorful worlds they built, but also quite mysterious in a way, because we're telling quite a mysterious story as well. So that was a lot of my inspiration. I want to make the player step into a mysterious, painterly world, basically.

We put a lot of effort in the sound. We want to use sound, it might say this correctly to like anchor the painter, you know, the impressionistic world and the naturalistic or supernatural story, we want to anchor it grounded back down with audio sounds that are very realistic on the one hand. On the other hand, we have the music that needs to reinforce the emotional experience, because I think that for our story is very important than that. It's not just a puzzle game. We want the player to have an emotional experience and the story does that, the world does that, but we also need the sound for that because it just carries you takes you that much further, higher, up, further down. Um, so he put a lot of time, effort and resources into sound. And I think we've even like, compared to what we have now, like the actual game, it's going to be like 10 steps further than what's in the demo.

Right. That's true. All our music is in-house as well. Like we have two amazing sound guys (Dries Vienne and Ward Snauwert) working on all the music themselves. So we're really proud of that part as well. Of our team. All sounds; every footstep, every branch cracking in the game, most of that is all recorded by us in-studio doing all kinds of weird stuff like hiking with a mic. We are in full control of sound because we make them ourselves.

Yep, yep, yep. Um, yes, the islands are very important. Some players have even suggested that it's a little, um, realistic or unrealistic that everything is being kept, you know, like it's survived time. We did that because we want the islands to be like a character in itself, that it’s been like waiting for Riley to arrive because the island really wants to tell the story. And I guess, like we did find some inspiration there, like a TV series, like Lost where you have like a land country, a thing that feels like a person and has a story that needs to be told. Um, so that is definitely true.

There are three islands called the Rogue Islands. You have the Big Rogue, Little Rogue, and the Dark Rogue. And each island has its own atmosphere, its own part of the story. Um, it's own set of rules, no gameplay rules but you know, like narrative rules, and everything unfolds on the third island. And that's where you get, you know, the climax and the unfolding of the story. And that's where you get the climax and the unfolding of the story.

We do have a lot of characters in our game but you almost never see anyone. So that's exactly why the islands themselves are the most important character in the game we have. So that's why we put so much into them.

Everybody's gone. There's only their things that they have left behind.

Yeah. There were challenges mainly. Um, we didn't start as a full-time team. So now we work with four people full-time in the office, but that wasn't always the case. And like working remote is one thing, but working after office hours and not everyone working at the same time that was, I think the most difficult thing about the whole development process for us. So we did learn from that one.

Yeah. The thing is like, we didn't have any budget when we started out. Every indie has its own challenges, but everyone's got the same challenges as well, but we didn't have any budget. We started with a hundred euros and that was it. So we had to find a way to do this and initially Ghost on the Shore was a lot smaller. I think we were going to do one small island and then somewhere down the road, I don’t know when, but suddenly there were three islands with a big group, which was really big.

So there was a lot of things. And then, you know, we started playtesting and getting feedback and now you want to improve it and you want to make it better. But then I also, you know, you increase the scope. And since we had people working after hours, most of our freelancers, cause they're also friends, it was really hard to keep the pace of the development. And then Kenny and I started working full time for like Charlie as one changed them. And then we decided to get some place. And so there's now four of us and that's since March and ever since, like, I think we could have made this game in two years if it had been, if it had been asked from the start, this thing would be released already. So that's something that we have learned. Um, like sometimes you just have to take a big leap and jump in there to start working together.

(laughs) Ghost on the Shore was like our working style. I guess we immediately gravitated towards that as a working title. Um, and we knew about Ghost in the Shell. There's also a song called “Ghost on the Shore.” So we all knew about that and we searched for a new name for months, from everywhere. Like every team member did suggestions and it never works out like the working title always stuck with us and eventually like we decided, yeah, let's just, let's just keep it, it works. It works.

Well, I'm trying to have a philosophy about that. I don't want to make people cry because if a player or if you were, or a reader feels that the writer or the makers want you to cry, I, as a reader, refuse to cry and we leave it up to you, but we're going to try everything we can to have you feel the emotional experience and you can respond to that any way you like. Also because there's like three emotional arcs, and it's branching. So depending on how you react to the ghost in your head, you're going to get a different story. In the first place, it's going to have different emotional experience and there's going to be little different twists and turns, especially towards the end. So if you are in the branch where the player doesn’t get along with Josh, the ghost, I don’t think you’re gonna find it like that. But if you kind of fall in love with him, then maybe you will.