After finishing their work on Spec Ops: The Line, Riad Djemili (senior programmer) and Johannes Kristmann (senior designer) left to form their own company: Maschinen-Mensch. Their first game is The Curious Expedition, a 19th-century exploration roguelike. This spring, they released it on Steam Early Access, where I found it. I spent some time playing it...
...and enjoyed it. Its turn-based pace makes it easy to play while doing other things, it emphasizes resource management and exploration over combat (you gain experience from discovering locations, not killing creatures), and it's set in Victorian-era exploration. Eventually, I got ahold of Curious Expedition's developers, and they agreed to answer some questions I had about the game. Here is my interview with them:
Your previous game, Spec Ops: The Line, was heavily influenced by Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The Curious Expedition is also influenced by Heart of Darkness, although from a different angle. Is this just a happy coincidence? Was The Curious Expedition conceived while thinking of Heart of Darkness during Spec Ops' development? Or is it because you were always big fans of Heart of Darkness?
I think the similarities to Spec Ops: The Line are more happy coincidence than anything else. A lot of different inspirations went into the setting of the game, like Jules Verne, H.P. Lovecraft, Indiana Jones and historic figures. Once we looked into the setting, we of course also rediscovered Heart of Darkness which we already knew from Spec Ops (and actually school before that). Inspiration works in pretty random ways, so its really hard to exactly say how much working on SOTL contributed to the ideas of TCE. If anything though our experience on SOTL reaffirmed us that games can also tackle more mature and serious topics.
On its surface, The Curious Expedition is a bright & colorful vision of exploring "because it's there". However, the subtext of the game gets quite disturbing with villages being destroyed and valleys being laid to waste just so an explorer can get a statue of himself built. (Explorers unleash disastrous curses when they steal treasures from shrines like volcanoes, chasms, and black holes.) Would you rather have the game seen as a celebration of exploration or a condemnation of it?
The fact that you ask this question is very satisfying to me, because it is exactly what we want the players to ask themselves. I don't want to give a definitive answer to that because it should be up to the players to make up their own minds. If the answer to this question would be too obvious I would say we would have failed in making an interesting game. We don't want to make a straight educational game, but if players reflect on their own doing within the game world, that is very welcome to us and we put a lot of thought into aiming for this effect.
Is trying to strike a balance between "exploit natives" and "respect natives" a factor in game balancing? Or is that affected more by trying to make sure there's a variety of ways to win? Back in the spring alpha builds, the easiest way to win was to steal everything that wasn't nailed down. Did you consider keeping "exploit" an easier way to win than "respect" in order to drive a point home?
Yes, your last point was actually our intention from the very start. The thought that even if you have good intentions, it is hard not to get corrupted. I was actually a bit surprised to see how many people picked up on that and asked for other ways to win the game. That's why we've been working also on giving more peaceful players more variety and chances to win the game. In the end there will still be a certain bias though as we feel it's important to the overall statement.
Currently dinosaurs are the main exotic theme of the game. Are there plans to add more exotic/supernatural themes, like Lovecraftian horrors or strange mythical humanoids?
Our idea is that the game starts somewhat realistic and then becomes more and more fantastic as the player digs deeper into the world. Kinda similar to the Indiana Jones movies. Dinosaurs are just one example of that fantastical element. In the latest versions its possible to recruit lizard people for your party or to travel into other dimensions. There are also a lot really weird items that you might find, like the infamous Necronomicon. Also watch our for those cultists and their shady doings. We still have plenty ideas for more fantastic things in the game, maybe going as far as adding Lovecraft as a playable character himself. (Appendeum: The devs confirmed Lovecraft will be released as a playable explorer for the Halloween update.)
I recall you saying in a post years you didn't want to include occultist Crowley as a playable explorer. Why did you change your mind?
I honestly don't recall that we ever said that Crowley wouldn't be a playable explorer and I don't remember us changing our stance on that, so I can't really add to that.
I got that impression from a reply to this thread here. I also vaguely recall a blog post stating you didn't want Crowley to be a playable character because he did some shady things in real life, but I'm having trouble finding that now.
That forum post could maybe have been worded a bit clearer . What it hints at is that our initial idea was to have the expedition leaders and the person sending expeditions into the world be two different characters. In that sense your avatar would have been that person in London, instead of the person going on the expediton. That is all the forum post was alluding to. It was not specifically about Crowley.
We're actually in the works of adding H.P. Lovecraft to the game, and even though we love the whole Cthulhu mythology, you also can't ignore some of the problematic world views of Lovecraft. I think this works for our game since we don't portray the expeditioners as heroes, but more as flawed characters, so this gives us liberties adding personalities like Crowley, Lovecraft or the others without glorifying them.
Does this mean Lovecraft starts out with the racist flaw?
Lovecraft does not start with a racist trait, since our explorers don't have traits or we would also have go through all the other ones and check if we need to apply sexist trait or other traits. We're thinking about adding custom Lovecraft events that reflect some of his specific (negative) traits/beliefs though.
Why are some of these expeditions set in Florida and the US Midwest? Weren't these sufficiently explored in the 19th century?
The world map showing the different locations is not in a final state. Once we finish it up we'll also make sure to fix up those issues. In all honesty I have to say that in the current state we take some liberties here and that the exact location where the map marker appears on the world map currently does not have any influence on the map generator that is used in the backend. That one is only influenced by what you see inside of the info box that appears when you click on the destination. So its influenced by the biome type, the types of locations and the text that is shown in the info box, but not by whether that marker now appears in Florida or somewhere else in the US.
What feature/addition do you think the players will want most that you won't be able to add until after its official release?
I think modding will be a huge feature for the community. We're working hard on bringing it into the game as soon as possible and it is using exactly the same interface that we're currently using to build the game actually, but there is a chance that it won't make it into the game for the version 1.0, as for that we're focusing to polish and tune our existing and upcoming official content so that the players have plenty of content to experience without having to get into mods right away. We don't want to use mods as an excuse for having too little content in the game.
The 1st expedition feels harder than the 2nd expedition for characters that don't start with machetes, and I've gotten frustrated with its lack of optional quest variety & inability to buy supplies or choose a destination. Do you plan to revamp the 1st expedition before public release? Or will it probably stay in its current form?
We're recently adding more metrics to the game which allow us to tune the game better and catch those tuning irregularities from a high-level perspective. The reason for having just one expedition to choose from at the beginning of the game was done to ease new players into the game and not to overwhelm them with lots of choices right away. We agree that for veteran players it can become a bit boring to always having to play that starter expedition over and over again, so we're thinking about ways to increase variety here. Most probably we'll offer the choice between a beginner expedition and a more advanced expedition right away at the game start.
Why is there just one meter for Sanity instead of two meters for Sanity & Hunger? Was it always one meter from the start? Or did you consider 2 meters for a time, then scrap it because it was too complex?
Just having one meter was the outcome of over a year of prototyping. At some point we had individual sanity bars per character and a hunger meter per character and a complex mechanic of having to distribute the food per character and having to take their personal diet into account and so on. We are believers in "its easy to make something complicated, its hard to make something easy", so we streamlined the system more and more and removed all the repetitive micro interactions until we got to where we are now. Our goal was to retain the interesting complexity, but remove boring book-keeping tasks.
Why did you add magnetic mountains to the game? I swear I've had more runs end due to their fake compass readings than anything else. (Aside from accidently destroying moon stones and rendering a map unwinnable.)
We're keen on having interesting interactions appear right on the map. There wasn't a specific reason, apart from the fact that we thought it would be an interesting challenge and an aha-moment when you discover that the thing you were chasing for days turned out to be a false end. We also try to make the game as fair possible though, so when you have magnetic mountain nearby the compass behaves visually slightly different than when it is tracking the real pyramid, so as a experienced player you have the opportunity to anticipate instead of relying on luck.
Speaking of getting moon stones destroyed, what safeguards do you use to keep the player from getting in an unwinnable situation due to moon stone loss? (Moon stones are required to unlock some pyramids and thus finish the expedition.) Do you make sure shrines with moon stones aren't near active volcanoes/geysers? Do you spawn other moon stones if one gets destroyed by a player-caused chasm curse? Is it no longer a problem thanks to the escape balloon mechanic?
The spawning of moon stones depends on how many moon stones you have so far. So if you don't have enough yet, there is a bigger chance that they spawn randomly and then we hope for the best. We know that this approach won't be good enough for the final release, so it's something that we're still working on. Also not just in terms of tuning but also in terms of making it at least as spectacular as the buried pyramid. And we have thoughts about adding more goal variations too.
What gave you the idea for the competition mechanic? This is one of the few roguelikes I know of where how quickly you win matters. Did it come early in production? What gameplay problems did it solve and what issues did it create?
The idea was there early in production, but it took quite some time to figure out how to do it exactly. When you have treasures that have been in a shrine for hundreds of years, it can be hard to deliver that feeling of urgency that you usually want in a game. Actually that's also the reason why you always have a strong antagonist in Indiana Jones movies. It acts as a kinda of hunger clock driving the player forward and forces some hard decisions. Also real-life expeditions were often about this idea of being the first, the first person on the north pole, the first person on Mount Everest, the first person crossing a continent. It's just a big part of the setting, so we had to have in the game somehow.
The Curious Expedition is currently in Early Access on Steam for $15. Screenshots grabbed from S.E.C.R.E.T. and Skutatos on Steam.
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