The Whiteout

Christa Mrgan: 10 years into the icy apocalypse, you find yourself traveling alone, deciding which way to go next to get out of the storm, in a world where food, trust, and human connection are hard to come by.

Welcome to the Playdate podcast, bringing you stories from game designers, developers, and the team behind Playdate, the little yellow game console with a crank. I’m Christa Mrgan. Today I am talking with Steve Chipman, a seasoned Playdate developer whose branching narrative adventure game The Whiteout is now a part of Playdate Season Two.

And heads up that there are some major plot spoilers and even a couple of small puzzle spoilers in this episode, even after cutting some of them out. So, proceed with caution, and if you don’t want any of the plot to be spoiled, maybe save this episode until after you’ve played The Whiteout for about an hour and a half.

Okay, you’ve been warned. Now let’s meet Steve, and hear about how he made The Whiteout

Steve Chipman: My name is Steve Chipman and I wrote 99% of it. My friend John was helping out in the beginning with some story stuff, but real life sort of got in the way for him, so he had to back out of the project. So it’s just me. So I also did all of the art, I did all the programming, the framework that drives it. The music, sound design.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, all of the stuff basically.

Steve Chipman: Yeah. Lots.

Christa Mrgan: And while his friend John Clarkson ended up stepping away from this project, Steve has also made a bunch of other great Playdate games, and John worked with him on some of those, and on an iOS game with him as well.

Steve Chipman: John and I worked together years and years ago at our Real Jobs and we worked on an iOS game together that I think was probably 10 years ago. And he also did the main menu design for Post Hero and the launch animation as well.

Christa Mrgan: Post Hero is an adventure game where you play as a mail carrier on his first day on the job. John also contributed to the puzzle game Four Corners.

Steve Chipman: Four Corners was the iOS game he worked on. He did the voiceovers for that game, and he also wrote all the music, which is in the Playdate version of the game.

Christa Mrgan: Nice. and some of the other Playdate games that Steve has made, which you can find on Catalog under the name Scenic Route Software, include the puzzle games Generations, Shift, and Shift Two, arcade style action games Lillybug and Garbage Scow Captain, the dice game, Greed, and the endless-runner-type platformer, You’re Gonna Miss the Bus! Several of his games have been nominated for Playdate Community Awards, and have been chosen by Engadget as some of the best games for Playdate.

Steve was interested in Playdate from the very beginning, but of course it was a while between first hearing about it, and actually getting one in his hands.

Steve Chipman: I want to say it was on Boing Boing in like 2019 or something. And I thought, oh, this seems really interesting. So I, I signed up for mailing list. And then when I, I later heard that there was gonna be an SDK for it, I was like, oh, that’s really cool.

So I signed up for that and I didn’t do any of the early stuff. In fact, I kind of forgot about it. And then I got the email that the pre-orders were going to start. And so I got really lucky and got into group one.

Christa Mrgan: Oh yeah. I don’t know if you were around then, or remember, or frankly even care at this point, but we launched Playdate pre-orders with really limited numbers, so there were different numbered order groups.

Anyway, I don’t need to get into all of that, but just in case you were like, what is this “group one” he’s talking about? Okay.

Steve Chipman: And then I got my Playdate in May of 2022. Downloaded the SDK, taught myself Lua, and Shift came out like a month later.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, Shift was the first puzzle game that Steve made for Catalog, and like I mentioned, he’s made a lot of different types of games for Playdate, but adventure games have always had a special place in his heart.

Steve Chipman: So I grew up playing Sierra Adventure games and they were very impactful on me.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, Sierra On-Line, later known as Sierra Entertainment, was a pioneer of the adventure game genre.

Steve Chipman: They were the games that, you know, not only did they teach me how to type, they taught me how to think like a game designer. I was just fascinated by them. And so I’d always really wanted to make something that was sort of in that vein.

So being able to do that with Post Hero was a lot of fun. And I’m pretty proud of a lot of the jokes in the game. So that made it a lot of fun, too. Just being very silly.

Christa Mrgan: Yes. But The Whiteout is an adventure game that has a very different vibe.

Steve Chipman: Yes, it does. Very different.

Uh, So it is an adventure game that takes place about 10 years after a global climate disaster. And I guess sort of elevator quick pitch would be, what if Cormac McCarthy wrote a adventure game for Sierra On-Line?

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, it really does feel like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was one inspiration for the game.

Steve Chipman: The Road is certainly one! Actually, I had read The Road years and years ago, but I rented the movie maybe six months ago to make sure that I wasn’t subconsciously rewriting it as I was building The Whiteout. um, I don’t think I am. But I had heard a story on NPR about this sort of eccentric tech billionaire who thought he could stop climate change by seeding the atmosphere with aluminum dioxide. And, no country will allow him to do this, because nobody knows what will actually happen. So, you know, he tried to buy an island in the Caribbean to do this so he’s, you know, going to all these ridiculous lengths to try and do this, a lmost to the point where he’s sort of like a Bond villain, you know?

And I started thinking about that, and that’s kind of where the idea came from. Like, What if this guy succeeded and this is what led to this disaster, was someone trying to do the right thing, what they thought was the right thing, but it ended up backfiring completely.

I, I love stuff like the Walking Dead. And like horror in general. I’ve never really written anything like this before. You know, most of my games are pretty happy go lucky, I suppose. Post Hero certainly is. So with a lot of my games, I wanna try something that I haven’t done before. And you know, I have obviously written an adventure game before, but I’ve never written one that was dark, with a brooding, dismal, grim story. So I wanted to see if I could do that. So it’s a lot of this stuff is all about personal challenges, you know? Is this a thing that I can do?

I don’t know that there was a specific game that inspired The Whiteout, per se. I know that there are other games out there like that people have compared it to. The Long Dark, I think is one. I haven’t played that i’m unfamiliar with it. I find that happens to me a lot. People say, oh, it’s like X and I’m like, I’ve never heard of that.

I guess it maybe it borrows some from Lucas Arts Games where they had these long, scrolling scenes, because most Sierra games-- the early ones anyway-- were constrained just like Post Hero, to like one screen with the character walking all over the place and then The Whiteout, you know, some scenes like, you know, the Country Road are very long. And he can only walk left and right, which was a constraint that I wanted to put on myself for the game. One, because I knew the scope of the game was gonna be very large. And two, because that’s just kind of how I had it in my head. He’s just always moving, you know, like the opening crawl of the game talks about how he’s been wandering for 10 years and he can’t stop. So it just felt like this constant forward momentum, would be important to the sort of feel of the game.

Christa Mrgan: And while your decisions shape the outcome of the game-- there are actually four different endings depending on choices you make along the way-- Steve added a lot of cleverly designed gates in the game that function to keep you in one area until you encounter all of the critical items or scenarios.

Steve Chipman: Yeah, a lot of that is to ensure that the player sees all the things that I need them to see. In very early iterations of the game, everything was optional. And I realized, especially with Country Road, the way that it was originally designed, there was a certain path that you could take that would end the chapter without you having ever done anything, which is obviously a big problem. So a lot of those artificial gates are there to make sure that the player gets the information that I want them to have. Part of that was from things that I heard about folks that played Post Hero, people would get lost. They’d been there, but they didn’t know how to get back there. Or they, one person told me that they had missed an entire section of town because they didn’t realize that you could go south at the park. So I realized those were design flaws, so I wanted to definitely avoid any of that here.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, that seems like a common design problem in adventure games, especially when there’s no map that a player can like zoom out to look at. So the developer both has to help the player create a mental map with environmental cues, and also make sure that they can’t get themselves into a situation where they’re stuck or just going in circles.

Steve Chipman: Basically there’s a state manager in the game that tracks everything you’ve done and those are just key value pairs. It’s an identifier like when you, first brush the snow off the car on the highway, that has an identifier that gets written into states. So the game knows you’ve done that. And then the game’s driven by configuration files. And there’s sort of a meta language within those files where there’s an interaction defined for this coordinate space, but it’s only visible if this other thing has already happened. So that visible “when” directive maps to the ID of say, you know, you brush the snow off the car, right? So you can’t try to open the car door until you’ve tried to brush the snow off the car. And they also stack, so they have to execute linearly. But then you can also use that to define what happens in other scenes. So, if I free the rabbit or killed the rabbit, when I find it on rural route five, that can change what happens later on, based on which choice you made. So you’ll have interactions that may or may not be available based on whether or not the state ID for the thing you did is true or not. I hope I’m explaining it well. But there’s this whole like sort of meta layer underneath that keeps track of everything. And then I have to keep track of all of it in my head. Sometimes I flow chart things that may be a little more complex than I can keep track of in my head, but for the most part, I just have Google Docs that I write all my notes in. Pretty simple.

Christa Mrgan: And in addition to the classic adventure game type of puzzles, Steve also threw in some mini games here and there, which is super fun!

Steve Chipman: Yeah. Those all came from brainstorming sessions with John. For months, we would get together every Monday night and we would get pizza and we would sit around and we would talk about what needed to happen. And, Ideas would come up and we’d implement them and we would realize this doesn’t really work or, you know, we forgot that this can’t happen because this thing already did. So it’s, you know, it doesn’t make sense anymore. But yeah, they all came out of brainstorming sessions. There’s one which I hope is intuitive enough for people. I don’t know if you took this path, but you have to light a stove and to get it to light, you have to–

Christa Mrgan: shh! Don’t, that’s too much of a spoiler! But yeah, the mini games are a lot of fun and add some great texture to the game overall.

Steve Chipman: And that one just popped into my head just randomly, I don’t know where it came from. But it’s just like fun little stuff like that I hope surprises people.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, I love that. And I’m always so impressed when people can handle not only all of the programming for their game, but also create all of the art and the music, the sound design.

It’s a lot of work! And it’s a lot of different kinds of work. So I asked Steve about his background.

Steve Chipman: I went to art school and I have a degree in drawing, that I skillfully parlayed into a career as a software engineer. A friend of mine and I, this was I think 96 or 97, we were writing shareware games for Windows.

And The web was fairly nascent at the time, so I thought we should build a website for our games. So I learned HTML then a few years later, companies were hiring pretty much anybody that knew what HTML stood for, so that’s how I got my foot in the door at a big internet company. And yeah, I’ve been doing that since.

Christa Mrgan: And so he doesn’t make art for his day job, but games are a great outlet for that-- though drawing in one-bit was an adjustment for him.

Steve Chipman: It took some getting used to for sure. You know, going back to the Sierra Games, I was also very fascinated with the artwork in those games and the original EGA games. I think EGA was 300 by 220, so even smaller than the Playdate screen.

Christa Mrgan: So EGA or Enhanced Graphics Adapter was an IBM PC graphics adapter that became the PC compatible display standard in the mid 1980s, and so dictated the default display size of computer games at the time: 300 by 200 pixels. Steve was so close!

Steve Chipman: And I was always interested in how, guys like Mark Crowe could draw at that scale, but then also have things be recognizable.

Christa Mrgan: Mark Crowe designed and developed some of the Sierra Online adventure games. So yeah, he was working at an even smaller scale than Playdate resolution, but in color.

Steve Chipman: So EGA games were 16 colors, obviously Playdate games are black and white. So it’s really interesting to me to figure out how to draw something at such a scale and think about what are the important visual elements of the object that you’re trying to represent? What can be ignored, but what is so important that it has to be included, otherwise it won’t be recognized? So that’s a lot of fun. Especially for like inventory icons and things like that are, those are only like 32 by 32. And then, you know, making it even more difficult by only having black and white to work with, especially like if you’re doing like a face or something, you know, one pixel can change everything about it.

So, I feel lucky to have like a background in fine art because with black and white, that’s sort of that, you know, Chiaroscuro technique where you sort of understand how light and dark play together.

Christa Mrgan: And just in case you don’t remember your fine art techniques, chiaroscuro refers to using extreme contrast in light and dark. Think Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Artemisia Gentileschi.

Steve Chipman: And so that’s been very useful I think for one bit stuff is just sort of understanding shapes and shadow and how that plays together.

I dunno if that sounded pretentious.

Christa Mrgan: Nah, it’s fine. And it let me subtly remind people that I was a humanities major in college for like five minutes. And one element of the art in the game that I really like is the vignette that Steve often uses around the main character, which both highlights the action and limits some of the visibility of your surroundings.

Steve Chipman: So that vignette actually serves two purposes. The first purpose is, you 're in a blizzard, and I wanted it to feel like visibility was low without actually affecting the player’s visibility too much. I wanted the world to feel tense and isolated, um, and I felt constricting your field of view to that 200 by 200 area helped with that. There are some indoor areas where that vignette isn’t used, but lots of them do use it because I, I feel like it adds tension to the scene.

The other purpose of it is nothing outside of that is being rendered, so it’s a performance thing. Everything’s clipped to that. So it’s really, if you turn that mask off, it’s just a 200 by 200 game.

Christa Mrgan: Clever. It’s really effective. And Steve made the sound design for the world feel fairly realistic.

Steve Chipman: for most of these sounds, I didn’t actually make them. I pay Zapsplat, I don’t know how much it is a year to use their stuff.

Christa Mrgan: Zapsplat is a website that provides royalty-free sound effects licensing.

Steve Chipman: I love that site as a resource. I’ve yet to not be able to find what I’m looking for, or at least find something close enough that I can manipulate it in audacity to get what I want.

Christa Mrgan: Audacity is a free and open source audio editor.

Steve Chipman: A lot of It’s just finding what I need and then, you know, I’ll tone shift it or pitch shift it or speed it up or slow it down, or, add, echo to it or reverb rather, until I get what I want. And and then there’s like, the volume aspect of it.

So like, you’re outside the cabin, for example, the wind is very loud. And then when you go inside, it’s slightly less loud. And the further you progress into the room to when you’re inside of an interior room, like the bathroom or the kids’ room, you can’t hear it at all.

So, and then as you’re moving around, it’s you know. Gets louder, it gets quieter. So there’s, you little stuff like that. felt it was important. A lot of the interactions feel empty if they don’t have a sound, that would be obvious, you know, like opening a drawer, you should be able to hear the drawer open, opening a door, different kinds of doors. When you go into the gas station, if there’s a chime on the door, you know? So just like little stuff like that that I think added a little, more to it. Maybe you won’t notice, but maybe subconsciously you pick up on these sorts of things. I don’t know.

Christa Mrgan: And Steve wrote the theme song for the game too, but we had this conversation before the game was completely finished, so he was still working on it.

Steve Chipman: I will be fleshing out the theme song a bit more. Um, Right now I think it only has eight bars and just repeats. I don’t have plans for there being music in the game unless there’s something that really is dramatic enough to warrant it.

So far all the sound effects are, you know, they’re either like UI beeps or blips or, you know, the sounds of objects being used. The scene’s, not in the game anymore, but there was a scene where it was sort of horrifying and there was this really dramatic, you know, cinematic stab, I guess.

I liked it, but it’s the only time it happens and it felt a little bit out of place in sort of the, solitude of the rest of the game. So, I’m leaning towards just leaning on environmental sounds for most of it, I think.

Christa Mrgan: And I haven’t actually played the game since I played this development version of it. So I actually don’t know whether or not that’s changed. I guess I’ll find out along with everyone else, when the game drops. And even though this is something like, Steve’s 10th game for Playdate, he says he’s still learning about the Playdate SDK. And that he still enjoys using it, which is great to hear.

Steve Chipman: I’ve been writing Playdate games for like, I guess two years now, almost, maybe longer? Time! I write everything in Lua because I have yet to come across a reason to write anything in C. Everything’s fast and fine.

But yeah, I’m still learning stuff about it, and I think one of favorite things and most useful things that I learned about the SDK was that there are simulator methods uh, like write to file, which you can use to write an image to disc. And I use that all the time now. Specifically, for example, like when the text fades out. So intuitively, as a programmer what you would do on another platform is literally fade that text out, because it’s trivial. But that’s not trivial to do on the Playdate. So really what’s happening there is there is a black rectangle that starts at, you know, 20% opacity and then fades in, to full opacity, which makes it look like the text is fading away.

But that’s not done programmatically. I just created the rectangle, the size that I needed. I iterate four times and, you know, draw that all into an image table at increasing opacities. And then I use simulator write to file to save the PNG. I move the PNG into the project.

Now I’ve got an image table that I can use to fade text out. So stuff like that, when I find stuff like that, I’m like, gosh, it’s really thought of everything. It’s been a delight to work with. The documentation is fantastic. Probably the best documentation I’ve ever come across for anything. And the responsiveness of, you know, Dave,

Christa Mrgan: Dave Hayden, one of the Senior Playdate engineers, and the guy who designed the first circuit board for Playdate.

Steve Chipman: You know, those guys are just, you know, they’re great. Everything about it’s just great. I really enjoy it.

I’ve been working on this thing on and off since Post Hero came out, and that was February of '23, I think. And so it’s been a long time. And the scope of it really terrified me. And then I forget when it was, maybe it was back in February, Arisa had emailed me and asked if I could send footage of The Whiteout for one of your Playdate Update videos.

And I was like, “absolutely, this is an opportunity that I would not wanna miss!”

The thing was all that existed of The Whiteout, what was, what was in the trailer. The teaser trailer that I had sent to Gant for the first Community Direct.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah! Andrew Gantt made the first Playdate Community Awards video, and other folks from the Playdate Squad Discord, including Donald Bubbins Fraser, and Paul Straw have pitched in from there.

Steve Chipman: So I spent the next month drawing like the town of Good Hope and the gas station and all of, you know, the tunnels and the hotel and all of these things, to have stuff that I could send you guys to use and my, sort of driving philosophy with this was “Steve, don’t make the game, just make it look like there’s a game.” But I didn’t listen to myself, and actually started making it into a game. So, you know, once that was done and I had everything that I felt I needed to make it look really great, I sent that off and then you guys asked for pitches for Season Two. So I pitched it for Season Two and you guys were like, “yay!” And I was like, okay. And I really, I don’t think this game ever would’ve been made had it not been for Panic’s encouragement actually get it done because it’s just too big for me without that.

Christa Mrgan: Oh man, I feel that. Sometimes you just really need the pressure of a deadline, plus that support and encouragement to finish a big project.

I’m so glad that The Whiteout is a part of Playdate Season Two. I feel like it helps to balance the season, having a game with darker themes.

Steve Chipman: Yeah, I I think a big theme is loss. But You play as the traveler. He doesn’t have a name. He kind of clues you in a little bit to his backstory. know that he had children, but we don’t know much about him. And the idea is that the story isn’t the traveler’s story. It’s June and her family’s story. You uncover diary entries and notes and things like that, and you start learning more and more about her past.

And then it’s also about, I think, loneliness and trying to connect, like when the traveler first meets Sarah. This is the first person he’s come across in a very long time. And it’s the first person that the player comes across in the game. The first person that doesn’t try to kill him, anyway, in the game.

But I also want there to be some themes of hope—that that it’s not all loss. That there are still pockets of good out there.

Christa Mrgan: Definitely. And I’m really looking forward to playing the finished version of the game and finding out how it ends. Because like I mentioned before, it was still in development the last time I played it. I hope you enjoy it as much as I’ve enjoyed the first half. It is dark, lonely, and poignant, with a story that leads to some unexpected places.

Thanks so much for listening and stay tuned for more episodes from Playdate Season Two, coming soon to the Playdate Podcast feed.

Steve Chipman: Thank you so much. Bye.

Christa Mrgan: The Playdate Podcast was written, produced, and edited by me, Christa Mrgan.

Cabel Sasser, and Simon Panrucker composed the theme song. Additional music was composed by Steve Chipman and comes from The Whiteout. Huge thanks to Tim Coulter and Ashur Cabrera for wrangling the podcast feed and working on the website, James Moore for making me an awesome Paydate audio extraction app, Kaleigh Stegman for handling social media, and Neven Mrgan, who created the podcast artwork and site design. And thanks as always to everyone at Panic. Playdate Season Two is available right now on the website and on Catalog! And of course, Playdate consoles are available at play.date.

Steve Chipman: The traveler reflects on, " oh, we were at a little league game when all of this started," which is actually something from my life. We were at a little league game and it started snowing and we all thought it was hilarious. So that actually happened to me.