Shadowgate PD

Christa Mrgan: A thing that I love about Playdate is that it feels both retro and brand new, A tiny one bit black and white screen, and comparatively low powered CPU make it perfect for games that feel nostalgic, but at the same time, the sharpness of that one bit screen and the look and feel of the hardware in general, make it modern and totally unique—p erfect for redesigning a classic point-and-click adventure game!

Christa Mrgan: 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, And today I am talking with Ollie Coe and Ben Perry about Shadowgate PD, the definitive remake of the point-and-click adventure. That’s right, I said “definitive.” Ollie took the best elements of all of the versions of Shadowgate and distilled them into one superlative edition that even uses the crank. Not that I’m biased or anything.

And heads up, there are some light spoilers in this episode, but also the original Shadow Gate came out 38 years ago. So I think it’s fine! Still, you’ve been warned.

Now let’s meet Ollie and hear about Shadowgate PD.

Ollie Coe: My name’s Ollie Coe. I’m the founder at Pixel Ghost and I did all of the coding, production, design, basically anything that wasn’t the art or the music/ sound. I did do some of the art, which I’ll talk about later.

Christa Mrgan: Folks. That’s called foreshadowing

Ollie Coe: Shadowgate PD is an official remake of the 1987 point-and-click Adventure. You traverse dungeons, you collect items, defeat monsters, ultimately with the aim of saving the world. It’s a certified classic. And it’s remade from the ground up, taking a lot of influences from the previous versions, for Playdate.

So I can’t remember exactly when I first heard about Playdate, but it must have been near the announcement. It feels like there was endless numbers of years after that obsessing about Playdate. I must have re-watched like the early trailers, like over and over again, just, just like hungrily waiting for the Playdate to, to be announced in terms of when it was gonna ship, when I was going to get hold of one. I think I ended up in some of the later groups and it came a little bit later over to the UK. And from the start it was something I was super excited about getting my hands on.

And then even before receiving a Playdate, I developed a few games for it using Pulp.

So it was yeah, it was something I really wanted to get into, and Pulp became something that seemed very accessible and interesting. So yeah, I managed to make Life’s Too Short the first couple of games before I even received the console, and Time from Earth.

Christa Mrgan: Whoa, he made three games in Pulp before he even got his Playdate? This is some Ollie Coe lore that I actually didn’t know before this interview. So, Pulp is our browser-based tool for creating Playdate games without necessarily having to know anything about programming. Though there is also a lightweight scripting language called Pulp Script that you can use to add more interactivity to your Pulp games, and people have done amazing things with it.

Like recreating a classic point-and-click adventure game. Anyway, yeah, there are a bunch of other adventure games from Pixel Ghost available on Catalog that you can find via the links in the show notes. But I didn’t realize before this conversation that Ollie had actually made some of those games before even getting his hands on a Playdate. That’s wild.

Ollie Coe: Yeah it’s been an obsession since the announcement, and ever since.

Christa Mrgan: So how did he decide to bring Shadowgate to Playdate?

Ollie Coe: I remember in the early days in the Playdate Squad Discord there was some people talking about, oh, it’d be really cool if Shadowgate came to the Playdate. It’s like the perfect platform for it. And I remember kind of playing on like, oh yeah, it would be really great if somebody made Shadowgate for the Playdate.

And then it must’ve been like a year or so later. I can’t remember what kind of kicked it off, but I decided why can’t I make Shadowgate for the Playdate? I started scribbling some of the early rooms in Pulp and reached out to Dave Marsh, who’s the original creator of Shadowgate at Zojoi, and just asked if I could make it for the Playdate. He checked out some of the previous Pixel Ghost games and liked what he saw. And yeah we put an agreement together to bring Shadowgate to Playdate.

I’m a, big fan of point-and-click adventures. Some of the early games that I’ve made for Playdate are, I’ve often described them as like point and click adventure-light. In terms of Life’s Too Short and those games. They’ve been influenced by games like Hugo’s House of Horrors. And I grew up playing like the early Discworld games and Monkey Island and those kind of games.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, Hugo’s House of Horrors, Discworld, and Monkey Island are all adventure games. I personally am a huge fan of the Curse of Monkey Island.

Anyway. How did he go about translating this well loved classic adventure game to Playdate?

Ollie Coe: I’ve always liked point-and-click adventures. It’s not like they’re like the only games I love or like the main genre I love, but it’s turned into that genre that I like to make games for in terms of the, taking an item and it having an impact somewhere else and then progressing through a story, so Shadowgate kind of Fit that perfectly in terms of adapting some of the systems that were previously developed for previous games on the Playdate. And then taking a big influence from the previous Shadowgate games to bring something that worked for Playdate.

In terms of the design, I wanted to keep it really, really true to the original. This is a real homage to the original Shadowgate games.

So there’s panic when your torches start to run down and you need to use more torches before you go into the dark and, and fail. There’s also some other design elements around it that I kind of like, feel like it maybe slows the game down or things, but I really wanted to make sure that it was true to the original.

The idea of nostalgia was really important with this. So the script is exactly the same. The art and music were very influenced by the originals and the design’s there. With some elements, I wanted to create like the perfect mix up. So the inventory system, for example, in the Mac version, is visual and you can move your items into the inventory section.

With the NES version, it’s text. So they sit in very specific places in a text inventory, but for the Playdate version, we managed to create something that kind of sits in the middle. So it’s a visual inventory. With items that fit into very specific blocks, so you can’t freely move them around, but it looks so much better.

And I think being able to take influences from lots of different versions means that we can take the best of both worlds and really creates something that I think is taking the good parts from all of the different Shadowgates.

I really want someone in a review to say like, this is the best way to play Shadowgate ever. So that’s what I’m rooting for. That’s like the dream.

Christa Mrgan: Nice. Well, I had actually never played the original Shadowgate, so for me, Shadowgate PD is the canonical version.

So earlier, Ollie mentioned that he did everything except create the music and the art, but that wasn’t true at first. He started out as the game’s artist.

Ollie Coe: So when I first started doing the art, the idea was to look at previous versions. So look at the Mac version, look at the NES version, and make something that fit in between them. So I personally drew the first few rooms, I think I drew the first three or four rooms. You can find it on the internet somewhere.

There’s a picture of where I started to fail in the art, so I just, I started to draw one of the rooms, which was a, it’s a lake where a shark’s crossing over it, and there’s a skeleton. And the first draft looked awful. I’d kind of run outta steam and I thought, I need somebody to help me with this.

And I managed to find an artist from Brazil called Than, or Thantropy online. And we started to work together. And the brief was really: take a look at the Mac and the NES versions and find something in between. And the work that Than started to send through was just fantastic. It blew anything that I’d done in the early rooms outta the water.

I wonder if players are going to be able to see the seams where it switches between me and Than in terms of our art. But I think the Playdate’s aspect ratio almost becomes perfect particularly with Pulp. I think with more pixels, you start to have more detail. But because for me, with the size of the screen, having the art, having to fit into Pulp with the different aspect ratio, you know, the, the lines are a bit thicker.

You have to start being a bit more smart with some of the choices in bringing forward some of the characters or the rooms. So in finding something that fit between the Mac and the NES and evoked both of them, but also had to fit within Pulp, I think Than really found something that, again, for me, it almost becomes like the ultimate version of the game and just looks fantastic on Playdate.

I’ll send you the the different skeleton lake rooms and you can see like my first draft and then you can see Than’s afterwards. It’s just like you can see where I’m, I’ve come to the end of the road. Ollie can do no more. We need some help.

A lot of Than’s’ work is through pixel art. So I think it was quite natural to be able to shift into this. The work got done so quickly and the quality was fantastic. So, yeah, I think the results really good.

And so I worked with Ben Perry for the music and the sound for the game.

Ben Perry: Hi everybody.

Ollie Coe: Ben’s worked on some previous Pixel Ghost games. They did an ending jingle for Life’s Too Short. They then did the whole score for Time from Earth, Life’s Too Short: Unhooked, which were both fantastic.

And Ben and I started to work together on Shadowgate. The brief again, was to really look at the NES version. The NES version is the real nostalgic version of Shadowgate that everybody remembers.

Ben Perry: When making music and sound for Shadowgate PD, I was thinking about how to create new songs that have their own identity and feel for the game, but also could still be nostalgic and kind of have elements of the original soundtrack that pull people in that have already played the game before.

Ollie Coe: Some of the music still fills me with dread in terms of the torch going down sounds and music, and the panic that invokes.

Ben Perry: I listened to the original soundtrack a lot, and I kind of extrapolated out styles and different elements from the soundtrack and tried to puzzle it together in a new and unique way for this game.

Ollie Coe: We really wanted to find a way to stay close to that without copying it. And also creating something that can live on its own, but also can remind players of how they used to play Shadowgate.

So again, like with the art, it’s finding something that takes previous influences, but also creates something that lives on its own, on Playdate.

So in terms of play testing, a lot of the play testing as is often the case, is me playing the game over and over and over again and making sure it feels right. I spent a lot of time during the last two years also playing through that NES version of the game to make sure that it feels similar.

There’s the right balance in terms of how the torches go down, how you’re able to progress through the game, how it feels. I spent some time working with some of the folks in the, Playdate Discord, to get some kind of second opinions in terms of how the game feels, how it flows. This is where there’s some tension with the original game because I had received some feedback which was, “ah, this doesn’t feel right. That doesn’t feel right.” But again, I wanted it to feel right to the original game as well. So we had to make some of those decisions.

And I just wanna shout out Plastic Fern, as well, who we did a lot of QA with. This was such a great experience uh, for me in terms of having, the extra resource and extra eyes to be able to look at this. As I’ve said, a lot of the play testing is playing the game over and over again hundreds of times, which can often drive you crazy.

So having that extra support has been fantastic in terms of having that second look and having those second hands to go through the game and find different bugs and mistakes.

There always are. There’s some weird ones as there are every time. It’s like, oh, I spelled that completely wrong, or I just did that completely wrong, or that line’s not even in there.

In terms some of the differences, or the constraints and challenges we had with remaking the game: animation comes to mind in terms of doing animation for pulp is incredibly difficult. I always tip my hat to Fatnose Games and some of the other developers in the community who have managed to do fantastic animation. Doing it across multiple tiles with Pulp.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah Fatnose games have made two adventure games and a sports action game for Playdate!

Ollie Coe: It meant that some of the animation of the game was a challenge, particularly right at the end of the game.

But it also presented an opportunity because I, managed to add some very subtle animation throughout the game, which wasn’t in some of the previous versions, but I think adds a nice little additional hint of movement, which kind of brings it to life even more. But it’s certainly a challenge adding that bigger animation that’s spread across multiple tiles and sprites into the game.

The most difficult part of development was the grind-- spending two years grinding through getting this game done. Making this in Pulp is a special form of madness. It probably would’ve taken me an equal amount of time to learn the SDK and learn to code all over, like all from scratch. But the the real challenge in making this game was spending hours every day going room by room, making the functions work across different tiles.

If a function works to open a door, you then have to make sure that every tile that represents that door has to swap to an open door. And then when you’ve got the open door, you have to do the same with a closed door. And it just becomes a war of attrition to make this actually happen. So just so many days of going through and sitting in front of a room and like, couple of deep breaths and knowing that the day’s work was just gonna be like just doing the work, just doing the coding, like doing all of the hard stuff. So the most difficult part was that was just spending the time getting it done.

Christa Mrgan: Uh, that sounds like a lot!

Ollie Coe: One thing that I made a really big mistake on was um, I learned how you can mimic what one tile does on another tile, and that was like amazing. So then I wasn’t just copying and pasting, but then I was just doing like any calls, so make just saying like anything that this tile does mimic it.

But apparently when you start the game or do anything then like every tile in the whole game, all 40 rooms, all just like screaming like at the same time because even like booting the game, they’re copying all the other tiles. So yeah, it was a real learning. Like I’d never done anything like this before. I’m still so new to game development. So all these early newbie mistakes.

Christa Mrgan: Ehh, it’s all learning, though. So what was the most fun part of making Shadowgate PD?

Ollie Coe: I think the most fun part for me was when you solve problems in the code, when you know that you want to do something and you have to then spend the time to figure it out. I have to shout out some of the fantastic Playdate community at this stage, especially Orkin and Scribe, like they’re a testament to this community in terms of being open and supportive.

Those moments where you think, ah, I want to make the imagery visual like this, or I want to make this other thing happen later on in the game and it actually working, like after figuring out, I think that’s like the some of the best wins. Also, you know, seeing it come to life through the sound and the music, and the art.

I think they’re such big parts of why this game is fantastic and why it’s gonna reach the heartstrings of so many Shadowgate fans. And when you start to see everything come together and coalesce and form this kind of whole, I think those are some of the most exciting parts of the game development.

I had announced it for a while and had been working on it maybe for a year before the pitching process started, but the opportunity comes up, and we put it forward, put together some slides, kind of talked through some of the design choices, some of the art, some of the music, et cetera. And just crossed our fingers. It’s one of those things I decided to pitch it because I thought, why not? It was similar to creating it in the first place. It was, why not reach out? Why not ask the question?

I didn’t imagine that it would make it in. Um, it was, it was kind of more. Hope, but really glad to be part of it. It’s really exciting. It’s such an honor.

I hope that Shadowgate fans find something that reminds 'em of their love for Shadowgate. I hope that they see this and see this as a, a whole new way to play, but also something that can remind them of all of their great memories of Shadowgate. For me, it’s one of my earliest gaming memories. It was actually released in the year that I was born.

So for Shadowgate fans, I think it’s all over again, a reason to revisit this fantastic classic adventure. And I hope that new fans find a new love for this classic. It’s a whole new platform and whole new audience of people that can play Shadowgate all over again. I also hope that they don’t come for me when they try and figure out all of the different puzzles and challenges within this, because it’s very loyal.

There’s lots of good guides online and if you have any challenges with some of the puzzles, I did not write them myself. They are a relic of a lost age.

I’m so scared of Shadowgate fans being like, what have you done? Or people that haven’t played it before, being like, what is this? I don’t understand. This doesn’t make sense.

Christa Mrgan: I do think he could have added a few more torches here and there, but I appreciate the commitment to the original, and I love that someone who is such a big part of the Playdate community was able to give this classic adventure game new life as part of Season Two!

Ollie Coe: The Playdate Squad Discord is such a fantastic place for new developers to get involved, to learn how to make games and Playdate as a platform has given me a chance to be a real life game developer. And I’m super excited to bring Shadowgate PD to Season Two.

Christa Mrgan: Oh, that’s so great. Thanks, Ollie!

Well, you can read up on the original Shadowgate, and find links to Ollie’s other games and all sorts of other things we mentioned in this episode via the links in the show notes.

And if you tap the link to the episode page, you can see Ollie’s original skeleton drawing versus the one that Than ended up doing. I’m not saying one is better than the other. They’re are different styles!

Thanks so much for listening, and stay tuned for more episodes about Play Date season two coming soon to the Playdate Podcast feed.

Ollie Coe: you. 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 Ben Perry and comes from Shadowgate PD.

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.

Ollie Coe: I’m never gonna make a remake again, because this has been like the perfect experience: asking nicely, right, Like getting a contract together and then making it, and getting like really great supportive messages from Dave. He is like, “this is amazing. You’ve done such a good job on it.” So yeah, it’s super cool and very few pointers, very few changes. It just all came together really nicely. I’m gonna quit while I’m ahead and make more games about ghosts.

I have a really noisy cat.