Chance’s Lucky Escape

Christa Mrgan: You are the world’s luckiest dog, but a flat tire keeps you from coming to the aid of your evil, criminal genius boss, Snowball. Now you’re on the run from a dog sniffing detective. Has your luck run out, or will you make another lucky escape?

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 am Christa Mrgan, and today I am talking with Yann Margan and Julia Minamata about their point and click Detective Adventure Game, Chance’s Lucky Escape. Heads up that we do talk about the game’s storyline a bit in this episode, as well as mentioning some gameplay mechanics, but we don’t spoil any specific puzzles, so you should be okay as far as major spoilers go.

However, there is one spoiler for one of Yann’s other games, Inspector Waffles. And Chance’s Lucky Escape is actually a spinoff story from that game, but we’ll come back to that. First, let’s meet the team. The idea started with the founder of Goloso Games, Yann Margan.

Yann Margan: My name is Y Julia and I wrote the story together, and I did all the code and the dialogues.

Julia Minamata: I’m Julia Minamata, and I collaborated with the Goloso Games on Chance’s Lucky Escape. I did the art and the animation, and I also designed the fonts. Chance’s Lucky Escape is an adventure game that is just a bit of a surprise in terms of how it plays and the idea of having an adventure game on Playdate.

Yann Margan: It’s an adventure game, but a lucky dog who is unlucky.

It’s a mixed between old cartoons and cop movies like The Fugitive, and so it’s not very serious, but it’s still a cop story, I would say.

Julia Minamata: Chance’s Lucky Escape. Is a bit of a subversion to traditional adventure game design in that because Chance are so lucky, these outcomes that move the game forward are not outcomes that he expects when he performs these actions.

And when Yann discussed this with me, when we talked about that design, I was fascinated by this idea of having the player trying to accomplish something and then having a surprise of it accomplishing something else entirely, but working to his favor. We wanted to do something that would be like a little treat for people.

A little surprising treat of an adventure game.

Yann Margan: When Panic announced the Playdate I thought it was super cool, the crank, and as a game dev, I have a ton of ideas and I thought that would be fun to make a game with the crank. Um, I thought everyone will do a fishing game. Okay. I have to be more original and find one thing that people did not expect, and I made a shooting game called Spike II, when you load and reload and shoot again with the crank.

Christa Mrgan: Spike II: the Great Emu War is an action game where you play as a cat named Spike, fighting off hordes of angry emus with your mini gun. There’s a link in the show notes.

Julia Minamata: I also learned about the Playdate initially, I think somewhere on social media. I’m not entirely sure where, but on social media and as soon as I saw it, I found it incredibly appealing.

I grew up with the handheld consoles. My house was like a PC household, but the way I got access to Nintendo games was through like the original Game Boy and then all the other subsequent units. And I just seeing this one bit graphics, little handheld console was so appealing. The cheerful yellow color, and of course the crank.

It just got me really excited and I was already interested in pre-ordering it before ever even considering to develop a game for it. And around this time I was starting to do streaming on Twitch. For my own game, the Crimson Diamond, I was streaming on Twitch, and as it happens, Cabel Sasser was watching one of my streams.

Christa Mrgan: Cabel is the CEO of Panic. He likes video games.

Julia Minamata: And during the stream I had this very relatable moment learning about a tool setting in Photoshop. And he emailed me after the fact and said, “there was this very relatable moment. And would you, would it be okay if I cut together a clip to share on social media of this tool?”

And I went “absolutely, totally please do.” And so he cut together this clip, shared it on Twitter and other places, or maybe just Twitter, I don’t know. But it was basically me discovering after having used Photoshop for literally decades at this point, and having this very cumbersome workaround, 'cause I didn’t know about this tool setting, discovering this new tool setting live on stream.

And he shared it. It was a very relatable moment. And during that same email he mentioned to me, you know, are you interested in developing a game for Playdate? And I said, absolutely. I couldn’t even believe he was asking, because I already planned on, like I said, buying this thing and just enjoying it on my own.

The idea of developing a game had never occurred to me, and I said, I’d love to make an adventure game or something for Playdate. And then I think a few months after that, Xalavier Nelson Jr. of Strange Scaffold, approached me and asked me, “do you wanna make a game for Playdate?” And I said, yes, absolutely.

So it just so happened that. I got to make a game for Playdate and Cabel sent me one of the developer units for the Playdate, and so Xalavier didn’t even have to send me one because I had already gotten one from Cabel and I got to develop it. And I was so excited to get to work on Recommendation Dog!! with Strange Scaffold and Sweet Baby.

But Recommendation Dog!! was not an adventure game. And I wanted to make an adventure game for Playdate.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. Recommendation Dog!! is an adorable action puzzle game where you play as a tiny dog with a big job at a temp agency. It’s available on Catalog for free. You can find it via the link in the show notes.

Julia Minamata: And so I guess a couple years later when Yann comes to me and says, do you wanna make an adventure game for Playdate? I thought, Hey, this is my chance. 'Cause I still felt like I owed it to Cabel to make an adventure game for Playdate. And it’d been weighing on my mind a little bit. And part of the thing is, I don’t know, Lua; Yann had to learn Lua for this game, and I was just feeling like that was such a big obstacle for me to even learn Lua, that I hadn’t even considered making one.

But when Yann asked me if I wanted to work with him on this and he would do the programming, I’m thinking this is exactly the opportunity that I’m waiting for to finally make an adventure game on Playdate. And I’m so happy that I can finally make good on my promise to Cabel with this game, Chance’s Lucky Escape.

Christa Mrgan: I immediately wanted to know more about that Photoshop/Twitch story, like what was the tool she was using?

Julia Minamata: I can send you the clip, but it’s the eraser tool. You have different types of eraser tool. There’s a pencil and the paintbrush tool in Photoshop. I didn’t know there was the equivalent settings for the eraser tool, and I thought there was only the anti eraser tool.

I didn’t know you could have just the pencil tool, but eraser version, and so I had this workaround, elaborate workaround to get. Non blurry erasing done in my pixel art, and someone told me, “Hey, by the way, this is dropdown menu, up in the menu,” and I’m like, “ohhhhh”

Christa Mrgan: man. I cannot imagine trying to do pixel art without being able to erase pixel by pixel.

If you don’t quite know what she means here, basically the eraser tool she was originally using was intended to erase things without aliasing, so it would erase like parts of pixels to create these nice blurred edges. Well, nice blurred edges if that’s what you’re going for. But the whole thing with pixel art is using tiny complete squares of color.

And yes, there is an eraser tool that will let you erase pixel by pixel the way you’d want it to work for pixel art, but just thinking about how she was creating elaborate pixel art pieces without that is kind of mind blowing.

Julia Minamata: It was a whole thing, yeah.

Christa Mrgan: Anyway, there’s a link to that Twitter post in the show notes.

So, long before Chance’s Lucky Escape, Julia and Yann met at an annual narrative game convention in London.

Julia Minamata: So we met in 2019 at Adventure X and Yann was showing Inspector Waffles.

Christa Mrgan: Inspector Waffles is Yann’s adventure game series about a cat detective. Chance’s Lucky Escape is a direct spinoff of those games. Chance never actually appears on screen in the original Inspector Waffles, but he is mentioned several times. We’ll come back to that in just a moment.

Julia Minamata: And I was showing the Crimson Diamond, the demo, and that’s how we first met. And in fact, I even contributed some art to Inspector Waffles. There’s some hidden perks in the game called these wool ball cards that are hidden throughout the world.

And Yann asked me if I wanted to contribute some art for it, and I said, of course. So that’s our first example of working together. I also saw you again in 2023 at Adventure X as well.

Yann Margan: Yes.

Julia Minamata: Yes. So we met up again, and then Yann got this opportunity. He wanted to pitch this game idea that he had, and like I said, it was like the perfect opportunity for me to finally keep my promise to Cabel. And that’s why I, I signed on.

Yann Margan: We both agreed at the beginning to use all the features that the Playdate can do. We didn’t want to do something overly complicated. We didn’t want to, add a tutorial or anything that need to be explained in the game just to take the Playdate and you understand it’s a point and click game, and you just click on object.

So it’s just a very classic point and click game in terms of mechanics. And the only original thing I would say is we use all the features of the Playdate. That’s something we both agreed right at the beginning.

Julia Minamata: I think it’s interesting that when Yann and I talk about what we like most about adventure games, neither of us really say the puzzles.

Yann basically designed all the puzzles here. But for my own game, when I’m designing my own puzzles, I’m not thinking about specifically designing puzzles like I need seven. More puzzles in chapter three or something. I don’t think about it like that. I just think about the goals that the player needs to accomplish and what they need to do in order to accomplish those goals.

And I always try to make the game as straightforward as possible. I don’t want any type of logical things that are going to be blocking anybody. That being said, like my own game was a text parser game, which just comes with its own built-in level of challenge. So me saying that I wanted to make my game as easy as possible. No one has complained that my game is too easy by any means. But they do say at least that it makes sense, for the most part. I want the game to, to make sense for the most part in terms of what can generally be expected. There’s a door that’s locked. You need a key, that type of making sense, not something where you have to think completely outside the box for something.

I, I don’t really enjoy that aspect of the adventure games at all. So I’m glad Yann and I are on the same page about what we value the most about the experience of playing an adventure game, which is the story and the writing and the setting and those characters.

Christa Mrgan: Yes, and as we mentioned, the setting in characters in Chance’s Lucky Escape come from the world of Inspector Waffles, Yann’s Adventure game series where you play as a hard-boiled cat detective. And this is a spoiler for that game, but right at the end, one of the reasons the bad guys don’t get away is that Chance’s car had a flat tire. While you never see him in that game, the story picks up from there and opens with the flat tire.

Yann Margan: And, uh, there is gap in the story where there is no explanation what happened to Chance, and so this game filled this gap. That was not very mandatory to the first story, to be honest, but I, I had a very clear mind about what I wanted to do about this character. A lot of my games are more inspired by movies than other video games.

And about Chance’s game, The biggest inspiration is a French movie called La Chevre, which means the goat. “The goat” in French doesn’t mean “the greatest of all time.” It’s very different and uh, this movie is old. It’s 40 years old, I think. This actor named Pierre Richard and this guy is famous for being very unlucky, even in real life.

Christa Mrgan: So in the movie, the daughter of a wealthy CEO goes missing while on vacation in Mexico.

Yann Margan: And this woman is famous for being very unlucky and they send a lot of private detectives and they didn’t find any track, any lead, nothing. This assistant told them you should send someone as unlucky as her, and I’m sure it just, you just follow him. It’ll lead you to your daughter. That is the story of the movie and Chance, the game, it’s very like that.

It’s not finding a woman. It’s finding a way to escape the police. But yeah, it’s the same kind of luck mechanics. The story was very funny to write. The dialogues were very easy because it’s super easy to write a character like that 'cause it’s someone naive. And I really like writing about naive people.

And also another the inspiration was a cartoon like Mr. Magoo, where he goes to one place to another without knowing that thing like that happened because he can’t see anything. That’s the spirit of the game.

Christa Mrgan: Yes. I love that your expectations are constantly being subverted in this game, and Chance is kind of failing forward all the time.

And when it comes to the look of the game, Julia already had a lot to work with since Chance’s Lucky Escape takes place in an existing world.

Julia Minamata: When I was doing the art for this game, I wanted it to look like Inspector Waffles and the world of Inspector Waffles. What was great about having that inspiration of a game that had already been released is there was a lot of reference that I could refer to and see kind of how buildings are made and how they’re drawn and what the cars look like in the game, even. I asked Yann, you know, what era is this? Because then it wasn’t, it’s not modern era in a way, it’s kind of like a, kind of a mysterious, like eighties, nineties era that when, when looking at the cars in the game, for instance, all this was to the benefit because I’m happiest when I, I have the most visual reference and source material to work from.

I like having a lot of information. So I said the setting of the adventure game is very important to me, and that for the most part was kind of already figured out. I didn’t have to figure that out, which was another time saver. Having a world that we could refer to already meant that we could. Its shortcut to exactly what we wanted to make without having to think too hard about the world we were building.

I remember part of the development process of how we were figuring out what scenes that we wanted to include in the game. Mm-hmm. And for the most part, it boiled down to Yann asking me, “What would you like to put in the game? What kind of scenes?” Just whatever. And I said, “I like cafes.”

Yann Margan: What would you like to draw?

Julia Minamata: Yeah, what would you like to draw? So that was literally what Yann asked me, and that’s how we came up with at least some of the ideas for what the locations would be. Of course, other things like callbacks, to other games. Yann also made a game called Inspector Waffles: Early Days. There’s like a miniature golf course in that game.

And so one of the game locations is a miniature golf course. Just things that we both kind of are interested in and we both like having in a game is almost the reasoning behind most of what we put in the game. When it comes to the Playdate and it comes to the screen and the limitations of the screen, like being 400 by 240 and one-bit graphics, I think about kind of my past work experiences and how they’ve really helped me become well prepared for working with the Playdate.

Even as far as being a freelance illustrator before I started doing game development and I specialized in magazines and newspapers. And something they, my teachers told us when we were working for, for instance, if you’re gonna get work printed in, in a newspaper, what the characteristics of that medium are, and what you have to consider.

And for instance, just like with the Playdate, with newsprint, it’s not pure white, right? It’s kind of like a duller, kind of a gray color. So you have to take that into consideration. Newsprint, it’s very porous. The ink’s gonna bleed a bit, so you can’t do really fine lines in newsprint, so you have to take that into consideration.

In the same way that with a Playdate, it’s not backlit. So you have to be very conscious of what you’re gonna be designing on that screen. So it’s gonna read well for people. Because it’s a small screen, one big color, and no backlight. So I, I actually approached, partially approached the way that I was gonna do art for both of these games.

Recommendation Dog and Chance’s Lucky Escape. But the same way I would consider approaching illustrating on newsprint because there are limitations to the medium that you’re working in. And then that, that was very important to me. And also coming from doing other part-time contract work on games. I actually did other one bit artwork for other games.

I’ve worked with Xalavier Nelson, Jr. and Strange Scaffold worked on uh, three games with them. So one of them was Recommendation Dog!!, But then I also worked on the Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator and Witch Strandings, and those games are one bit as well, which meant that coming into Chance, not only did I have this experience working on this newsprint, this idea of being very mindful of the limitations of the medium, but also having this one bit art experience already from those other games. And that to me was super helpful in approaching both Chance and both with Recommendation Dog!! as well. And for both of those, I had the same initial approach, in terms of making sure that we have a manageable scope.

We’ll be able to deliver this in the time period that’s allotted. I did the same thing with both of those games in terms of, yeah, the, the screen is relatively low resolution compared to any other type of game where it’s, where it’s 400 by 240, but I immediately halved the resolution, and I used that as the working resolution, which meant that the graphics ended up being more blocky in a way.

And you could see the pixels. You see there’s , some Playdate games use full advantage of 400 by 240 screen where the pixels are very small. It’s actually a very fine screen. It displays very well, but you can’t see often the actual pixels on it. And it’s funny 'cause in preparation for this, I was listening to the Playdate Podcast, Christa, and I was listening to the Saturday Edition/Star Sled episode, and Chris Makris of Saturday Edition was mentioning he actually thinks Saturday Edition looks even better on a big screen 'cause you can actually see the pixels on the screen on display. But for me, when I was approaching building the assets for both of the play games that I’ve worked on, I immediately, yeah, have the resolution. So you do get the pixel ness that, um, that blocking is of the pixel art.

Because part of the pleasure for me of seeing the pixel art is skating to see those individual components of the pixels, which meant that, again, the detail that I was able to put was dictated by that lower resolution, which meant that it was not as much labor to create these scenes as it would be otherwise.

So I was actually working at 200 by 120 resolution, was the resolution I was working on, so that was my approach for both of those games, and it did work out really well in terms of, I never felt limited by doing that, and I do think it helps the game have the distinctive look that it does have, because I do love that idea of having it be pixely.

The most fun for me was actually doing the character designs. I really enjoyed designing the characters and I’m so proud of the characters that I got to create for this game. I really like Chance. My, my favorite character that I designed, though, was there’s this henchman that is not very smart, and there’s two henchmen.

One of them is modeled after, I think, Kazuma Kiryu from the Yakuza games, and one of them looks like that. And then there’s a second henchman who is this kind of smaller, hunched over kind of guy. And he is inspired by Conor McGregor in the Roadhouse remake movie. That character, this is the way he looks and the way he acts was the character of this other henchman in the game, and I think I made him like a pit bull. A pit bull in a tropical shirt. And the idea that to convey all this feeling and look of a character with this one bit low resolution graphics, I was so pleased about the type of characters that I was able to create for the game.

That’s my most proudest part.

I will say for the game design, I think in terms of how the character moves or he doesn’t move through the screens, is very much how it was done in Inspector Waffles. And part of that I think was a consideration too. Yeah, keeping this very streamlined as a game design in terms of assets as well.

And that means that Chance does not have a walk cycle. He, he’s still in the frames or there are animations here and there. But he doesn’t freely move through the screen, which is the same as how Inspector Waffles was treated. So I think that was really good because it did mean that we didn’t have to have the consideration of, oh, he’s not close enough to something, or he had to move him over to a specific place, or we have to have in front of and behind objects or any of that stuff.

Or we tried to keep it as simple as we could and really keep that scoping under control. Just be something small and be like an enjoyable little treat for the Playdate because the form factor of Playdate is quite small and we didn’t want people to be playing this very long, epic meal of a game. I think it’s really made for these small, little quick hits of gaming.

We wanted to think about it that way.

Yann Margan: Exactly. There are some point-and-clicks, more from the golden era, when you have to watch your main character walking from one thing to another. And that’s exactly what we wanted to avoid. And obviously it make the game shorter because you don’t have to work for all 400 hours. But yeah, it’s more dynamic like that. For me, i’m very simple and if the story is amazing, I’m, I want to know more. You can have the most beautiful point click ever, but if I get bored after two or three minutes, uh, it’s not good.

Julia Minamata: And it’s so wonderful that there are these incredible tools, like there’s CAPS to help developers really get in there and kind of get to customize what they’re building.

Christa Mrgan: Yes, CAPS is the custom font tool for Playdate, created by Panic developer, Shaun Inman.

Julia Minamata: I had designed the fonts for the Crimson Diamond as well, so I, I had a bit of experience doing that and I was comfortable doing it. I was happy to do it because, yeah, mentioning that the writing is so important and the tone is so important in, in Adventure Game, and that also includes the font.

Fonts can make a huge difference in how the feel of something is and the feel of the writing is.

Yann Margan: I remember I ask you very early, we should do a font and you have your tasks of a thing to do and you did everything and every, I don’t know, once a week, ah, I forgot to do the font.

Julia Minamata: Yes, it kept getting pushed back and pushed back every week, but I’m so happy that we did do it because it doesn’t give it this really beautiful feel of the era or an era, although specifically like the type of font that it is, it kind of looks like an art deco font, which doesn’t really make that much sense when it comes to saying that the game according to the cars in the game was like eighties and nineties.

But this detective noir idea is very art deco, that that era, and it’s a bit of a mishmash really, but the idea is if this overall tone is a pleasing, cohesive tone, then you kind of can wave away any type of potential inconsistencies.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, the fonts definitely give it a very film noir vibe, and to me that does kind of read as eighties as well, because there was a bit of an art deco resurgence then.

Then music was another element that didn’t come into the game until Yann and Julia were nearly finished with development, but which ended up working really nicely to help support the game’s overall tone.

Yann Margan: Philip Aldous, aka PalKid composed the music. He composed the music of all of my previous games and we always work the same way. During the middle end of the project, I show him, um, what we accomplished and I told him: “do what you think the best.” He think about it, like two days and says, “Yeah, I have decided I’m going to do a jazzy, uh, soundtrack and I have some ideas for, yeah, something for this scene.”

“Okay. Okay. I trust you.” And that’s how we work for every game. And it’s funny because he composed lo-fi stuff for a game. He composed another game. It’s more calm. He’s doing a lot of different genre for all of the game. And it’s funny to imagine what he has in mind each time because it’s not. What I expect sometimes, but it, it’s matched very well.

So yeah, so that’s how we, we did with, uh, chancellor Escape and he did it something very jazzy, very more so. I was okay with that. But the SFX is a bit different because I. Do a list most of the time of everything I need, and I don’t want to have too much SFX for adventure games. I think it should be, the music should be very important, very ambient, but the SFX, especially when you do a detective game, should’t, be too strong.

It should be something very, not important, but for this one. Like I said, it has to be a bit cartoony and some animation, like old cartoon when the characters fly a bit before falling, so I ask him to do something a little bit cartoony and do not hesitate to do too much for some of them. So yes, it’s a bit exaggerating, but yeah. I do the list, and he does great.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, and overall, Yann and Julia see Chance’s Lucky Escape as a Snackable game more than an Epic meal.

Julia Minamata: It’s like a little treat. I want people to have a, just a lovely little time with this character and to be in this world. And just that the whole thing about the Playdate is just, it’s a joyful contraption.

I want people to feel that same kind of joyful energy when they play Chance and as well with the rest of the Season Two. It’s always been such a pleasure to see how the community of the Playdate, how they approach these types of games. There’s some people who are really pushing the technological envelope with it, and then there’s some people who concentrate on the vibe and the ambience of what they wanna deliver and how the Playdate works so well with that particular form of being a joyous little cranky guy.

I want people to have put a smile on their face when they play this.

Yann Margan: Yeah, quite, quite the same. I want them to have fun to, to enjoy it. Like a little cartoon from the Sunday afternoon, Sunday morning I dunno, it depends on where you are from. But yes, it’s something like that. Like it’s, the game isn’t very long and it’s on purpose.

It’s like a little piece of a cool show, and that’s all we imagine it. There’s no story to learn, no big, uh, happy ending that will make you think. It’s just something you, you enjoy and you have a good trip watching it.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. Chance’s lucky Escape is a ton of fun, and I hope you love the humor and happy accidents in this absurd, cartoony adventure.

Julia Minamata: Thank you so much for having us on today. It was such a pleasure to get to talk about Chance, and I hope people have as much fun playing it as we did making it.

Yann Margan: Thanks for having us, Christa. We are so happy we made this little game Chance’s Lucky Escape. I hope a lot of you will enjoy it and really thanks a lot for the opportunity, Panic.

Christa Mrgan: You can learn more about Yann and Julia and their other games, as well as find links to the soundtrack and a bunch of other stuff we talked about in today’s episode in the show notes. Thanks so much for listening and stay tuned for more episodes about Playdate Season Two coming soon to the Playdate Podcast feed.

Yann Margan: Bye. Thank you!

Julia Minamata: And also I, I kept my promise Cabel. You have an adventure game! Thank you so much.

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 Philip Aldous and comes from Chance’s Lucky Escape.

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 Playdate 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.

Julia Minamata: One outta four times, there was a problem with the spritesheet that I gave him because there was some, it was a pixel off or something wasn’t quite right. So that was a bit of a learning curve for me, was just the delivery of assets, because I’m so used to just working on my own that this idea of handing something off to somebody else and formatting it properly for somebody else it’s just not something I’m used to.

That was, for me, the most difficult part. I had never generated spritesheets before!