Back in Bilbao, we got to chat with Adam Riches of Robust Games about the nominations and honours Loco Motive has received.
"All right, we're in Bilbao for the BIG 2024 and I'm here joined by Adam Thank you so much for joining us who's gonna tell me a little bit more about an adventure that just released which is called Locomotive. So first of all, you know, I learned about it in Lisbon at DevGAMM. We were there Yeah, yeah, but we couldn't talk there So you guys were nominated for both best art and best narrative which says a lot about a graphic adventure, right?
So what can you tell me a bit about these two aspects and how you worked on them? Oh, okay Well, I have a I have a strong art background. I worked in In games for around 10 years before starting robust games with my brother Joseph Primarily as a as an artist and animator Primarily focusing on pixel art and pixel art animation so you can kind of see that in in locomotive There's a lot of beautiful hand animated Animation and it's it's a very high fidelity pixel art so for me it was an easy an easy decision to make to make and we really like set out to make Make everything as fluid as possible And I it's really good to see DevGam recognize that in terms of the narration, it was also a great honor because me and Joseph and not we don't really have a strong writing background, but we We we kind of wrote this for us and the way we wrote it was In terms of just kind of make each other laugh And if we can get a laugh out of the other person we we'd Write that down and it's a way to get it into the game. So to have to have a that recognized Both in terms of like overall story, but the the comedic aspect of it be recognized that that's great for us Tell me a little bit more about you know The pants and the jokes that we are going to find in this game because I've read I haven't played the game yet But I've read that it says that you know that it's sense of humor is one of the highlights here. Yeah. Yeah so as a lot of a Dialogue in the vein of like the old Kind of LucasArts adventure games like your monkey islands or your day of a tentacles So we have a lot of sort of dialogue based humor, but sort of going back on the on the art front We have a lot of visual visual humor as well So it's kind of a slapstick nature to it a lot of visual comedy as well, which I think works in a favor okay, so if we have a Checklist for a graphic point-and-click graphic adventure you have a like sense of humor jokes, you know difficult puzzles I guess pixel art, but how do you make it stand out?
You know graphic adventures are like always coming back, but then they're never quite there Right is sometimes it looks like a niche. Sometimes you look at more mainstream So, how did you make locomotive like sort of click with current audiences? Yeah, it's a great question I I think I think part of that was recognizing that we needed to modernize in some aspects. So On controller it has full controller support and you kind of play in a different way than you would traditionally So you would have like direct control of the character So so on a gamepad or on Nintendo switch if you want to play on that like it feels natural It doesn't feel like you're emulating a mouse cursor. No touch controls on the switch I guess not at the moment, but I'm hoping to hoping to add those at some point Yeah. Yeah, I would really like to take fully a full advantage of that if we can so that's something we're looking into Sort of within the next few months if we can the key was to modernize it another aspect that seems familiar to me But at the same time you guys guys kind of make it unique. Is that you present these as an on rails?
mystery which is What's what's with that? What's going on? Why why are they so so successful, you know, even at the Very old Paper Mario. I was playing the other day the Thousand Year Door. It has a mystery in a train So it's not just you know novels and movies of the of the you know, just a year So what can you tell me about this this sort of train aspect to it? It's interesting Yeah, I've had a few people point that specifically to me like the Paper Mario. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but it was unique Oh, it's just the Paper Mario So I'd actually I actually didn't know so I had to go look it up and be like, oh, okay. I Don't know I think there's just something like interesting about it and when we were when we were like marketing the game I think I think there is Something enticing about It being on a vehicle because you have a lot of movement Like the backgrounds moving and it feels very kinetic and there's there's energy there and I think adventure games Traditionally can feel a bit static and they can feel a bit slow and it's oh, I'm looking at this screenshot But it's two people in a room talking to each other But I feel like having like that constant movement of the camera and like stuff whizzing by like it feels like a lot more Kinetic it has a lot more energy to it I think that is what makes it attractive in a way at least at first glance because you're like Oh, I need to look into this a bit more The same time it's like a hotel I guess I don't know about in your game But you know people have their rooms where they sleep and yeah, and also you're trapped inside the train for a while So that kind of makes you you know, you can create situations and you cannot escape, right?
It's an environment that you kind of can explore right and you can kind of delve more into It's a characters when you kind of access different areas and that kind of stuff Okay, this game released in English. I have to ask you about this. I'm Spanish We met in Portugal. So what can you tell me about, you know potential new languages?
Packs coming for the game in the future. Yes, so we launched in English and German Personally, I would really love to do as many languages as possible. I think we've had a lot of people requesting Spanish specifically I can't really confirm anything at this specific moment but I would love to do more languages and bring the game to more systems and Maybe even looking into mobile if we can do the touchscreen So yeah, there's a lot of options that we'd like to explore with the game. We're not finished with it yet It's available on steam for now Yeah steam GOG Nintendo switch And tell me a little bit more about your background. You said you are into pixel art yourself. Did you work on Wargroove?
Yes. Yeah, I love that game Yeah, I worked at Chucklefish. So I worked on all of their in-house titles so I worked on a starbound and Wargroove and then I also did the Expansion the the Wargroove expansion double trouble, which was a whole new campaign. I got to do a lot of Character animation with that especially so that was cool. And then I did a bit of work on and which broke which is Chucklefish is upcoming game Before sort of starting my own studio So I have a lot of experience in pixel art and now in the future What can we expect from you any new ideas coming up? There's some vague ideas I was I was talking about this earlier about which direction to go in because there's a few options I was saying we sort of learned how to make this game as we were making it so there there is an enticement of okay, we know exactly how to make this and what Goes into it and what that pipeline is so we could do it faster and quicker and better but part of me feels Like it would be fun to also just try something completely different. Yeah, but yeah, we launched two weeks ago So I'm gonna take a bit of time and think about it and then maybe in the new year We'll we'll have an answer but the the real answer at the moment is I'm not sure Yeah, looking forward to learning about that looking forward to playing the game You can always choose the direction you want to go unless you're stuck in a train. Good luck with that. Thank you Thank you so much for your time. Cheers. Thank you"