Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn are two of the most celebrated indie games around, even to this day, and Lucas Pope, the developer behind them, isn’t stopping any time soon, but he’s hesitant about revealing anything too early.
This is what he commented on and explained during a conversation on Mike & Rami Are Still Here (hat tip to IGN), the podcast run by No More Robots co-founder Mike Rose and Vlambeer co-founder Rami Ismail. While he was happy to discuss the business, he said being open about his creative plans isn’t something he’s “comfortable” with, at least not at this stage.
“But I also like to talk about the stuff I’m working on, and I think, just now, the situation just feels different to me… You don’t really talk about stuff when you’re working on it, because I don’t know that it’s going to get slurped up by AI or people are going to copy it, or something else like that. It’s not a hard rule. It’s just I got a feeling about that,” he explained, also adding he hopes “that sort of breaks” so he can relax a bit.
It’s a surprising stance coming from an indie developer, but considering how successful the two aforementioned games have been, I’d guess he’s got the freedom to choose to do that. If you haven’t been keeping track of his full career, he’s also made browser games like The Sea Has No Claim or Unsolicited. More recently, he also released Mars After Midnight for the Playdate console.
Additionally, Pope believes he’s been “pushing his luck” by finding success with Papers, Please and then Obra Dinn. “Do I really want to maybe just go out on a high note?” He said. “Why drag myself down with the next thing that people may not like? I feel lucky with those two games. I can do the same things again. I can sort of focus on narrative, and gameplay, and mechanics, and stuff like that, but who knows? It could be a total miss.”
At the time of writing, we don’t know anything about Pope’s next game, and by the sound of things, we might not learn anything until it’s close to completion.
