Lucas Pope

It really is.

It's like you did something full of shit and then people decided you were an expert.

For some reason, I became the SimCity guy for a while.

It was fucking weird.

Republic of Times, another great one.

Both of those are by Lucas Pope, who's a truly incredible developer.

And Papers, Please is you're a Border Patrol agent.

Yeah.

Lead- leading question

The, I, the weird thing is I think there's almost, there's, there's two lanes here that don't need to intersect, right? Like, indie auteurs, like, all right, I'm gonna use Lucas Pope for an example.

I actually don't know what Lucas Pope's stance on AI is.

Maybe he's super pro-AI, but for the purpose of my argument, I'm gonna pretend he doesn't use it.

Lucas Pope, the guy makes a game every five or six years.

He's not in a huge rush, and when the game comes out, it's a perfect jewel, and it's genre-defining and usually invents a new genre.

Lucas Pope doesn't need to use generative AI if he doesn't want to.

He can keep being Lucas Pope.

They actually celebrate.

But we today are going to be talking about the game Return of the Obra Dinn, which is a game developed by Lucas Pope.

who you might be familiar with if you played Papers, Please.

You also just might be familiar with him from this game because it sold quite well and was reviewed very well and is just a, I don't know, I mean, it's a popular good game that people generally like.

L.A. Noire, 78.

Crusader Kings 3, 79.

And then 80 is Lucas Pope's other game, Papers, Please, which I think is actually a little low for Papers, Please.

I

Um, but we knew we didn't, we, we couldn't, we couldn't sell a just like classic adventure game.

So that's why we sort of mashed it up with the Lucas Pope papers, please mechanic.

And it's a very tenuous connection to like, it's not the same mechanic.

It's not a document checker, but it's, it's a gate guard sim.

Your brain just gets to imagine the finished product and the finished product is always fantastic in your brain.

But the important question is, what's the actual game? Let's take Papers, Please, created by Lucas Pope and released in August 2013.

Papers, Please is a dystopian puzzle simulation game where you play as a border-crossing immigration officer in the fictional communist nation of Arstotzka.

Your job is to inspect documents and use ever-changing rules to decide who to omit, turn away, or arrest, all while you earn enough money to keep your family alive.

You talk about, uh, um, Toby Fox or, uh, the, the, uh, Stardew Valley concerned ape, uh, yeah, super giant.

Um, the, the, uh, papers, please Lucas Pope and everything.

Like, I guess if you're literally not in that list, uh, like is there like there's a chance no matter how big your game might like if if Mina the Hollower would have done poorly or middling and no one would have cared and would have reviewed poorly like that just might be the end of it been the end of them so have

we heard how Mina the Hollower is doing like I believe they said that they were happy with

I think Heart Machine's issue was they never, beyond Drifter, they never created an identity for their studio.

You know what you're going to get from Supergiant.

You kind of know what you're going to get from Lucas Pope, even if the perspective and art style is different.

You know what you're going to get from Yacht Club.

He's just, he's-

His name's Lucas Pope.

Is that right?

Lucas Pope.

Yep.

Yeah.

Blood of the Dawnwalker is a game where there is time limit to be a vampire.

[laughs]