It's finally time! If you've been holding off on getting all esoteric until some kind of juicy deal, then I am happy to announce:
(And it's a part of the Raw Fury June Sale! Check out all the other cool games too!)
Now it's been a while since I last gave you one of those blog posts / dev logs, so I figured I'd write you something relevant and/or interesting that's been on my mind lately. Namely, about a question I've been getting a lot during interviews and podcasts. Which is: why call it a Disco-like?
Three months ago, I released my first game. Though first might be a misnomer - Esoteric Ebb was the first big commercial game I’ve produced “myself”, in this unique collaborative development process. Fun. Bit of a miracle it worked out, really - but luckily Raw Fury supported it with an artillery barrage worth of financial support. Though while I try to not be too much of a pessimist, I don't think it’s an overreach to call the entire project vastly over-scoped and content-creeped. Entirely of my own making. But we did it! All the amazing artists who created the visuals and audio that make up JOR, as well as all those words that needed to be written/designed…
I am extremely happy with the results. Everything that EBBRPG could have been, it is. With the setup, with my own inexperience as a project lead, with the support - and most importantly when it comes to the public reception - with the ZEITGEIST.
Zeitgeist is defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as something that I don’t remember right now, but I personally tend to use it to describe the general vibes. The Vibes of the Times. I knew from the start of production to the end, that the reception to EBB would be controlled, defined, and born out of this Zeitgeist. All games are, of course. But even more so for Ebb - entirely because I made a number of harsh design-choices very early on. Three of them, in fact. Those three being:
A Vertical Dialog Box. Far more common today (and I love to see it), but back then this UI visual was a statement of intent. Almost like a challenge.
Chimes. Or interjection system. Talking skills that act as a whispering DM in your ear, granting context to your character’s reality.
A non-linear design. Simulating an open-ended TTRPG-like playground, yet built entirely with the illusionary constraints of authorial-intent.
With these three, I knew from the start that the comparison would be unavoidable. I also knew that, for this particular adventure, I really wanted to utilize these three elements, no matter what. I spent four years experimenting and prototyping, all to see how these three worked, why they worked so well, and if they truly were a good fit for EBBRPG. The answer was - a very subjective but strong - YES. And thus the game was born.
But the Zeitgeist was haunting me. Because ask yourself this:
Would you like to go up against the best game of all time?
Technically, I kind of like it. I mean, it’s idiotic from a marketing perspective. You want to go into the community of this game, which is steeped in some truly tragic drama (see the Noclip documentary for context), stand up and yell, “See what this huge collection of incredible artists put together after years of toil? Yeah, I can do that!”
You want to do that, all while the actual developers splinter off into various factions to each continue their own branch of spiritual secession? Why on earth would you ever want to do that?
For me, it’s because I really like interactive writing. I’m obsessed with it. Ever since I played Planescape: Torment in high school I just literally can’t get it out of my head. Since then, I have focused my entire life towards the singular goal of creating this precise style of game. But in order to do that - to get the wonderful privilege of being able to do that - I needed to make it profitable. Thus, I needed the Zeitgeist to accept my work. And I needed it to work out on my first try, because I had to bet everything on it.
So how then? How do you make that Disco-like without exploding in a bonfire of public disapproval?
From my perspective, it was always about dancing between a hard place and jagged rock. If Ebb was too close to its inspirations, it would falter as a poor imitation. If Ebb was too far removed, it would lose the edge of familiarity. And the correct position here does not exist. It’s simply a matter of statistics. That, and subjective artistic value. But from the perspective of I-want-to-be-able-to-pay-rent? It’s mostly statistics. I needed to balance what people wanted in a supposed ‘successor’, with the few strengths I had. Thus, I aimed at differentiating Ebb in two major areas: tone and theme.
Oscar Westberg’s wonderful visual style guided the tone quite a bit. Using that, I wanted to simulate a session, with me as your DM. That immediately would invoke, in most players I reckoned, a much lighter feeling. After all, we’re just hanging out you and I, rolling some dice, failing our way forward in a tiny low-stakes adventure. Comedy is in the forefront here. Which is risky by itself, since (as you can tell by reading the Steam reviews) if you don’t like any of the dumb jokes I’m writing, you probably won’t enjoy Ebb too much. But for those who do enjoy it, who find themselves ‘buying in’ into this campaign of mine, they’ll probably get what I’m going for. Which is the exact same thing I try my best at delivering when I play D&D with my friends - a fun time. And not just that, but a fun time that’s extremely influenced by my idiosyncratic behaviors. Your DM is, after all, going to improvise a lot in a truly reactive game, which automatically reveals all of their natural instincts and flavors.
There’s pros and cons with going for that rougher, improvisational tabletop tone in the writing. The biggest pro is probably that it's hilariously fun to write. Which I think shows in the final product.
Then for theme, it’s again just about my personal fixations. I absolutely adore political debate (especially the flaming hot internet-comment-section version - the stupider the better!) - especially when it’s about asking difficult questions. Even more so when it’s in context of modern cultural trends, seen through the lens of fascinating hypotheticals. That’s what fantasy does best in my eyes. It allows the author to craft a world where specific questions are put front and center and examined in philosophical extremes. What if death was a monetary predicament? What if someone defined Good and Evil long ago? What if Elves were Finnish? These deep and soul-shaking questions are really fun to explore. Mix that with the emotional through-line of Ragn - a 27-year-old ‘failure-to-launch’ archetype with a very specific obsessive talent, which is the only thing that supposedly gives him value. That by itself just screams thematic resonance to me (or maybe some other less pretentious term) to the point where his entire character was built surprisingly naturally and gradually over the course of development.
Did it work? Currently, Esoteric Ebb sits at ~5000 reviews on Steam. I expected maybe 2000 after a full year, so that’s a HUGE success in my eyes. We actually threw a little celebration here in Skövde last week for everyone who contributed. And it’s ~95% positive! Technical issues (while not negligible) haven’t impacted the reviews to any major degree. So those negative reviews are full of wonderful and insightful feedback that I will make sure to bring along and keep in mind for the next project. Especially in marketing, since trying to sell a product as a ‘successor’ to the greatest game of all time has the potential to backfire. That’s on me, sorry about that. As for the 95% who enjoyed it enough to perform a clerical ‘thumbs up’ - wonderful feedback in here as well. I actually read every single review, positive or negative. I think it’s extremely important for me to do so, since it gives me a unique chance to tap directly into the vein of the Zeitgeist.
I don’t remember who wrote it, but someone left a review saying - if Disco Elysium is about dealing with the past, Esoteric Ebb is about finding something worthwhile in the future. Maybe that’s the lighter tone from a friendly D&D session shining through, or maybe it’s my Swedish Socialism middle-class conformity moralistically and blindly goose-stepping over nihilism (realism?). Or maybe it’s just fantasy escapism. Either way, I do have to admit that it was all just a big gamble. I like numbers, so I always try to predict the outcomes by vibes and data. But for Ebb I never really had it settled for anything other than a fifty-fifty.
I’m extremely grateful for every single one of you who played, left a review, sent a message, joined the Discord, or posted some random comment about Ebb online. Apart from writing, reading your reactions is genuinely the best part of the job.
-Christoffer Bodegård