Interview done on August 9th 2024
In this new interview on DCDL, José María Meléndez, head of the studio Postmodern Adventures, set in Barcelona, and main author of its games, has agreed to answer my questions about the making of An English Haunting (see article here), a brilliant point-and-clik adventure game set in London during the Edwardian era. Enjoy!
Pour la version française, CLIQUER ICI !
Hello José, thank you so much for accepting this interview. An English Haunting was a fascinating adventure game. I really enjoyed it and would like to ask you a few questions about the creative process behind the game and the whole philosophy of the work you do in your studio, Postmodern Adventures. First, I’d like to know a bit more about the latter. Of how many people is it composed? You seem to be the main creator of An English Haunting. Is it true or did you collaborate with other artists? What were their roles? Is game-making your main activity? Has it always been?
Hey Florian! Thank you very much for your interest! Indeed, I’m in charge of almost everything: art, story, puzzle design, sound effects… Except for the music, for which I counted on great musicians such as Stefano Rossi and Rubén Giménez in the case of Nightmare Frames or Matías Olmedo in An English Haunting. I also got help from developer friends like Laura Haunt (from Dead Idle Games) or Rubén López (from Aruma Studios) on the technical side when certain elements of the Adventure Game Studio engine were beyond me. Emilio Almirón (from Chenke Games) made the templates for the characters’ walkcycles and some additional animation. The animation of Arthur Conan Doyle climbing the wall of Blackstone Asylum is his, for example. I feel comfortable working on all aspects of the game, but I also enjoy collaborating with these great friends. Without their help, my games would be much worse.
I don’t make games for a living. I wish I did! My real job is completely different. Postmodern Adventures is a hobby that fortunately is starting to work well. I wish I could do it full-time one day. Compared to my current job, making games is like taking a holiday.
On the game’s Steam page, alongside Postmodern Adventures, another entity is indicated as the co-publisher, called enComplot. Who are they and to what extent were they involved in the making of An English Haunting?
enComplot are my friends Javier Cadenas and Paco García. They are developing a very promising adventure game called The Season of the Warlock. We’ve known each other for more than twenty years since the three of us wrote for the Spanish adventure-game site Aventura y Cía. They have always collaborated in my games in one way or another. Paco, for example, has been in charge of the covers of my games since Urban Witch Story and he did all the portraits for Nightmare Frames, replacing the ones I had done in pixel art a month before the game was released in record time because he believed the game would benefit from it (as it did). Javier takes care of all the Steam stuff, manages translations, Spanish proofreading and is always there to solve any problems that arise during development. Such is the help and support I have always received from them that I decided to list our names as editors of An English Haunting. Which is something I should have done much earlier because, without them, perhaps there would be no Postmodern Adventures or it would be something quite different.
The pixel art and the writing of An English Haunting are truly impressive. You seem to be a real connoisseur of the British Edwardian era and, in particular, its literature. For ten hours, I felt like I was actually living in 1907 myself and you made me want to discover many horror / fantasy novels I’ve never read. Why did you choose to tell a story taking place in this specific historical period? Did you have to do a lot of research? Had you read before all the novels that you quote in the game?
A couple of months before launching Nightmare Frames, I was in doubt about what my next project would be. I had several ideas but none of them really convinced me. One day, browsing through my library to see what to read next, I came across a book of Arthur Conan Doyle’s horror stories and remembered his connection to the subject of early-20th-century spiritualism. I thought of those elites going to seances, reputed scientists investigating strange phenomena, and within ten minutes I basically had the structure of the game as it seemed to me a very interesting setting to explore. I was already familiar with the work of M. R. James, Bram Stoker, Lovecraft (although he is a later author, An English Haunting has a lot of him in it) or Sheridan Le Fanu. But I decided to immerse myself in authors I didn’t know at all, such as Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen and the horror stories of Conan Doyle, among others, to capture the essence of the era and the horror that was being made at the time. And I was fascinated by what I found in their pages. They are texts that, although a hundred years old, are still relevant today and work for today’s reader. The Empty House by Algernon Blackwood seems to me to be one of the best haunted-house stories I have ever read. It has an oppressive atmosphere and some disturbing events that helped me a lot in making the last part of the game. I can mention several short sories that fascinated me such as The Horror of the Heights by Conan Doyle. It’s modern, fascinating, a century ahead of what’s told in Jordan Peele’s Nope. I couldn’t stop reading The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen and I devoured everything I had not read by M. R. James. This literature has been a great discovery. I have become a die-hard fan and still read other authors from that era. As I said before, I think they are stories that can still surprise the reader today.
The problem with point-and-click games is often the same: the player ends up consulting a walkthrough to find out what they missed and stop going around in circles. The constant backtracking can be tedious. It’s not the case in An English Haunting. I must have done it once, just because I was in a hurry to discover the rest of the great story. How did you manage to make it so well-paced? So well-balanced? Is it something that is done along the way and could have gone wrong or was the whole architecture planned in advance?
I don’t usually plan the design of my games in advance. I do have a structure in mind of what and how things could happen. But I am doing the design of the scenes and puzzles as I go along. It is a very organic way of working that I feel comfortable with, since I am surprised by how the game goes. So if you liked the design of the game, it means that this way of working works or I’ve just been very lucky! Anyway, I’ve been playing adventure games for most of my life and I’m aware of what I want my games to be like. What I want and what I don’t. I guess that helps too.
As an indie writer and sometimes translator, I was amazed at the quality of the English translation. Was this your doing or was the game initially written in Spanish and then translated by a professional? Is a French translation on the way?
Thank you very much! The game was originally written in Spanish and translated into English by Emilio Almirón. Later, Jack Allin (of Adventure Game Hotspot) served as proofreader. So all the credit goes to them. As for translations, unfortunately it will not be possible for the game to appear in languages other than English and Spanish. A professional translation is not cheap and we are talking about games where the budget is quite low. For this reason, you will find that some non-English speaking adventure-game developers only translate their games into English. We would all like our games to be in as many languages as possible. But as I say, it’s a question of budget.
You’re obviously very much attached to old-school point-and-click mechanics. What is your gaming history? What games have influenced you the most and what recent games did you particularly enjoy playing?
I was a fan of interactive fiction during the 80s, although I must confess that I did not live through the so-called Golden Age of Adventure Games. As a teenager, I was able to play adventures like Leisure Suit Larry and the Land of the Lounge Lizards or Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis on a friend’s computer, but it wasn’t until the late 90s when I really got into this genre. Just when that Golden Age was over! Unlike many adventure-game developers, LucasArts has influenced me the least when it comes to designing adventure games. I connected more with Sierra even though their designs were not as strong. Leisure Suit Larry 3 or Gabriel Knight 3 have taught me more than all of LucasArts’ work, even though they are games I love. My background is complemented by more obscure games like Dark Seed II or Harvester, which are far from perfect, but the atmosphere and exploration of those games is something I’ve always wanted to achieve. Nightmare Frames is very much influenced by these two aforementioned games, by the way.
The list could go on with The Will of Arthur Flabbington, The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow, Shards of God, Stranger in Utopia… I would need more space to name them all. I’m currently about to finish Cosmic Void’s Twilight Oracle and I’m looking forward to the release of their next game Devil’s Hideout. It’s definitely a great time for adventure games. Wonderful and inspiring titles are coming out every year.
I’ve recently interviewed Alexis Corominas, one of the devs of Arise: A Simple Story, also based in Barcelona. He told me that there were mostly small studios in Spain, making indie games, and that the recent period had been quite hard for everyone due to the global crisis in the gaming industry. What do you think of that? What’s your situation? Do you communicate a lot with the other Spanish studios to try to, somehow, join forces? Have indie games become a new general standard as they cost much less than mainstream AAAs many players (like me) have grown somewhat tired of?
I don’t know if I belong to the industry, but I don’t feel part of it in the sense that I’m just a guy who develops games when work and family allow it. And most of the developer friends I have contact with are in a similar situation. They don’t do it full-time and the games they make are not part of their livelihood (although it helps!). There is a lot of cordiality between us. We usually show the progress we are making in the game, contribute ideas, polish puzzles or improve the graphic aspect through constructive criticism. We treat other people’s games as if they were our own, so it’s incredibly satisfying to see a developer friend succeed. I don’t know if any of us will get far in this business. But I like to move at these levels and I think that’s where I belong.
As an independent writer, I fear that the growing use of AI in the artistic field will quickly smother human creativity and destroy many jobs (scriptwriting, graphic design…). What is your opinion on the matter? Have you turned to AI tools at some point in the making of An English Haunting? Is there no way around it now?
I share your pessimism about AI on an artistic level. In theory, it is a tool that can help us with repetitive or boring tasks. For example, I was recently setting up one of the scenarios for my new game. It was an exterior where cars from the 30s passed in the foreground. I had to draw about six of them to give variety to the scene. In those moments I would have liked to use a tool to which I could say « make me twenty car models with my own pixel-art style ». Once the moral dilemmas about what material the machine is based on to create can be resolved, I believe that this use would benefit artists as it would help them optimize their time. As we all know, any technology is good or bad depending on the use that is given to it. We are facing a technology about which we still do not know what its final use will be. At the moment, what we are seeing is discouraging, especially for artists. But since we will have to live with AI, I only hope that it is more beneficial for everyone than harmful. Oh, and everything you see, read and hear in An English Haunting is made by a human being.
To conclude, José, could you tell me about your other games? I mean the ones you made before An English Haunting. Are there some new projects in the pipeline already?
In the year 2020, which was the beginning of Postmodern Adventures, I released three games: Urban Witch Story, Dead Dimension and Billy Masters Was Right. All of them are free and can be found on my itch.io page. Urban Witch Story is a police and supernatural thriller about a couple of police officers during the Los Angeles riots in 1992. I wanted to imitate the graphic style of Sierra Online’s first adventure games like Police Quest or Gold Rush. I thought it was going to be my first and last game so I put all my love and experience into it. Dead Dimension was my next game. It is a small narrative and experimental adventure. It is the only one of my games that is not translated into English and I think that is how it will remain. Weeks later, I launched Billy Masters Was Right, a short adventure that I did during the 2020 lockdown with the sole intention of checking if I could do an adventure in a month and it ended up becoming the fans’ favorite game and the one with which many players met Postmodern Adventures.
After these three free games, I wanted to raise the level and make my first commercial game: Nightmare Frames, based on an idea that was on my mind long before the studio was born. It worked quite well, the public liked it and it won several awards. Right now, I’m developing a new adventure game based on the work of H. P. Lovecraft. It will not be an adaptation of his stories, but situations, places and characters that Lovecraft fans will recognize will appear. I see it as a spiritual sequel to my first game, Urban Witch Story and to describe it to you in some way I could say that it is Lethal Weapon in the city of Arkham.
Thank you so, so much, José, for your time and the fascinating insights! ¡Enhorabuena!
Florian Baude (Des Clics & des Lettres)
AN ENGLISH HAUNTING (article about the game)