Death is ubiquitous in games, but it's far removed from the every day reality of death, and the fact that we're all going to die someday. Players have been racking up extra lives since the arcade era, and mass murdering enemies is so commonplace in games that Uncharted 4 gave a tongue-in-cheek trophy for your thousandth kill.

Laundry Bear Games’ first release A Mortician’s Tale takes a different tack. It’s a small narrative game set in a funeral home that presents players with a view on death from the perspective of a character deeply entwined with its effect, but not so much with its victims. 

Gamasutra had the pleasure of talking to designer and lead developer Gabby DaRienzo about making the game in a recent Twitch stream. She talked to us about the game's message about death, as well as about the game’s development, and what other indies hoping to find success with niche games can learn from A Mortician’s Tale. 

We've transcribed some of the more interesting passages of the conversation below.

You can watch the stream embedded above, or click here to see it. And for more developer insights, editor roundtables and gameplay commentary, be sure to follow the Gamasutra Twitch channel.

STREAM PARTICIPANTS:

Bryant Francis - editor at Gamasutra

Alex Wawro - editor at Gamasutra

Gabby DaRienzo - co-founder of Laundry Bear Games, designer and lead developer of A Mortician's Tale

Death can be gross

Wawro: I was reading this book (Smoke Gets In Your Eyes), and the thing about it and this game is, it opens up something that is very taboo and not talked about at Aall, at least here in America in my experience, and I was fascinated, I never thought to ask: "What happens after you die?" But it's crazy. It's marvelous and gross and beautiful in all kinds of measures. In this game that seems to be one of the core components, letting players go through the ritual, of cleaning and rubbing and scrubbing. This is going to sound weird, but how did you know where to set the bar on that? Because in the book, it can be real gross.

DaRienzo: Oh yeah.

Wawro: But the game so far has been really meditative and kind of beautiful and not at all icky or gross. So, I kind of wanted to know how you decided how far to go with that?

DaRienzo: I think, with the game, and understanding that it is a game, and encouraging players to interact with this stuff directly, it's really important for us to find the correct amount of accuracy versus comfort. It's very different to read about a thing, and imagine it, and directly interact with a dead body, like you are right now. There's a lot of things we did to try to find that balance, and I think we did an "okay" job at it? (laughs)

One of the things is the art, which as you can see is very purple. Part of that was inspired by the prototype I made a couple of years ago in Pico8, which has a very limited palette. It was really purple-y, and I really liked that aesthetic and wanted to bring that over to the full game. It matches the melancholy-yet-hopeful vibes we're bringing to it.

This monochromatic-ist color scheme also masks a lot of really gross things in the game. The body is not jaundiced, there's not any blood or guts or any kind of bodily fluids. We also distorted the people a bit, so their heads are a little big bigger. Not by much, they still are people, but they're distorted enough that we break any kind of uncanny valley vibes we're getting. It's very different to work on a body that looks like you than one that's a bit more cartoony.

That kind of balance we've also extended to quite a few things. Our sound designer did a good job at finding that balance, she was really comfortable with listening and doing lots of research for the game, and listening to really gross stuff. You don't have the sound on, but the embalming machine, every mortician that we've shown the game to says "You nailed it," it sounds so good. There's a lot of sounds that sound really good, but some are more cartoony and satisfying. It's well done in a way that's not too gross, there are a lot of sounds that could be gross, but she did a good job of making it not too bad.

Wawro: Yeah, that's exactly the word I would have used as I was playing through it, it's very animated and cartoony, it's very satisfying, like jabbing with the trocar, it's very satisfying in a strange way. Pop it in, pop it out, stuff comes out, it's very approachable in a way I appreciated. I was wondering if you had set the bar farther than that, then taken it back during development?

DaRienzo: There are a few things, yeah. We had talked about having children in the game. It was something we felt we had to talk about, and be honest about it. But at the same time, none of us on the team have had the experience of losing a child, so we didn't feel like it was appropriate for us to explore that so we decided to take that out.

Another thing, there are some grosser procedures when it comes time to preparing the body for burial. I tried to find a line, we wanted to show as much as we can, but there are certain things we can't show. One of the things, I think it's in (Smoke Gets In Your Eyes), it's talking about putting diapers on people so their bodies don't leak. And so we were like, there was no way that we could do that, there are certain stores we can't bring this to. There's a certain level of comfort that we need to aim for, and as soon as we bring in diapers we lose that.

Pricing a niche indie title

Francis: There was a question earlier. This is an interesting, a different kind of game to sell on Steam. It's kind of short, I'm actually doing my best not to run through the whole thing here. It's about an hour and 20 minutes, and you're selling it for 15 dollars. Once you realized that this was the game you wanted to make, and that you wanted to sell it through traditional online game marketplaces, how did you arrive at the decision to sell at this price, and how did you figure out how to market it to people who'd want to buy this game?