Interview – The unabridged Cosmo D discussion

I did a professional-like summary of my interview with Cosmo D. Real professional, like something you’d read in Time Magazine. Not that I read Time Magazine, so I actually have no idea what their interviews are like.

But maybe that wasn’t enough for you. Maybe you’re curious about everything that Cosmo D said to me. I’m not going to give you that. Not entirely. Because, like myself and everything else, Cosmo D has a lot of idiosyncratic trail-offs, “ums,” and “likes.” So, I’m going to edit those out.

What follows is a gently edited transcript of the interview. It’s edited for clarity, and I moved a couple questions around for chronological flow. Otherwise, this is basically everything. I’m also adding the same conclusion that I had in the abridged version because this took a really long time to transcribe and edit this, and I just want it out there.

BUILDING OFF-PEAK CITY

ZOEY – Your first game, Saturn V, was designed as a musical companion to the music of Archie Pelago. What made you want to try that?

COSMO D – I had a moment in time where I was curious and kind of feeling like I’ve been exploring sound and trying to improvise and take listeners on a kind of journey with the sounds I was making, and with the music I was writing. And it kind of just shifted one step into, ‘now let’s try the visual.’ This was maybe like 2013. Unity was what it was at the time. I think it was getting easy enough to use for somebody with some kind of technical proficiency, generally, to mess around with it. 

So I was in my mess around phase with Unity as an outgrowth of me messing around with music software – Ableton Live, Max MSP. And I was like, “this seems kind of cool.” It was kind of an anything goes sort of medium. There aren’t really any expectations on what I need to make or what is expected of me. So there was a liberation there.

So, Saturn V kind of came out of that. Both Saturn V and Off-Peak were these music games. They were an aural auditory experience around the Archie Pelago sound world. And so it kind of grew out of that. It was like a music video in four dimensions. As a promotional tool, it was like, ah, whatever. But along the way, it got really fun to make 3D worlds, and there was this feeling of playful discovery that, frankly, hasn’t really gone away, even now.

Once I could kind of tell these three-dimensional sort of spatial stories and build this world, I realized how much I wanted to do it. But it really just started literally with messing around, having no expectations. I was already out in the world. I wasn’t like in a game school or a part of like a student scene. I was a professional out in the world, like, figuring shit out. And it was liberating to be like, ‘oh, this is cool.’”

THE VISUAL AND THE AURAL

ZOEY – I always thought of Off-Peak as a very visual game, perhaps because I’m a more visual person. Were you a visual artist before going into game design?

COSMO D – No. No. I had no formal visual training. No informal visual training. It’s all been just shoot from the hip. Like collages, “this looks interesting.” Or, “this could go with this.” Along the way, I would kinda learn techniques. I would kind of learn some dos and don’ts. But no, there was no training at all. I think just by the nature of being in an adjacent art or, you know, working in the arts. You kind of just pick up on things that work and things that are appealing to the eye.

Now I was deep in advertising as far as, like, music composition for ads, and electronic music, and dance music. So, I was studying aesthetics around, like, how dance music packaging works and how vinyl labels package their tracks. And then at the same time, I was hitting music to picture a lot in my quote unquote “day job.” So, I was definitely thinking about visuals and thinking about how things were perceived. But it was more through osmosis than training or direct training.

ZOEY – Did you make the models used in the games, or did you get them from asset stores?

COSMO D – It’s a mix. I’d say the more crude and basic models are mine, and then the ones that probably look more elaborately made; I would get from that from a store. So, for example, I think the chandelier in The Norwood Suite; I definitely made that from like some primitives that I kind of assembled together. Oh, and the router that you turn on. But the cars were either, you know, free asset store cars or asset store cars.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE PIZZA

ZOEY – What about the pizza?

COSMO D – I made the pizza. Well, what I would do is, I would take an image of a pizza, and I would just, like, literally map it to a flat cylinder with rounded edges. It’s super crude. It’s very straightforward.

ZOEY – Super crude, but it looks delicious.

COSMO D – It does. The thing about it is, it’s not the shape of the pizza. It’s definitely the texture. And I was trying to be really mindful of that. In a game engine, you have the texture, but then you have the sort of normal map and other elements to it that make it shiny or give it a little bit of

a dimension bumpiness or whatever. And that’s where I was really like, ‘how does the light hit off the cheese of the pizza?’ I didn’t want it to be too shiny, ’cause I didn’t want it to look plastic, but I didn’t want it to just look like rubber and absorb light. So there had to be this balance of how the light reflects and hits off of this cylinder with a pizza texture on it.

ANOTHER SLICE

ZOEY – Why are your games so pizza-centric?

COSMO D – The pizza, it’s interesting with pizza because, to me, pizza’s, like, this deep vice. And it’s also this obsession in the city that I’ve called my home for a long time – New York. The various ways that pizza has evolved in New York, whether it’s been like the kind of the newer trendy pizza or the old school pizza; the sliced joint. Like it’s a kind of cultural thing in the city, and different joints are opening up and closing and this and that, and it has its history.

But I think for me, pizza works because – it works on a number of levels. It grounds the game. You’re in this kind of surreal place, but everybody’s having pizza. Like, pizza’s a relatable food. It’s almost an international food. It’s a street food. It’s a relatable food that people can enjoy. Nine out of ten people, when they hear pizza’s coming, are gonna respond positively to it. So there’s a positive association with it. It’s fun. It’s a little bit of silliness. It’s, like, kick back and have a pizza. There’s a certain positive celebratory element to it, but it’s also a street food. 

And it’s really hard to make it home unless you know what you’re doing. You need very good equipment to make a pizza to the standard that you get out [at a restaurant]. Or you just need an extremely hot oven, or you just need to really know what you’re doing, or be super in the practice of making pizza at home. So there’s that element of, it takes skill, but it’s a lot of fun.

It’s still affordable, more or less. It can be gourmet, it can be upscale, it has a heritage. It came from Italy, but then it kind of got reworked.

Also. With Club Low, pizza was the bridge that helped me kinda reinforce the rules of the game. As that game brought in dice mechanics, there was a lot of things I was asking the player to keep in their head that I’d never asked them to before. I was teaching this game while I was teaching the systems and how they work.

So, pizza was a thematic way to reinforce the rules of the game. It was a way to say, “Oh, cheese does this and sauce does that.” It served as a practical gameplay bridge. On top of all the sort of cultural symbolism going on.

ZOEY – Replaying your games, I kept on having to order pizza because I couldn’t get it out of my head.

COSMO D – It puts you in it!

STEALING FACES

ZOEY – Where’d you get the faces?

COSMO D – Early on it was this, I was using this software called Mixamo Fuse. It was, like, Unity Asset Store had promoted it as a way for indie or more indie-leaning developers to make models. And for a while, I was cruising with it. It was a lot of fun to use! But then Adobe bought it and kind of mothballed it. So, that was around when I wanted to switch it up. And so, for Off-Peak City, my approach changed. I actually took some old – I still can’t believe I did this – but, um, I basically would go on these old mugshot websites of, like, early mugshots, because I was looking for some public domain stuff. And there’s this site that’s, like, mugshots from Australia in the turn of the century.

And the reason why I was looking for mugshots is because I needed a front view and a profile view, and these mugshots had them. I would just put mugshots over a piece of software that could allow you take the mugshot and turn it into a 3D face. So then I had a 3D face, and then I would put hair on it. I’d make the hair, or I’d find a hair asset, put it on, add some unique accessory, make some clothes, like, you know, wing it with some clothes, there it was. So yeah, my approach changed.

ZOEY – Out of all the possibilities in my head of where you might have got them, that wasn’t one I had envisioned.

COSMO D – That’s kind of intense! I wanted them to have the look of somebody who’d done something really bad. And I made sure that the mugshots were not murderers or people who committed serious crimes, like crimes beyond like petty thievery or some small time stuff. Because the small time stuff, you get a lot of that churn of people in the system.

So, yeah, that was kind of my approach. It hasn’t changed all that much, but there’s so many pieces of software out there that can kind of reconstruct a face. I wanted it to be more photography-leaning, even if it didn’t quite hit the mark of hyperrealism, it just needed to be real enough to kind of make you feel like this is a person. This could feel like a person that I would talk to. The Mixamo models were definitely more like clay-like. But after that, I wanted there to be more of an ambiguity of, you know, let this person exist as a real person, but also as a digital version of this person.

THE NORWOOD HOTEL

ZOEY – Despite being very abstract, the hotel from The Norwood Suite felt like a real place. What was the inspiration behind it?

COSMO D – I think there was an amalgam of inspirations, but if you go up the Hudson River, in the Hudson Valley, there are these sort of hotels and kinda lodges that one can stay at that are just, like, hiking lodges or old hunting lodges. 

The Mohonk Mountain House is one. There’s a castle in Connecticut that was like this actor’s old mansion. Yeah. Gillette Castle. He was a silent movie actor that played Sherlock Holmes. It was, like, his work-y mansion home that is now a park. Just these woodsy estates that exist in kind of the Northeast that are either hotels, or they’re museums now, or they’re still private estates.

If you’re up for a little adventure, they’re there. They’re usually on some scenic overlook, and they look over this sort of valley of, you know, autumnal trees. In terms of just geography? Yes. In terms of the specific, like, Norwood as a character, that was another amalgam of people in my professional life and people that I’ve come to know that I was thinking about.

FAMILIAR FACES

ZOEY – Are any of the player characters from the game supposed to be the same person?

COSMO D – I think it’s interpretive. I actually really like that. As I’m moving into Moves of the Diamond Hand, I’m really realizing what it was that I was trying to say with my earlier work. I don’t think the perspective has actually shifted that much, with the exception of Club Low. Club Low was like a deliberate shift to be this clone character who could be you as him. It was very much a third-person almost. It’s like a “and now for something completely different” kind of moment in terms of gameplay, and who you are, and what the game is telling you. 

But the other games, I do think they were always either me or you, the player, or you as who you want to be in the game. It’s really up to you. Then I take that idea even further with Moves of the Diamond Hand. Who are you? Really? What are these common skills that I’ve given you to play around with? Who do you see yourself as in this game? I ask the player directly. I ask them whether it’s them as a persona. Them being like, “I’m gonna be a jerk in this game,” or, “I’m gonna be my real self in this game,” or I’m gonna be like this heightened version of myself in this. I do leave it up to the player, but I think I hold up a mirror and I say, “It’s the player, it’s you,” but it’s also kind of me ’cause I’m making it, but it’s maybe both of us, or maybe this is the conversation you’re having with me in this game.

TALES FROM OFF-PEAK CITY VOL. 2

ZOEY – Is there ever going to be a Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 2?

COSMO D – I think that’s what Moves of the Diamond Hand is sort of emerging as. It’s like a spiritual sequel because it does a lot of the same things that that game did in terms of it’s setting being a city block. It’s dealing with local issues. It’s revisiting the factory, which was featured in [Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 1]. Some of the same characters are coming back.

I think, I’m not calling it volume two more for the purposes of, like, my own sense that time has passed, and I’m in a different place. If I was gonna do a Vol. 2, it would probably be a commitment to what Vol. 1 was, which is more of a narrative adventure,light dialogue experience, or more of a walking sim vibe.

Yeah. But this is something else. But it’s using a lot of the same DNA. So, I guess the answer is: I don’t think that’s where I’m heading. And in terms of the nomenclature, I think it’s all of a piece. I don’t know, it just feels like: Vol 2, this is it. But I just don’t wanna call it that because this is its own thing too. But I didn’t know where I was going then. I know where I’m going with this game, but, you know, within the larger arc of the work that I’m doing. Maybe Vol 2 will make sense as a return to that, or maybe it’ll be something else.

I don’t know.

ZOEY – There’s an old Steam post where you said that you were working on Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 2. Did it evolve off Betrayal of Club Low? Does that sound accurate?

COSMO D – Yeah. When I was making Vol. 1, I thought it was gonna be more of an anthological collection of games that would be shorter. They would all kind of go to different parts of the neighborhood.

I wanted to turn it into sort of this…. Like, I was watching this series on Netflix called Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories, which is about literally a midnight diner. And every episode is, like, somebody else comes to the diner, and they have their issue and the guy at the diner helps ’em solve it.

And it’s kind of chill. It’s a cozy show with a bit of wistfulness. And I was like, “Oh, I wanna make a game that’s all these little stories.” And I kind of did that. I started to do that. But then, I don’t know, I think then I played Disco Elysium and was playing a lot of tabletop RPGs, and I was like, “I think I actually wanna make something with mechanics now. I think I can do it technically, like, I have the chops to put numbers in the system and play with that.” And plus, I think my heart’s telling me, “Go for it. I feel it.” Like my own artistic urge shifted. So, I shifted my plans and who’s gonna tell me I can’t do that? Thankfully, I’m very fortunate that I could just kind of take this chance.

FOR HOMEWORK

ZOEY – I ask every developer I interview this, but: do you actually play video games, or do you just make them?

COSMO D – Well, it’s an interesting question. It’s interesting because I play games. I’ve been playing games my whole life. I think that was part of why I made the transition from music to game making. I locked into it super hard because I’m a lifelong gamer.

When I was like. Five, four, even three years old. I got an early Nintendo. Yeah. Everybody had one in their house. That was part of it. But also early PC. You know, like King’s Quest, the old-school Ultimas, Ultima VI, Ultima VII, Battle Chess. All the Origin Systems stuff. As I was getting older, I was of that generation where my parents were like, “You cannot get a console, but we will give you a computer, because the computer, at least you can do homework on it.” But obviously, the computers at the time, you could play games on them. 

The games that were awesome to me were, like, MechWarrior 2 or Crusader: No Remorse, Wing Commander, Command and Conquer – the ‘90s-era computer games. That was my childhood. And I had a friend, we played all that. We played Myst. We played it all. 

And then when I got to college, I got deeper into old-school DOS games. The DOSBox emulator came out, and I played old DOS games on emulators just to see what they were like. Planescape Torment, Baldur’s Gate. I consider myself a deep head of a certain kind of game. Specifically, RPGs; computer RPGs. I’m not one of those people that goes on the forums and  gets in the weeds about what game is what, but just as a fan, my fandom for those games is really, really, really deep.

To this day, I still actively play when I can. When I have the bandwidth. Metaphor: ReFantazio, Stoneshard. I played this game, Shadow of the Road, this new game coming out that’s a Feudal Japan RPG. Warhammer: Rogue Trader. A bit of Balatro A ton of board games on my shelf. Sagrada. The Evil Within, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, Battletech, Stellaris, Caves of Qud. I’m all over the place. Silent Hill 2, just for some vibe. I’ve been playing some Stray, ’cause I’m checking out environmental design.

I think it’s a mix of playing because I love playing, but also appreciating the craft, and studying the craft. I’ll get to a point where I’m playing, and I’ll be like, “Oh my God, I gotta make something. I gotta stop playing, ’cause I’m so inspired that I wanna get back to working on my thing.” It’s a very nice symbiotic thing. I’ve always loved play as an activity, as an act, as a thing to bond with other people. It inspires me so much, that I’ve made these games. That’s kind of what happened.

HOW AWESOME

ZOEY – How awesome is Moves of the Diamond Hand going to be?

COSMO D – How awesome is it going to be?

ZOEY – How awesome is it going to be?

COSMO D – Wow. I think you could kind of tell what I’m reaching for here with the demo and where I’m taking it. But, I think, ultimately, what I wanna do with this game is, I wanna hit players on a few levels. 

One is the level that I’ve established, which is the sort of aesthetic exploration, narrative level. They’re moving through this space. They’re like, “What’s going on, like, what’s the story here?” That’s something I want to have still put a premium on for sure. And now that it’s back in first person, you get, you’re right there again. 

The next level is the gameplay. The strategy of, “Ooh, what dice do I use and where do I go?” You know, “how do I level up?” An RPG-like satisfaction level that I feel like I started to hit on Club Low. I want more of that, and there’s more ways to expand your powers, but they’re all thematic. There’s the pizza dice and now there’s disguises – the deepening of those systems so you get that satisfying feeling, that I get whenever I play an RPG. That satisfying gameplay part of my brain is also getting tickled. 

And on top of that a narrative guide. A way of pulling players into this mystery. Like, who are these people? What does the Diamond Hand really want? What’s going on with this election? That layer of, “I wanna keep playing, not just because the vibe is right. The gameplay feels satisfying, and the RPG systems are clicking for me, and I’m in that flow state. And the plot is really intriguing, and I just wanna see what happens next.”

So, that’s my goal. I haven’t pushed myself as far narratively until this game. It’s a bigger, longer game. But if I can hit all of those parts, and they’re all in working in harmony and in synchronicity, I’ll be very, very pleased.

That’s the awesomeness that I hope I can give players. It’s gonna take a lot of work. It’s taking a lot of work now and all feedback is good feedback, but that’s the work I love. That’s the challenge I love. That’s the journey we’re on. So I accept that journey. I accept those challenges and, hey, I’ll do my best, you know. But it’s all love. That’s the passion. That’s hopefully the awesomeness that we’re gonna give you.

THE MOST SCREENSHOT-ABLE GAMES

ZOEY – I refer to your games as being some of the most screenshot-able games out there. How do you approach setting up a scene because it feels very deliberate.

COSMO D – Setting up a scene for a screenshot. I approach it from a top-down view. I kind of think about the broad strokes. For the most recent game you have the gator skull at the keyboard playing the note. That was just like a thought I had. But then, I zero in, and I get into the details like, what’s the music on the piano? Then I get into the lighting and the kind of balance of how the color works. 

For Off-Peak, it was a big, huge Battersea-like power plant; like looking straight on at a power plant. Imposing huge doors. You go down the stairs, there’s an aquarium – big, broad stroke stuff. And once I got the big broad strokes idea, then I think about the finer details. What’s the sky lighting, what’s in the frame, what’s out of the frame, what’s the point of focus? 

Again, I don’t really have specific training on this. I really just do it based on instinct and vibe and feel. It seems like people take things from my work that I wasn’t intending. Both good or not; intentional or unintentional. I don’t know. It’s right from the heart. It’s right from the vibe, you know. It’s an uncompromising idea that I’m just like, “This is it.” Boom. I try to bring some care and attention to it, but there it is.

ZOEY – I think really that’s sort of the way a person comes through their art. They kind of make it up as they go along, unfiltered.

COSMO D – Yeah. Indeed. 

ZOEY – Do you ever think about where the player’s going to stand when they’re, like, talking to a character? One scene that really sticks with me in The Norwood Suite is when you’re talking to the Blue Moose delivery guy. Or, I guess he’s not a delivery guy, he just likes doing it.

COSMO D – He’s, like, a rep.

ZOEY – Yeah. You’re talking to him, and from where I was positioned, I was looking out across the river or body of water at the city in the background and the parking lot is below, and it was all framed so well. Did you intend for that, or did it just come together as a happy accident?

COSMO D – In the case of that particular interaction and the system as it existed, there’s this zone of interaction where you can sort of position yourself in proximity of the characters, and wherever you are in that proximity, the text kind of follows you. I think I was kind of going for, like, let the player frame it how they want within this zone of proximity. I think I knew that there was a chance you would approach him from that angle, and you could see out into the expanse while talking to him. That was intentional. It wasn’t so intentional where it had to be just so. I think there was a bit of letting the player dial in the exact framing, you know, ’cause you do still have control over your mouse. You do still have control over your movement. 

In the newer games, I don’t do that. In the newer games, I actually do set up the camera to wean into a very specific framing. That’s more a limitation of the way the rules of the dice and the interactions work. There’s a framework that I need to put for that. And I’ve thought about, “could I do this ambient kind of approaching system again?” But as it stands, I haven’t been able to return to it.

But no, it was a mix. I think it was, like, I give you the player space to find your way to talking to this person from this framing. ‘Cause I think you could talk both from his right side or his left side, but then you can set it exactly how you want and put the text in the frame. It was a bit of me, but maybe it’s a little bit of you too.

OFF BEAT OFF-PEAK

ZOEY – Do you think you’ll ever branch out from the RPG or adventure genres, or do you feel you’ve found your niche?

COSMO D – That’s a good question. I think about other games that I could make. I also feel like I could take some of these dice resolution mechanics and put them in something more strategy or more like, you know, city gangs taking over the city, block by block.

I’ve had those ideas, but knowing how long this has taken and what it’s asked of me as a creator – of my time and brain power – this feels like exactly the thing I want to be making right now. This is the challenge that makes sense. And others could emerge out of this much like Club Low emerged from games that I was playing, and the games that I was checking out, and stuff I was already doing. I kind of go with what feels right. This feels super, super right. It also feels super, super scary ’cause this is a big project, but it does feel right. 

So. We’ll see. Let’s get this one over the line first. Let’s get this done. Let’s bring this to its full fruition, and along the way, sure, I’m open to other stuff. But I know how long and how hard these things take. Especially as a developer.

I’m my own boss. I’m following my own whims here. The plan is to do it and to put it out there and to see what happens. I wasn’t expecting Club Low to do what it did, but then I saw it, and I was like, “Oh, okay, let’s respond to that.” And so I’m gonna do this, see what happens, and then respond. That’s kind of always been how I’ve operated.

COSMO D INC.

ZOEY – Have you ever considered bringing a team on board under you or do you prefer to just work alone where you can experiment and do what you want?

COSMO D – So, I have worked with people in this sort of orbit collaborator sense. Like my colleague, Julián, who’s got this game coming out called Despelote. It’s coming out within the month (Zoey’s note: It’s out now). It’s really lovely. It’s a game about football or soccer; about his life. Growing up in Ecuador. He helped me with the camera system. He did all the post-processing effects in Off-Peak City (Zoey’s note: I think he’s referring to the literal photography camera, where you pick up film that applies different effects to the images you take). And I have somebody – Chase – helping with some of the odds and ends environmental design in the new game. I’ve had people help QA test. Norwood Suite had a publisher.

People have kind of come in and out of my orbit when I’ve been able to bring them. And it’s been great. I love having that vibe, and having that sort of team, even if it’s a temporary team.

People playtesting, giving feedback, my Discord server – in a way, that feels like collaboration. I’m putting the work out, they’re playing and giving me feedback and contributing where possible when there’s a budget for it. 

Now, in terms of like an actual team, like, me as a studio with X people working under me or with me… That would be cool! But the economics of… and my professional capacity just hasn’t allowed for it. If I was gonna bring somebody on to that degree, I would want to do it on a level of professional that I don’t have access to at the moment. And there’s been publisher interest in my work, but it’s never really gotten to that point.

So, yeah, it’d be nice, and I think that would be a really nice next step for what I’m doing. But if it’s not there, then this is still good. What I’ve got now is still good. I don’t work totally alone. You know, there’s always people in the mix. There’s a community around what I do. So, that’s been good for now.

NOT QUITE CLOSING THOUGHTS

ZOEY – That’s all I’ve got. Anything you wanted to add?

COSMO D – Yeah, we’re aiming for Moves of the Diamond Hand to come out in the Fall as an Early Access game. It’s gonna still be a work in progress, but I think enough will be in it to give people a sense of what they’re signing on for and where we’re taking it. Where I’m taking it. I say “we” in part because Chase is still working with me and for me. And people are testing it constantly and stuff. So, it does feel like a bit of a collaborative effort. 

Shout outs to everybody who’s been on the ride so far. I mean, it’s only going deeper. The thing I’m saying now is the thing I think I’ve been wanting to say the whole time, and now I have all the pieces in place, and it’s just about doing it, and having the hindsight of the past work and the lessons learned from the past work to hopefully guide this work to be the most impactful it can be. To hopefully live up to that vision and that awesomeness that I’m working on.

ZOEY – Are you still planning for it to be chapter based? That’s what your PR guy mentioned.

COSMO D – Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So it is chapter based. The chapters are kind of big chapters. This next chapter is like a hub world with spokes. You can do a lot of stuff and then, ultimately, it leads up to a narrative punctuation mark that gets you into the third chapter.

The actual structure of the story is pretty much what I want. The way it gets divvied up, this next chapter could maybe even be two chapters. I don’t know. I’m still thinking about the cadence of how it’s going to frame itself. That’s emerging. Whether it’s one big super chapter or whether it’s a series of chapters within, we’ll see.

The overarching narrative is there, and things happen and time passes, events carry, and your decisions have ramifications at the end. So, that’s all building, and I think having it in a chapter structure helps guide the player towards these major points.

So, yes. Chapters.

LIVING DOCUMENT

ZOEY – Oh! I did have another question. How many comments on pizza toppings are there in Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 1? Do you have a count on that?

COSMO D – Yeah. So, the way that I did it was that, if you hit like a certain window of toppings, they would, they would say something. If you went under, they would say something else. If you went over, they would say something else. It was different from topping to topping, person to person. If you didn’t put any toppings, they would just say, “Wow, you gave me some bread. Thanks.” That was kind of a little egg. 

It was somewhat granular. But, within the realm of… you know, I had fun with it. I’ll just say that. It was somewhat random, but I didn’t go nuts.

ZOEY – Yeah. It seems like you did.

COSMO D – I did go nuts because I made the game.

ZOEY – It seems like you did, because it’s a lot. I considered playing through the game multiple times to see how many of these comments I could find. So you don’t have, like, a spreadsheet or anything to keep it organized?

COSMO D – Everything was actually just a big… they were all just text files.

ZOEY –  Just a big living document?

COSMO D – Yeah, a big living document. Where it had its own IF check. Like, if over three, jump to this line. If under three, jump to this line. Very rudimentary text parsing that I just did that… hey, it worked. I mean, it got it done. It’s just straight up bootstrapped a little basic text parsing around the amount of ingredients.

THE PROCESS

ZOEY – It had a fascinating effect. Along with the individual book names on the spines that never repeated. Most people aren’t going to take the time to stand there and read them all, but just the fact that they are there is a fascinating extra feature.

COSMO D – That was because, within the scope of what that game was doing, I could go deep on those details. And I wanted to go deep on those details, ’cause that was a game about going to somebody’s private place, delivering their pizza, and taking in their whole world.

So, in a way, that’s meditative. It’s like the magnetic poetry on the fridge in the kitchen of Norwood Suite. It’s like free association, riffing, who are these people? What do these names mean to me. It was very much just being in the creative headspace and putting it together. Just sort of having fun with it.

ZOEY – Just sort of enjoying the process.

COSMO D – Enjoying the process. A hundred percent. That kind of detail work can be tedious. It can be very like, “who’s gonna read this?” But the people who do read it, boy, they get given this whole world, and they appreciate it that much more.

I’m definitely of the mind of, like, this work may not reach the amount of people that other games might, but the people that it does reach, the quality of that experience and the meaningfulness of that connection and the richness of that is more valuable to me than volume. And I think that’s very clear that I would rather have a very meaningful one-on-one conversation than be in a sea of people and have less meaningful dialogues or exchanges. Quality over quantity, and yeah, like one apartment, with one bookshelf, with a lot of bespoke names that speak to the world and the fiction of that world is… I guess I just really care, you know? I just wanted to go there. People do feel that. If they notice that.

THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS

ZOEY – I think they pick up on it, even if they don’t really recognize it. In college, my professors always instilled writing backstories for characters, even if you weren’t going to use them, because it would still be felt through the way you write the character.

COSMO D – Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Somebody similarly told me, “when you think about a place…” I think that he had played Off-Peak. I was getting into it, and he was kind of an informal advisor/mentor, and he was like, “When you think about a place, think about a hundred years of history in that place. Think about what happened a hundred years ago. What happened 80? What happened 50? What happened 30? That was The Norwood Suite. That was a lesson I tried to apply to that. If there’s a thing in a world, like if I put a prop in the game, I need to tell you… If somebody’s like, “Why is that wheel of cheese in the trunk?” Or, “Why is that giant hand holding up the apple?” I need to tell you with a straight face exactly why. And I think I can pretty much 99% of the time. I mean, when I put it there, I had a reason.

ZOEY – Okay, why is the cheese in the trunk?

COSMO D – The cheese is in the trunk because the people who were staying at the hotel, they wanna go on a picnic. And that was like their sort of leftover spillover of provisions that they brought to the hotel. And they left the cheese in the trunk. They just forgot about it. They checked into the hotel, but they left their provisions in the trunk.

And it’s the kind of cheese that like is sealed with wax so that it keeps better. It’s the wheel. It’s a cheese that can keep if you leave it in a trunk. But only for a little while.

ZOEY – So, is there a story behind the apron warnings in the kitchen?

COSMO D – There is. Bruce, who is kind of on the outs with the hotel, has been in a beef with Nadia, who manages the hotel. Everybody has it out for Nadia. But Nadia, this is her way of passively-aggressively telling people who work in the kitchen to put on their apron. If they’re not putting on their apron – if they’re just showing up to the kitchen in their sweatpants and, you know, chill clothes – it’s a health hazard. So, that was her way of fancifully reminding people to follow the proper dress code in the kitchen.

ZOEY – If years down the line you ever wanna do a special edition of The Norwood Suite, you should maybe add a commentary where, if a player’s looking at a scene, they can click to have you explain what the meaning of the scene is.

COSMO D – I’ve thought about that. You’re right. It’s possibly in the cards at some point.

ZOEY – It would be something that would interest me. ‘Cause I could sit here asking you questions about why things are the way they are in your games and probably listen all day. So, that would be pretty valuable to me.

COSMO D – The time will come. The time will definitely come. I’ve thought about remastering or future-proofing some of the older work. I mean, it’s been 10 years. It’ll be almost eight years since Norwood and that’s running on old Unity.

So, yeah, I think there’ll be a time and a place for either a remaster or, you know, a touch up, glow up, commentary. I don’t wanna change that much about it in terms of its presentation, but just a tech maintenance release and then, yeah, throw in some serious commentary on everything. ‘Cause it’s all there. It’s all there.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Talking to Cosmo D was really insightful to me. The impression I got when I first played Off-Peak was “this guy’s an artist.” It felt like walking into the modern art wing of a museum. His games don’t really feel like they’re informed by other video games. Even if you look at games like The Norwood Suite as a walking sim, it doesn’t really walk the same walk. Betrayal at Club Low is absolutely an RPG, but it doesn’t translate the tabletop origins to a video game in the same way as CRPGs or JRPGs.

Yet, it’s not that his games are outsider art – he plays video games like the rest of us. Rather, he just has a really healthy relationship with his art. He enjoys the process of creating. You can see this in all the small, unnecessary flourishes he adds, like how packed bookshelves in Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 1 have unique titles on every single book. He doesn’t even fancy himself a visual artist, with music being his main outlet.

The insight really frames his work quite well. Knowing that behind every scene and every character is carefree intent makes everything feel a lot warmer. More importantly, however, I’m going to be taking a much closer look at all the environmental details, knowing that there’s probably a story behind each of them.