Cocoanut Hotel was no ordinary jam game. We developed the game last month in Los Angeles, during the catastrophic wildfires that blazed through the city. More than 18,000 structures were destroyed. At least 29 people died. My phone blew up with text messages and the toxic air felt rough on my lungs, but my wife and I are otherwise fine. Unfortunately, my game development partner Gwen was not so fortunate. She’s okay health-wise, but she suffered greatly during the wildfires. I decided to interview Gwen to learn more about her experience coding our game while evacuating from a natural disaster. Gwen’s story inspired me. No, not just the story. Gwen herself inspired me. Like, as a person.
This is part one of a three part series. You can expect part two in your inbox next week. Standard Disclaimer: I edited this interview for length and clarity.
(Geoffrey) I wanted to talk about the process of making Cocoanut Hotel from your perspective and mine to get the full story. This game turned out to be sort of an unusual game development journey.
(Gwen) Yes, definitely that.
I have introduced you in the newsletter in a prior issue, but why don’t you say in your own words who you are and what kind of game development you do?
I’m Gwen Katz, and I am the owner of Nightwell Games. That’s my own small solo game development studio. I’m an author, an artist and a game dev. I like building story-based games, puzzles, strategy games, games that have an emotional journey and make you think and engage your mind.
We regularly meet as part of a critique group you founded for game writers. It started at GDC two years ago?
Yeah, every month we get together with some other indie devs, game writers and narrative designers. To sort of critique and go over each other’s stuff.
It’s a nice group.
It’s a good group. And it was just complete serendipity. It was the people who were in the hallway who couldn’t get into the narrative design panel. And there were so many of us on the hallway, we just sat down and started our own. You were there. It was just such a cool group of people. It was like, okay, we can’t just let everybody walk away here. We gotta make this an ongoing thing.
I think this game development journey starts at that holiday party we went to last December.
The narrative designer party, right? Yeah, because we were talking about public domain stuff and what stories people wanted to adapt and what kind of adaptations do and don’t work well in different mediums.
I think I brought up the topic of the public domain, because I usually do. It’s one of my weird hobby horses.
We were talking a lot about Alice in Wonderland and how that was a gamey sort of story, because she just kind of goes from place to place and stuff happens. It would make for a good adaptation.
At that point, honestly, I actually wasn’t sure if I was gonna do the public domain jam, because I had just found out the show had a prize. They judge winners and losers. And I wrote an Equip Story newsletter about my experiences with IFComp and how competition put me in a bad head space. When I was developing for IFComp, I wasn’t developing something I wanted to make. I was developing something first and foremost that I thought could do really well in IFComp. When it didn’t meet my expectations, I was disappointed. So I was weighing this back and forth, because I love the public domain and I’ve wanted to do this jam for a while, but the contest element through me off.
The point is that I wasn’t a hundred percent sure if I was gonna do it. And then I saw in our critique group Discord, you posted and tagged me in the post: “Anyone else doing public domain jam? I know Geoffrey is in.”
I’m sorry, did I just do a shotgun wedding there? I had thought that you were definitely gonna do it at that point.
It wasn’t so much that you said, “Geoffrey, I know you’re in.” It was more that you were in. I was like, “Okay, well, if Gwen is doing it, that’s cool. Then it’s not just me and a bunch of weird randos.” And that pushed me to do it. Why did you decide to do the public domain jam?
I am also a huge fan of the public domain. I write a lot of historical fiction. I write a lot of stories inspired by history and stuff. And I’m constantly running up against the limits of the public domain. I’m working on this surrealist game and, like, a third of surrealist art is in the public domain and two thirds is not. It’s this awkward split about what you could use what you can’t use.
I’m a big fan of classic literature, art, all kinds of old stuff. So I’m always really interested to see this stuff come out and kind of get a second life. And the public domain is very, very powerful, right? For instance, H.P. Lovecraft has been extremely hot these past 10 years or so.
There’s that HBO show. There’s Call of Cthulhu, a very popular tabletop role playing game.
All the way down to like, you know, Cthulhu plushies on Etsy. That’s all because H.P. Lovecraft entered the public domain and goes from this obscure old author who mostly horror aficionados know about to someone who everybody knows about. I want to see that happen to more old authors.
We could have a conversation about whether H.P. Lovecraft was truly deserving of that much attention, but the point is it’s possible for that to happen because of the public domain. It isn’t just locked in a vault forever. It’s good for history and literature for us to be exposed to this old stuff, but it also inspires new creativity and new work.
So I was thinking, okay, Gwen is going to join the jam. Maybe this would be a fun opportunity to work with Gwen on something! I reached out to you and I said I was working on a hotel simulator based on The Cocoanuts, the Marx Brothers first film. You must’ve liked that idea enough to wanna collaborate.
Yeah, I thought that was a really fun idea. I’ve built a lot of sims in the past… Well, that’s actually not true. I think I’ve thought of more sims than I’m actually built.
Me too.
But I enjoy playing them and I’ve enjoyed them when I have built them. And I was like, “Nobody’s doing the Marx Brothers, right?” I was real confident that was gonna be something nobody else thought of.
For me, I’m a comedy nerd and I grew up with Marx Brothers. So the idea of being able to create a game that was fully authorized, because it’s public domain, that was a really cool opportunity.
I whipped up a prototype really quick over the holiday break. It was a two, three hour thing. It was basically an Adventure Snack, very dialogue and story driven. But with you on board, I was like, “Oh, Gwen works with Godot. Maybe this could be something bigger.” What did you think of that initial prototype?
Honestly, the prototype’s mechanics were actually quite solid already. It definitely had a ramping difficulty and a non-trivial balance, even in that very, very small version of the game, just trying to keep your money up and get enough guests.
Yeah, it was structured like an Adventure Snack, and that’s [the scripting language] Ink. It was very much how you would approach this sort of project in Ink. As events happening, right? As people coming up to you and talking to you and asking you to do things. But my thought was like the traditional sims. Old school, 90s, classic games. They’re all about managing different levels of resources and increasing and decreasing your budgets of different things. That’s more of a classic sim game approach. You’ve got these different levels of things you want to spend money on, you want to increase your marketing budget, you want to increase your housekeeping budget, and then different things will happen as a result.
I felt like you had the right vision for it. So we had a kickoff call about process. What were you hoping for from that meeting?
I don’t do a ton of collabs. I’m kind of choosy about the collabs I do. A lot of that’s just because it’s so important – far more important to me than what your skill sets are – is whether your personalities gel as a team. Which, in my experience, is completely unrelated to whether you gel as friends.
We hadn’t collaborated on stuff before. So I really wanted to make sure we felt like we were on the same page as a team, and we felt like we were excited about each other’s ideas. Especially because you’d given me this prototype that was very story-based and I was suggesting something more systems-y. I really wanted to make sure it didn’t feel like I was like erasing the work you’d done and just trying to take the project in like a different direction that wasn’t what you hoped for.
I was excited about what you were offering to bring to the table, because it was above and beyond what I was expecting. You showed me a UI mock-up prior to that meeting and it was like, “Oh shoot, this looks like an old PC shareware game. Hell yeah, this looks like Marx Brothers Carmen Sandiego.” I was like very into it.
That’s definitely kind of a reference point here, like those sorts of games where it would be your stats on a bar on the left, and a picture of the scene on the upper right, and then at the bottom, a bar with the dialogue or whatever’s currently happening.
So we divided up responsibilities. I was going to work on getting the Photoshops of all the character images, then write the dialogue and script the events. What was on your plate?
I had a mock-up of the UI, but I didn’t have the real UI. Then getting the integration working and getting all the back-end builds.
So tell me about one fateful night when you were working on this project.
Yeah, the funny thing was, you got it all very much in real time, because we were going to hang out on Wednesday. And on Tuesday, there’s this giant windstorm. I’m really annoyed because I wanted to be working on the project. So I went down to the coffee shop across the street and worked for a bit, and the thing I was really annoyed about was like, “Oh man, my phone’s gonna run out of batteries and I’ll have no way to charge it.”
So I texted you to let you know that I was planning on coming over, but in the event my phone runs out of batteries, I: (A) won’t be able to come and (B) won’t be able to tell you that I can’t come. So, if you don’t hear from me, that’s probably what happened. I think it was a Panera when I was texting you and you replied, like, “Is everything okay?”
The Palisades Fire had already started, because it’s in the middle of the day, but that’s way off on the other side of LA from where I was. Whenever there’s a big windstorm, you know it’s gonna start a fire somewhere and you hope it’ll be small and far away from people.
I remember… I didn’t actually send you this text, but I typed it out. Something like, “Oh, I’m making this sound like this Mad Max out here, but I’m at Panera.”
But everybody’s talking fire at the Panera. Everyone’s there trudging their laptop and I start hearing people say “close fire.” I thought they were talking about the Eaton Fire. That was the close fire. And you know, I’m checking my phone and going, “Whoa, whoa. There’s a fire at the canyon, which is, like, a few blocks away from the Panera that we’re currently at.”
My partner Jason and I go outside and the hill above Panera is on fire. We’re like, “Well, maybe we’ll go home the long way.”
📨 Next Week: The fires close in on Gwen’s neighborhood.
🎲 Your Turn: Have you ever experienced a natural disaster? Do you know someone who has? If you want to share your story with me, reply to this email. If you want to share your story with the world, click the orange button below.
3 responses to “Burn, Panera, Burn”
I’ve lived my whole life in the coastal plains of North Carolina, so hurricanes are just a part of life in these parts. That said, the Big 3 of storms I’ve survived would probably be Hurricanes Fran, Floyd, and Isabelle, with the last of those three being the first nail in the coffin of my childhood home(Isabelle wrecked the roof, the contractor the mortgage company hired to fix it did half the work, took half the insurance money, ran and filed bankruptcy, the mortgage company dragged their feet releasing the other half of the insurance money to my father, the damage accumulated from the lack of a functioning roof outpaced my family’s ability to make repairs and by the time the mortgage company forced my family out in early 2012, the old place was barely standing and condemned shortly after the foreclosure.
Also survived the last really bad N1H1 flu outbreak and Covid19 if you want to count them as natural disasters(technically they are, but I feel like most people put disease in a different box from things like major storms, wild fires, and geological disturbances(speaking of which, I did technically live through the worst earthquake to hit North Carolina in the last century or more, but that was more notable for being strong enough for people to feel it than any damage done, so inactive is the fault that cuts through this state, and I wasn’t even among those who felt it)).
You’re a survivor. The fact that you lived through three hurricanes (not to mention N1HI and COVID) shows how resilient you are.
That’s horrible what happened to your childhood home. I’m so sorry. It takes a special kind of monster to rob from people after they suffered through a natural disaster. The system is so broken.
Also survived the storm that dropped a tree on the trailer I was renting and my housemate’s car, totalling both back in I think 2019.
And yeah, the fallout from Isabelle was something. For years we dealt with it raining indoors every time it rained, had to move the family computer like half-a-dozen times because it was in the splash zone of the indoor rain, the back porch completely collapsed in on itself, the roof of the backporch collapsing left a gap between floor and wall along the back wall of the second floor “Mother-in-law’s apartment” wide enough to see sunlight through, my at the time girlfriend fell through the kitchen floor despite being less than a hundred pounds soaking wet. Downright comical if you aren’t the one living through it. Granted, the decline took place over nearly a decade, but it’s a prime example of how failing to make timely repairs can snowball out of control.