It's been eight years since the release of Return of the Obra Dinn (I know, sorry!), the last full game from indie dev Lucas Pope, and while he's working away on a new project, he's reluctant to provide any details. In an age of generative AI and algorithms, he's worried it'll get sucked into the slush pit of a chatbot, or someone else might steal his idea.
He spoke on the subject on the Mike and Rami Are Still Here podcast. "I have this curse where I really wanna finish things, and I also like to talk about the stuff that I'm working on," Pope states. "But now, the situation just feels different to me. You don't really talk about stuff when you're working on it cos, I dunno, it's getting slurped up by AI or people are gonna copy it, or something else like that."
This isn't "a hard rule," he adds, but "I just don't feel as comfortable talking about what I'm working on again." It's a fair observation, because you can find a lot of studios that churn out games clearly using gen-AI assets. If someone like Pope, who was also behind 2013 dystopian hit Papers, Please, that requires a little more wariness about the ideas he put out into the aether, lest he indirectly spawn his own (much worse) competition.
But then, coming off of two modern classics, he's wary of living in his own shadow, too. "I was pretty happy with Obra Dinn and Papers, Please. And maybe I can't do it again?" he muses. "Maybe I just wanna go out on a high note. Why drag myself down with the next thing that people maybe won't like."
Considering how specific and thematically nuanced and deep those two games are, there's always a chance Pope's next creation could be the one people bounce off. I mean, I doubt it personally, but you never know, and I understand his self-consciousness.
He did provide a sliver of a tease, simply suggesting what's coming isn't like either Return of the Obra Dinn or Papers, Please. "I can do the same things again - I can focus on narrative and gameplay and mechanics - but who knows. It could be a total miss. So in that sense, I don't really wanna push my luck too much," he states.
"I'm just finding the fun over here. The last six years... just finding the fun," he finishes.
