FRACT OSC ist “Moog: das Puzzlespiel” und gehört alleine deswegen schon zu den spannendsten Projekten, die Musik und Spiele miteinander verbinden. Gefangen in einer Techno-Dimension müssen Spieler Rätsel lösen, indem sie Synthesizer, Turntables und Controller manipulieren und dabei feinste elektronische Klänge erzeugen.

Wie so oft ist die Geschichte der Macher des Spiels aber mindestens genauso interessant wie das Werk selbst. So auch bei Richard E. Flanagan und seiner Partnerin Quynh Nguyen, die sich als Paar gedacht haben: “Hey, lass uns doch mal ein Indie-Adventure mit Synthesizern und so machen.” FRACT OSC wurde zu einer schwierigen Prüfung für die Beziehung der beiden, aus der sie stärker, fokussierter und mit einem Kind herausgekommen sind. Eine Geschichte über die Liebe und Spieleentwicklung.

Das Interview liegt auch im Audioformat vor. Die Lesefaulen unter euch können direkt zum Player am Ende des Artikels springen.

You’ve been together before you started working on Fract, right?

Quynh Nguyen Yes, thankfully (both laugh). We’ve been together for almost a decade now, but we’ve always done projects together. Nothing of the scale or length, but we definitely worked together in the past. But it’s still been a learning curve, learning how to communicate…

Richard E. Flanagan To compromise as well. We both have opinions about how things are going to get done and it’s interesting. But we have done a lot of projects together in the past so we had a framework for working well together creatively.

How would you describe working together?

Quynh It was rough at first. I think more because it’s our first game and it’s been a real learning process. As we’ve gone along we’ve had to learn and make a lot of mistakes along the way. And it’s hard not to take this frustration out on each other. It’s just been a challenge at times. But we’re still together and things are going well now.

Richard Yeah, I think another big piece was: We didn’t have a good plan. Part of it was my fault. But part of it was: We haven’t done this before, so we didn’t have an idea of how to go about things. So Quynh, as a producer, was expecting to get certain achievements. And ultimately, we weren’t doing it, because we didn’t have a plan. We thought we were making the game on day one, that was our rookie mistake. But we were not making the game, we were doing R&D, we were doing pre-production, we were doing early iterations of systems that may or may not be in the game. So we were very demotivated when those systems, those ideas, got tossed. But that’s part of the process. I think if we were prepared for that it wouldn’t have been as tough.

Quynh I think we had maybe not the most realistic expectations going into it. When things didn’t fall into place or when things went awry it was a challenge to figure out what happened, what went wrong. But as Richard said, it really is part of the process. A lot of it was due to our inexperience in making a game and just not knowing how long things take, what’s the best way to go about things and figuring that out along the way, while trying to negotiate our relationship and how we work together and how we communicate. I would say at this stage it’s one of the things I’m the proudest of. As a team, not only Richard and I, but also our programmer Hank, I think we’ve really learned to communicate well and respect each other and give each other a voice, too. The roles that we play are not very clear cut. Like, I manage the project but I definitely have some input in the creative aspect. Richard has a technical side to him as well and equally Hank has a lot of interesting design input. There’s a lot of bleed-over. Figuring out, who still has the final say, that’s been an interesting process.

Are there any downsides to working together as a couple?

Richard Yeah! Definitely. It’s emotional. We fight in life, so we’re pretty good at fighting at work, too. We can get angry at each other. It’s a different type of angry than just a professional relationship would have. That can be pretty stressful.

Quynh It’s also been good, because I still want to keep the project on track and whatnot, so maybe in the past I would have get mad and stayed mad at Richard for a lot longer than I do now. Now it’s like…okay, we don’t actually have time, because we have to be professional and keep moving along, so okay, I’ll wrap this up a little bit faster.

Richard One other negative I think is kind of compounded by the fact that we work out of our home, is that we very rarely stop working. We try to have a regular 9-to-5 day and then Quynh and I usually do extra work in the evening. You never stop. It’s hard to draw the line between when the day ends and when the extra work ends and when life begins. It’s tiring, just tiring. That goes for anyone working out of their home.

But there must be some bright sides?

Richard and Quynh Yeah!

Richard We know how to communicate with each other. Quynh finishes my sentences for me. She helps me externalize ideas. Nobody could do that. She knows me so well, she knows the way my mind works. So when I’m working through something ridiculous like a puzzle that is based on a synthesizer. That’s ridiculous! But when I’m trying to work out these ideas to get them externalized she facilitates that. We have a lot of things in common in terms of aesthetics, in art direction and other aspects of design that — because we know each other so well — we can arrive at those conclusions faster and usually communicate better.

Quynh I mean, in the end, we get to make stuff together! Which is amazing! We’ve talked about the challenges of it, which is part of it, but we do it, because we love it and we love working together. I wouldn’t be able to work in the same way. We really get a lot of satisfaction out of doing projects together. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

How far along is Fract now?

Richard That’s a good question.

Quynh (laughs)

Richard Actually, this week has very shaken my idea of how far along we are. We need to have a chat. But it’s light at the end of the tunnel, for sure.

Quynh We’re definitely closer to being done than we are to starting.

Richard Yes! There we go! We’re not going to start over AGAIN! No, we’re finishing THIS Fract.

Thank you so much!