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Untitled Goose Game devs on turning the mundane into the absurd
Untitled Goose Game doesn't take place in a fantastical setting, nor does it feature a larger-than-life lead character. It's a game about being a jerk goose. In an interview with Gamasutra, dev Nico Disseldorp talks about how important the mundane nature of the game was to nailing the entire experience.
The whole idea for the game started with this realization that a person having to interact with a scary goose was this very normal, grounded conflict. Getting chased by a goose is absurd, but it really does happen to people all the time. So for us the mundaneness, or everydayness of the situation was very important.
Every now and then during development we’d come up with an idea for something bigger, like mucking up a wedding for example, but we’d always let those ideas go because we wanted to make sure that it felt like this was a very normal day in the character’s lives. Anything out of the ordinary is the result of the goose.
I guess this aversion to escalation also helps with the structure of the game we wanted. The human characters are able to tidy up most messes and put things back to normal again, giving the goose a chance to play the same tricks over and over. The mischief is a bit cyclical.