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Kentucky Route Zero devs discuss how they arrived at the idea of an episodic game with interludes
When it comes to episodic gaming, Carboard Computer was really at the forefront of the modern episodic game approach. The funny thing is, they weren't even sure they'd be releasing an episodic experience when they first started out. In an interview with Polygon, dev Tamas Kemenczy addresses one of the many challenges the series faced, with one coming before development got underway.
Another good example happened really early on when we were in pre-production. This was before we even decided to take an episodic route. There had been several iterations of the project in both art style and — we’d changed mechanically what we wanted to do with the game.
We thought, What have we gotten ourselves into? How are we going to manage this work that we promised and that we want to do? We have this idea, and it doesn’t feel right to just make it this really short game.
During that time, we’d begun looking at and researching episodic games. We thought this could be a good format for a small team, in the sense that we could produce a — we could do the whole thing and give it the attention we wanted. We could spend the time we wanted with it. But we’d also have these flag posts where we could make releases, instead of just working on one idea for however long it would take [to finish the entire game].
Having those goals — releasing the episodes and interludes — became really useful to us.