Adam Pype Hands You the Knife [Podcast]

I ask Adam Pype, the Belgian developer behind No Players Online, why a game where you peel the faces off strangers turns out to be easier on the squeamish than one where it happens to you.

SKINFACE started at an in-person game jam in Belgium on the theme “mask.” Adam pitched it to the room, heard that it was messed up and that he should go for it, and built it with the artist Ties Groen. You play a hitman who takes his targets’ faces, and the full version, due in December, keeps the jam game’s refusal to explain itself. He tells me where it came from: a face-stealing hitman in Poker Face, the L-shaped apartment corridors of Alice in Borderland and, more and more, Soviet housing blocks. He also tells me why players at Gamescom who said they could not handle gore found it manageable once the knife was in their own hands.

We start with The Beginner’s Guide and what it means that games are now old enough to be about the people who make them. Then we get to short games, and why a four-hour demo is a lot to ask. Adam explains how No Players Online, a ten-minute jam game grown into a three-to-four-hour one, kept pulling between a commercial hook and a story about art and relationships, and why he now plans to alternate: a sellable game, then something completely unsellable. And what changed when, for the first time, he only wrote the code and someone else made the art.

Links

• It’s About Skinning Faces, and That’s All You Need to Know, my interview with Adam Pype
• SKINFACE on Steam
• No Players Online on Steam
• Adam Pype on itch.io
• The Beginner’s Guide to the art of videogames
• In Forgotten, you’re the horror inside the computer
• Plum Road Tea Dream’s grief sanctuary gains a mausoleum

Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by Nick Sylvester.

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