When you’re in a bit of a slump, doing an everyday task can feel like pushing a giant boulder up a water slide filled with lube. But what if that seemingly-difficult everyday task was a person? Not only that but a person that cheered you on and hyped you up to complete the task? That’s the case in the upcoming indie title Inhabit.
Inhabit is the debut slice-of-life puzzle game from new Brisbane-based indie studio Public Void. In Inhabit, you get out of bed and explore the world around you, practising healthy habits through puzzles presented by personified version of activities such as cleaning up your house, going for a jog, or spending some time in the sun.
The art style is very cute pixel-art, and the overall vibe is very wholesome. To learn a little more about Inhabit and Public Void, I had a chance to chat with Bosco Bartilomo, the studio’s lead designer, and Harry Stitt, the studio’s technical director.
Image: Inhabit / Public VoidRuby
First things first, how did Public Void as a studio come to be?
Bosco
We’ve been talking about it for years. I think everyone who works in IT has this dream in the back of their head of making games. At the start of the year, we were in a position where Harry and I, and a few other people were like, “This is the time. Let’s do it. Let’s do as much as we can.”.
Some people over the months have fallen off a bit, but that’s all right. So me and Harry have been kind of taking the reigns, doing whatever we can. Yeah. We’ve always just wanted to make games basically and wanted to take a stab at it.
Harry
Yeah. I think that’s right. I mean, I can’t speak for Bosco, but personally, I’ve always made games in my spare time. It’s always been something that I’ve done as a hobby. It’s always something, as Bosco said, I had in the back of my mind and said, it’d be nice to try and make a go of it at some point. Again, as Bosco said, it was just good timing. Stars kind of aligned a bit. Everyone was at a point in their lives where it was something that seemed feasible.
I mean, for me personally, I’d been taking some time off and was actually focusing on teaching myself how to make games. It was something that I’d always done in my spare time, but I’d never really done it seriously. So yeah. I spent a bunch of time trying to learn how to make games and all that sort of thing. Then Bosco kind of was the one who was just like, Harry, let’s just do it. It’s a good time. Why not? So yeah, just have to stab at it.
Ruby
So Inhabit is your first game as a studio, would you be able to tell us a bit about how it all started and what the game involves?
Bosco
Harry, you want to talk about this or you want me to…
Harry
Go ahead, Bosco.
Bosco
Thank you so much. So the way it started was we wanted to start kind of small. So Inhabit is a pretty small game. It’s a two-hour-long puzzle game, and it’s like a crazy slice-of-life game. It’s kind of a genre that we all enjoy playing. So we thought, oh, we could try this out, see how we go with it.
We were very naive at the beginning. We thought it was going to be a two-month-long project, but it’s been…
Harry
Still are, by the way.
Bosco
Yeah, definitely have not learned a thing over these six months, but yeah. So it’s already been half a year, more I think, and probably will go until at least the end of the year.
Harry
It definitely started out as something that we can get behind, that we can have fun making, that won’t be just a huge, insane amount of effort. Because it is our first game, just to have a project that we can do start the finish and because neither of us have actual experience in the industry, have a project that we can use to just learn the ins and outs of what it takes to develop a game to completion.
I guess the sort of theme of the game came from the tail end of COVID where everyone’s kind of stuck at home miserable and we just were trying to make something that could, I don’t know, give you a little bit of peace and comfort in while you’re by yourself at home.
Bosco
Yeah, definitely.
Image: Inhabit / Public VoidRuby
Yeah, of course. What kind of other games do you think inspired Inhabit‘s creation?
Bosco
I guess the most obvious…
Harry
I would say that at its most sort of fundamental, it’s a puzzle game, so I’ve tried to incorporate a variety of different puzzles. So yeah. I mean, I don’t know, Bosco, what were you going to say?
Bosco
Oh yeah, just in terms of inspiration for the atmosphere, I guess. Also mechanics have been very, very clearly stuff like Stardew I think is kind of an inspiration for any cozy indie game. It’s not that groundbreaking to say that. A lot of stuff like that.
Even stuff like Pokémon, me and one of the other creative guys got really, really into, and a lot of the puzzles have been compared to Pokémon gyms before. So that 2.5-D, grid-based puzzle kind of stuff. We’re all really into music as well. So we wanted to channel this acoustic cozy folky music into a game, and we thought the style we were going for here would be a really good fit for it.
Ruby
So who’s doing the music? I’d love to know more about that.
Bosco
Yeah. A good friend and one of the other founders of Public Void, Tom Dron, he’s also a local. Yeah. Harry actually is the guitar lead guitarist for the band. Yeah. He plays a lot of gigs around Brisbane. He’s really, really a talented musician.
Harry
He’s the one that sort of has come up with the main theme for it, which as Bosco said, just this cute little acoustic jingle kind of thing. But yeah, he’ll definitely be, I mean, we’ve still got a lot, lots of work to do in terms of sound design and music, but yeah, he’ll be composing the remainder of the tracks.
Bosco
Yeah. Actually, so of the six puzzles we’ve got, we wanted to have a different style of musical theme for each of them as well. So kind of looking at making the running game a bit city poppy while still having very strong motifs from the original theme. Stuff like that. So we wanted to have a bit of fun with the genres as well, have a little bit of a yeah.
Image: Inhabit / Public VoidRuby
Wicked. Now I’ve seen a common trend recently with people struggling to do everyday tasks, be it because of the big sad that COVID brought along or just in general, kind of gamifying them to make them a bit easier. It’s kind of like what I see with this. So how do you think the gamification of everyday tasks can make them a little bit more bearable like you do in Inhabit?
Harry
Sure. I think one of the main ways we’ve done it is by personifying these everyday tasks into characters that you can just form a relationship with really and get some attachment to. They’re kind of there to, I don’t know, just make the task more bearable if you like. I think, at least for me, that makes the whole process of some banal task seem a bit more approachable and comfortable I guess. Yeah.
Bosco
I remember a Tumblr post that something along the lines of, if you need to envision Naruto being proud of you for brushing your teeth to get through it every day, then do that. That’s absolutely the right way to brush your teeth.
So yeah, having these mascots that you can, I guess, visualize to a smaller extent than maybe Naruto, kind of saying, “Exercise is great. Nature would be really proud of me for watering my plants,” or whatever. Having that kind of mascot character relationship is kind of how we wanted to get into that.
Ruby
Amazing, I’ve seen that exact post. So the game, as you mentioned, is one to two hours long. It’s a nice, short and sweet experience. How do you think a shorter experience in video games, like Inhabit, can ultimately be quite a valuable experience?
Harry
Yeah, I think, I don’t know. We were careful to not make any claim or to try and stay away from appearing like, oh, play our game and everything will be all right. That’s not really the intent. The intent is to just give you a short period of time where you can just get lost in a little comfy world. So I think again, that one-to-two-hours-long is perfect for that. That would be my answer for that.
Bosco
Yeah. Completely agree. Having that short time, lets it be very accessible for people to put wherever they can into their life, if they need a chunk of relaxation or whatever it is to get lost a little bit and feel some warmth or coziness or whatever. That’s what it is.
Ruby
Beautiful. And what are some of the challenges that you guys have faced while developing the game? If any? Shouldn’t be presumptuous.
Harry
How long do we have?
Ruby
Please, go on.
Harry
Yeah. I mean I think the main one is just neither of us has done this before. So every little thing is unknown and when every little thing is unknown, it’s difficult to prepare for… You almost always end up underestimating how difficult it is or overestimating your own ability to achieve something.
So I mean, from my perspective, because I’m more sort involved in the technical parts of the actual programming side of things. I’ve made plenty of really small games, small little projects, but never a full game. Until you actually do that, there’s just a whole bunch of things that just won’t have come up before.
Dealing with all of that has been an awesome learning experience, but at the same time, it’s like, oh geez, if I’d done it this way, this would’ve taken a quarter of the time. But there’s always the next game. For me in particular, just the actual technical side, everything has taken a million times longer than I thought, but it’s been really good because I’m learning all the time.
Bosco
For me, a lot of the struggle has been around the cohesion of the game. It’s easy to do a very cohesive game when you’ve got a scope of a two-minute gameplay loop that you make in three days or whatever, like in a game jam or something like that. Whereas where, when you’ve got this big project, you want everything to feed into itself, as much as you can to have as complete an experience as possible. So making different parts of the game feel as good as they can. Try to convey atmosphere and stuff.
The other big thing is getting the game out there, I guess. We have technical skills, but we are not business people. We are people that just wanted to make games basically. So learning all that kind of stuff at the same time has been very challenging, to say the least, and very time-consuming, but definitely a good experience.
Image: Inhabit / Public VoidRuby
Absolutely. From the perspective of a studio making their very first game, releasing their very first game, and going to Gamescom, you’re doing all the big stuff to get your game out there. What advice would you have for first-time studios, maybe first-time developers that are wanting to get their game out?
Harry
I know what my advice would be, and it’s not even really directly relating to getting a game out there. Just start with a scope that is just ridiculously small, just come up with a small scope and then make it an eighth to the size, and maybe that’ll give you half the time that you thought you had to market your game.
Because I think Bosco has been more involved with getting the game out there. So perhaps he has some more direct advice, but that would be mine. Just make it as small as possible.
Bosco
Yeah. I think having a very good plan at the start is a very, very good tool. We thought we had a plan and that did not work out very well at all. If we’d spent another week even, just hammering out exactly what each part would be, what it would look like, I think we would have a much smoother experience.
It’s very funny to be asked for advice considering I don’t think I’m an expert in even the slightest. I mean in Australia, really the biggest thing that helped a lot was there are a lot of people out there that are really, really willing to help, like Ruby. You’re a huge saviour for the indie game scene in Australia, giving people like us opportunities.
(That part made me blush. I almost cried. Too kind to me. Screaming. Crying. Throwing up.)
IGEA has been really helpful with advice and this whole Gamescom thing. There are lots of grants out there. We haven’t received any, but I know they exist. I think just relying on the dev scene as much as you can, because especially in Australia, they’re really, really happy to help, even just talking to anyone out there. They’ll be more than happy to give you a leg up in some way.
Harry
I think just generally as well, I think you have to love it. Obviously not all the time, but I think there has to be some part of you that loves it because it is a grind. But it’s a rewarding one. Once things start to come together, I think.
Bosco
Oh yeah, it’s super stressful. It’s the most stressful job I’ve ever had by a very long margin. So don’t go in it with a faint heart. Yeah. Be ready for it.
It’s always a blessing for me to be able to chat to Aussie indie devs trying to get their games out into the world. I live for it. Crave it, even. So a big thank you to Bosco and Harry from Public Void for giving me the opportunity to speak to you both about Inhabit!
If you’d like to check it out for yourself, Inhabit will be released for PC in December of this year and can be wishlisted on Steam.
