We're the creators of Ridiculous Fishing - Ask Us Anything

First off - Thanks for making this game. Even though I don't own any iDevice myself, I was able to borrow the iPad from my parents for a couple of days, and boy, glad I did.

• I don't expect much of it, but have you considered porting this (or any other Vlambeer) game to Android?

• Technical question - Since everything in Ridiculous Fishing (except for the font) is made in angles of 45, how'd you still keep the style this smooth? I don't think saving as regular images would justify the 45° angles.

I'm curious about an Android release myself as well as I don't have any iDevices, but a couple of Android!

We're still arguing about an Android release. There are a lot of things to consider and a lot of things that we just don't know too much about since we've yet to make a game for Android. As soon as we figure all that stuff out, we'll see what we can do.

Not really a question, but I just wanted to say that you all are one of my favorite indie developers. Keep making awesome games!

Thanks, we fully intend to keep up making games you like!

What's the story behind the Byrdr ARG?

Rami Zach Greg and JW had already created an in-game social network called Byrdr that Billy (the main character of the game) uses to connect with other characters in the game while he's out fishing. At the same time, they began taking email addresses for a supposedly real-world version of Byrdr. But up until about a week before the launch of the game they didn't actually know what they were going to do with those email addresses! So 5 days before the game's launch, Rami comes to me and says "We have 800 emails and this fake social network called Byrdr. Want to help us make the world's shortest ARG?"

What followed was a 5 day blur of insanity where I outlined and wrote a series of email from James Eagler, the Byrdr CEO, to be sent to everyone who had signed up for the service. At first the emails are simple affirmations of how good Byrdr will be when it eventually launches, but then as Eagler begins "accidentally" leaking internal documents, players get the hint that perhaps everything at Byrdr is not as innocuous as it seems...

The end goal of the ARG was to flesh out Ridiculous Fishing's narrative, a backstory that most people aren't even aware exists. Many of RF's players may never even realize it's there! But there was a wonderful amount of thought put into the game's story, why Billy is here, his past and future, what's at stake for him. Much of that is tucked away in the ARG, hidden in little metaphors and side stories, and I hope that people who have played both the game and the ARG are able to make some of the connections! I won't go into specifically what those connections are, but I can assure you they are there :)

There was also a phone line you could call into, hidden messages and documents to find, email addresses you could write to, some of which you can still find at http://byrdr.com/

Out of curiousity, was there any kind of code hidden in the messages? For example, I noticed the notes directly from Eagler would occasionally start a sentence with a lower case letter, but his official Byrdr emails were always pristine.

No, that was just to make it look more informal. This is what we discovered about ARGs: people will read into EVERYTHING. Players did some crazy shit looking for clues in the strangest places. Ironically, when the ARG first launched there were almost no puzzles, and it wasn't until we saw people were looking for puzzles that we decided to add them!

Oh god is this IAmA, in ITSELF, part of the ARG?

There are 17 letters in "ridiculousfishing." Take every 17th letter from his comment:

aristrtnehdotwzt

Here's the obvious breakdown:

arist

A reference to an aristocracy. The notion is clear - by fishing so heavily, there will be nothing left for others, allowing only the top few elite fisherpeople to rule.

rt

"Right," as in "correct." Confirming that the aristocratic fisherpeople do not see anything wrong with what they are doing.

NEH

An acronym for the Northeast Harbor in Maine, which is where the game is set.

dot

The Department of Treasury is demanding that the fisherpeople pay their adequate taxation, but they refuse - in this game-within-a-game, you must eventually buy expansions to move from the NEH or else you will be found by the DoT and forced to pay taxes.

This has a second possible interpretation that seems at least equally likely: the Dutch Open Telescope is commonly referred to as the DOT, and may indicate a later expansion for fishing on distant planets.

wz

A reference to Greg Wohlwend, Zach Gage, co-creators with Vlambeer.

t

Actually disconnected from the ARG, it's Vlambeer's not-so-subtle request for people to follow it on twitter.

Interestingly, this comment also has 17 points.

Do you get people being all like, "$3 for a mobile game?! You're insane!" and how do you feel about that? Do you feel that the mobile market undervalues games? (Cause it makes me feel shitty and upset.)

We're not upset - it's just the way the market works at the moment. We do believe that developers shouldn't be scared to charge $3 for a game.

The problem is that at $0.99, you'll need to sell endless amounts of copies to be able to survive as an indie developer. Most games don't even get close to that. A direct result of the whole race-to-the-bottom in prices is the prevalance of Free to Play on iOS - it seems to be a safer bet.

But since its almost impossible to do F2P in a non-evil way and without sacrificing the elegance of your game design, we'll prefer to charge $3.

Will you guys make wasteland kings into a full game now that Ridiculous Fishing is such a great success? Or atleast make it so windows 8 can play it? Keep on the good work.

We'll try. It's a real problem that the Windows 8 audio drivers seem to mess with our games, but we've made sure LUFTRAUSERS won't suffer from that by programming it in C++. We do want to work on Wasteland Kings a bit more, but we'll have to see if we can find something in there that we're so excited about that we want to work on it more than we want to work on our space game.

Thanks so much.

Hello Vlambeer! I'm a huge fan of your work, and had a blast playing Ridiculous Fishing. First off I want to say thanks for NOT including in-app purchases, it would have been really easy to implement based on the games design, and I'm really happy you chose not to. Now for some questions!

I know having your game cloned was a huge step backwards, and almost destroyed Ridiculous Fishing entirely. My question is; Did the cloning motivate you guys in a way to make the game that much better? I picked up Ninja Fishing after hearing about what had happened on your website, and you guys pushed through and made a much more polished game, so congratulations!

Also, I know you will be releasing Luftrausers on the PS Vita, have you put any thought into releasing it for us 3DS users, or even on the iPhone/iPad?

Anyways, thanks again for your great work! I'm a huge fan of yours and hope to one day develop games like you guys. Keep it up!

Thanks for all the kind words! The cloning didn't motivate us to make a better game - we always want to make the best game possible. If anything, it demotivated us to the point where we didn't want to work on the game anymore.

LUFTRAUSERS won't release on iOS - the controls simply are even tougher than Super Crate Box' to implement. We've never really talked to Nintendo, but they've asked to speak with us sometime soon. Who knows?

Make games!

Thank you for making my favorite iOS game in years! Do you guys have plans for any future Ridiculous Fishing games or content?

Thanks so much! We're definitely thinking about adding more content in the future, but it might be a while before we make it as good as we want it to be.

For Rami and Jan, how did you guys meet each other?

In the train to university. We absolutely hated eachother, Rami being a programmer that worked on small, commercial games and Jan Willem being a guy that made 300 tiny prototypes a year. We found a common enemy in our school and started to slowly respect each other, ultimately leading to us deciding our time was better spent making videogames than learning how to make videogames.

What do you think it says about me that I posted more bullshit answers than genuine responses to inquires about me or my writing?

That you're Davey Wreden, Davey.

I really love Ridiculous Fishing! I'm developing small games myself beneath school but I struggle at one thing: Prototyping.

How did you do that? Did Jan just start creating a working prototype that you extended with graphics and features, or did you have some other kind of software/programming language that you would recommend?

Thanks :)

Get going and just turn off thinking. Thinking is often demotivational when you're prototyping. Don't try to work towards something specific, the journey is what's important, don't forget the destination is not set.

If I were to desire sexual relations with any of the people behind Ridiculous Fishing, what would be the most sure-fire way to achieve this fantasy?

We love how this is the question absolutely everyone replied to.

We're going to leave this question to Davey.

This question is for cakebread: How is it going?

Mcflyin8, let's talk here for a minute.

When I saw your question, my first impulse was to deliver the most drawn out, unnecessarily obtuse diatribe about the nature of the word "it" and how "it" is going, the condition and usage of "it" in contemporary culture. I had a whole lot about "it" that I was going to say.

But you didn't come here for that.

You didn't come to be lectured about the etymology and cultural context of the word "it."

You came here to talk. To me.

How insensitive of me would it be to not reciprocate? To deflect your inquiry into how I'm doing, as though I'm too insecure about such topics to be able to open up to you, who I've just met over the internet. What kind of a person would I be then? Not the person I want to be, that much I can tell you.

You've pierced me, Mcflyin8, you've undone me. I see my flaws laid out bare before me, the desire to push away those who want me close, the inability to form a true connection with another human being. It came from the purity of your desire simply to know what's going on in my world today. Can I be a new man tomorrow? Perhaps. But you've given me the strength to start being better today.

THAT, mcflyin8, is how I am doing.

How are you?

It can be pretty challenging working with Davey due to responses like thse.

Any chance of the Wasteland King source code being released? The game is awesome! Probably my favorite of the bundle!

EDIT: More importantly though, is there a way to become the true Wasteland King? I've been to difficulty 20 before and there doesn't seem to be an end!

We can choose between releasing the source and continuing the project. Since we're not sure about where we want to take it, we've just been focusing on LUFTRAUSERS or Ridiculous Fishing. If we ever decide Wasteland Kings won't be developed into a full release, we'll release the source, deal?

For some reason I thought games made during a Mojam would release their source code (I guess because a game or two did that for last years Mojam). I was excited to try to import the game into the newest version of GameMaker and make it work with Windows 8 or at least try to learn about GameMaker.

However, it looks like this was not the case. The said they plan on potentially doing something more with the game so I bet they will just add more content/bug fixes instead of open sourcing it.

We're actually considering making it a full project. No promises, but we do really like the game enough to consider it!

How would you compare Super Crate Box to Ridiculous Fishing? What part of those games do you see as undeniably 'you' that may not be noticed right away by anyone else?

What are you doing to prevent review scores like 10/10 going to your heads and negatively influencing your work? Or don't you worry at all?

We guess that they're both us. We try to make minimalist, elegant game design with a lot of polish.

As for the reviews, we just don't worry. Some of our games scored average, some got an amazing critical reception. We care about the games we make and whether we're proud of them. If other people like them, that just makes us really happy.

What does Vlambeer mean?

To elaborate on that, it's also a play on words. The Dutch word for 'to flambé' (you know, setting your food on fire for 10 seconds to make it delicious) is 'flamberen', and if you were to say 'I flambé' it would be 'ik flambeer'. Phonetically identical to Vlambeer. :)

What happened is we couldn't come up with a name for our company, but ran across a pun Jan Willem made years before in his dummy. It was an image of a burning bear with the text 'flamberen'. It sounded cool, didn't mean anything, had barely any Google results and it also ends in 'beer'.

In other words, it was a perfect name . We redrew the logo in MS Paint in twenty seconds. That exact image is still our logo.

Hey guys, thanks for doing an AMA! I've loved Vlambeer since I discovered Super Crate Box, probably about a year ago now! Ridiculous Fishing was all that I expected from you guys and more, and I'm so happy for you all that the game is being received so well by the populace. My question for you today:

Does the huge success of Ridiculous Fishing change anything for you guys? If yes, what does it change? The direction of your work, or your freedom while doing it? Any information you want to shed on the future is welcome. (The question is mostly for the Vlambeer guys I guess, since I really only knew of them before RF, but anyone feel free to add what this success means for you personally!)

It just means that we have some more space to prototype and come up with crazy things. We're working on LUFTRAUSERS right now, and we're also prototyping this space game and thinking of toying with Wasteland Kings a bit in the future. Besides LUFTRAUSERS, though, these are just ideas. We might kill them at any time. That's one of the fun things about being your own boss - nobody besides yourself cares if you throw away a month or two of work.

• Other than the games you've made, what games on iOS would you recommend checking out?

• what fish were there from the beginning, and what fish were more recently added?

• did you do any actual fishing for inspiration?

• Super Hexagon, Sword & Sworcery, ASYNC CORP, Windosill, Spacechem, Spaceteam, Shot Shot Shoot and Fingle.
• We really don't know. We think the first two fish you encounter are the first two that were made. Besides that new species were added every now and then until finally, the boss fish were created.
• No. Just like we made KARATE, a game about punching people to the gods in heavens with your fists, without researching KARATE. http://www.vlambeer.com/downloads/misc/karatesim/

I want to become a game developer myself but at the moment I have a lot of trouble coming up with ideas for them. The reason for this is that I have an idea for an game that is to complex and to much work for me to handle at the moment. So I want to make a (or more) simple games first but I have trouble coming up with new ideas because I keep thinking of that game. What would you recommend me to do?

Realize that if you don't work on something at all you definitely won't be making it. Just start going on any game at all (the one you can't make on your own or any other game) and see where that takes you, or find people that can help you realize the game you have in mind.

Assumptions are amongst the worst things a designer can make, so always test what you think.

Among you, who is the best real-life fisherman?

All we know about fishing comes from this Texan guy we once spoke to.

Where are the Ridiculous Fishing T-Shirts or Prints???

We've got a design we really like being made right now. If you're at PAX East next week, we'll have them there. If not, they'll sell on our store right after PAX ends.

Do you think, despite the emotional toll and the stress of the situation, that ultimately Ridiculous Fishing will now see greater success and profitability because of the event and how (well) you chose to respond to it?

We don't know. We'll never really know, we guess, but we do guess that Ridiculous Fishing ended up being sort of a symbol in favor of creative, novel games and against cloning. So in this scenario, where we did get cloned, it's helpful. We like to think most of the attention is based on the fact that Ridiculous Fishing a good game.

Either way, if we could've gone back in time and stop the clone, we think we'd much rather not have had to deal with a year and a half of demotivation. It turns out motivation is really one of the most valuable things you have as a game designer.

What caused the demotivation?

The idea that we spent months coming up with a tight game design and someone else could steal the idea and get credits for it. The most painful thing was seeing how, after the release of Ridiculous Fishing, people would call us out for being cloners of this fishing game they played with a ninja in it.

What's your favorite thing about space? ^{Mine is space.}

Mine is also space.

+1 on space

+1 on space.

Also, in science fiction books when they believe Venus has dinosaurs under the clouds.

Where can i find Mimic Fish ? Its the only fish i could not find until now.

Those are really rare, but search in the most mythical of places in the game and you'll find it eventually.

Will there be a Vlambeer/Dennation collaboration somewhen in the future?

We don't know. We love the Dennaton guys and we've always been mutually involved in eachothers projects - they're amongst the first people we send builds to for most of our games. We just don't know yet - the future with things like these is so uncertain with everybody working on five things at once!

1. Is a PC port at all possible? I'd easily pay again to have it on Steam with mouse control.

2. Will the game ever get any sort of content updates? It's quite perfect as it is, but it'd be nice to have an extra fish added now and then.

3. For Vlambeer: Will GUN GODZ ever get a release outside of the Kickstarter thing?

4. Also for Vlambeer: Will SCB get iPhone 5 screen support any time soon?

5. How the hell do you believe in yourself?

1. It's unlikely. The game was designed for tilt and touch. We'll see, though!
2. Yes, it's been a real burden to work on this game for so long, but after its reception we're excited to work on the project again. We're discussing what we'd like to add to the game right now, but it might take a while before we actually get going on it. We want the update to be at least as good as the game.
3. Yes, it's available at http://venuspatrol.com/subscribe right now!
4. Yes!
5. http://gamejolt.com/games/puzzle/if-you-really-want-it-you-can-fly/663/

I just want to thank you for both super crate box and ridiculous fishing. You've made my commuting times fly by and I sincerely thank you for the end credits in ridiculous fishing so. Thanks :) keep doing what you are doing

Thanks so much! Will do!

Who came up with the art style for Ridiculous Fishing?

That was Greg (aeiowu).

Hey guys, though I have not yet played ridiculous fish, (I have recently moved to android) I was a great fan of super crate box, I also watched you recently on the humble bundle mojam.

I am attempting to make my way in the gaming industry as a developer, and I'm here looking for tips from when you first started. So what worked and what didn't work for you when you started making games? (in terms of getting your name out)

If anyone wants to check out the game I am currently creating please head over to http://www.reddit.com/r/lowpolygame

We made games, did every interview we could get, spoke to everyone we wanted to speak to, mailed to every press outlet that we could find. Actually, we still do that.

What was the inspiration for making this game, a huge improvement over Radical Fishing?

Do you have any future projects planned yet?

Thanks for doing this AMA and for making the game!

Like always, our inspirations don't come from games - they come from things that are not games. In the case of Radical and Ridiculous Fishing, the inspiration was a documentary about tuna overfishing. There was a beautiful slow motion shot of a fish being flung up into the air - and Jan Willem just imagined how that would be with a light gun.

Love all of your games! I was wondering how you did the tilting of the phone on the ridiculous fishing website. I know it is css rotation but what are you using to time everything?

We timed it manually. We had a version of the trailer with the time overlayed on it. Here's the code, scroll down to the update part to see how that worked. http://ridiculousfishing.com/js/video.js

It's awesome to see that Ridiculous Fishing is received very well by everyone. Are you guys planning to develop SCB or RF for android? I know that you can get SCB from PlayStation Suite but that doesn't work on every device. Nonetheless, keep up the good work!

We're thinking about Ridiculous Fishing but don't think Super Crate Box will hit Android. Thanks for the kind words!

I'm really disappointed that you didn't make me pay for my jelly hat and wizard suit made of real wizard skin. This game would be so much better if I had to sink real money into it through micro transactions. Damn you for showing everyone that you can make great mobile games without monetizing every little detail!

I love it, the Byrdr-part was a great detail. Great job on the game and good luck in the future :)

Also, how's LUFTRAUSERS coming along?

Pretty well! If this IAmA is over, we're going to back to crunching on LUFTRAUSERS - there's a pretty big announcement about that game coming up soon!

Not related to ridiculous fishing, but;

Any idea when LUFTRAUSERS will come out? And what platform(s) will it be on? I'm really looking forward to it!

We don't know yet, but we hope within the next months. We've announced PC and Mac so far, but that's not all it's going to be on. One tip we can give you is that it's not going to be iOS and it is going to be on a platform owned by a company we've worked with before.

I've been hearing a lot about your game the past few days, so congrats.

Now, assume I only have $3. Why should I buy Ridiculous Fishing and not the Irish Cream cupcake from the cupcake shop around the corner from me?

Depends, will you starve if you don't have the Irish Cream cupcake? Are you desperately in need of food? If not and you like games, we would love if you checked out our game. It's about chainsawing through fish and a story of redemption and we're really proud of it.

1. First off, that's a good game you made there.
2. How exactly do you become and indie game dev/ get into the gaming industry? Im currently doing my first year of 6th form and want to know where to go from there.

1. Thanks!
2. Start making games, start reaching out to people that inspire you and start going to conventions like GDC if you can. Allow people to contact you, talk to you and be open. As an indie, we have the advantage of just being ourselves instead of being hidden away behind twenty layers of PR!

I love the game, but somehow got to the end without knowing that I got to the end... it was odd! The cutscene was beautiful but it seemed sort of out of context! I didn't know what story it was concluding... So I guess my question is, how did I miss it?

You didn't miss anything. The story happens in retrospect, where you finally realize why Billy has been out on the ocean shooting fish. The story deepens a bit if you check Byrdr.com's ARG part, Byrdr in the game or play the original Radical Fishing.

I'm a big fan of the stuff you guys do over at Vlambeer and I'm extremely jealous of all the talented people you manage to pull together to create such awesome games.

Making an indie game is something I've always wanted to do, but I have a hard time finding the right people to do it with. So my question is, how do you go about finding the right people to work with who fill various rolls so well?

Honestly, things just sort of happen. When we started this project two years ago, none of the people we're working with had ever made anything 'big' - but over the past years a lot of things changed.

We guess the trick is to find people that you like, people that think like you and people that seem to be good at what they need to do. If it turns out someone isn't doing their job proper or is just working against you, cut them loose. Game development is hard enough without people dragging you down. Luckily, we never had to do that yet.

Thoughts on Ouya? Any plans for an Ouya game?

We're still talking to them, but we don't have concrete plans. We'll meet with them at the Game Developers Conference in a week or so, so we'll know more by then!

How about the sequel to The Stanley Parabel? Any dates, or exclusive insides?

So...it's coming! I promise!

We fell into a common development trap where the scope ballooned to larger than what we had anticipated or were really capable of tackling. But the good part about that is that a) we've gone through a LOT of content so we feel that everything that's currently in there is pretty great, and b) the mindset of the development has shifted from "let's come up with a bunch of cool stuff" to "let's finish this game." It's time for this thing to simply wrap up, we are at the beginning of the end.

Everytime we say "let's finish this game" while playing Stanley Parable we end up walking circles or getting murdered by the narration of life.

Thanks a lot for the AMA!

Sadly I do not own an iOS device, so the only exposure to Ridiculous Fishing I have has been via the Giant Bomb Quicklook & their Live show, which basically sold me on the game. Is there any chance that you would bring the game to another platform, such as Android (I know that's a controversial one) or Vita?

Also, is there any chance you guys would do a larger-scale game similar to the mini Serious Sam RPG you guys made? Of all the indie games leading up to the SS3 launch, that was the only one I truly adored.

Thanks again =) Love your guys' work.

Thanks, Serious Sam: The Random Encounter was a lot of fun to make. We're so glad you like that! We're thinking about Ridiculous Fishing on Android, but we're just not really sure now. There are a lot of things to consider.

Will LUFTRAUSERS support linux?

Don't tell anyone but probably yes.

Rami, where are you from?

I'm from the Netherlands, but I'm half-Egyptian.

Rami and JW, how did you guys get into game development?

Rami started when he was six and he only had a PC with QBASIC and a game called GORILLAS.BAS ( http://www.kongregate.com/games/moly/gorillas-bas ). That was about 18 years ago? He modified the source, the game changed and the fascination that that was possible never left him.

Jan Willem started ten years ago or so when he got a kids magazine called Compukids. There was something about Game Maker in it, he downloaded and never stopped making games.

Hi! Love the game! Been fishing a lot these last few days (four more fish to find). Any plans of porting the game to other platforms (read: Android)? If the game is successful, will we see a RF 2 (Ridiculouser Fishing)? And: any plans of making merch? I'd kill for a RF tshirt. I'm however hoping it won't have to come to that. Thanks in advance. Oh, and please accept this offering: http://i.imgur.com/YaX0E2g.gif

The shirt will happen, the Android version maybe (we have a lot to think about regarding that) and a sequel probably not - we're looking at doing some updates for the game in the future, probably.

Do you guys have a process for developing your games? Like did you plan the game out, or did you just make a prototype and iterate until you were happy with it?

We iterated endlessly. We guess it's important to leave the destination - the goal - somewhat undefined. Sometimes, games are just better taken in another direction than what you had in mind originally. A lot of features in Ridiculous Fishing, like Byrdr and the ending, only came to be as you know them from the game in the last two months.

How did you guys come together to work on such an interesting game? Like, how did you meet up, I guess. The whole process of thinking and making everything must be an interesting tale!

The game was based on Radical Fishing and we never intended to make an iOS game out of it. That changed when Brandon Boyer came to the Netherlands, where Vlambeer is from, and we showed him Super Crate Box. We decided to quickly show him our 'other' game, the Flash fishing game, and he wouldn't return our laptop for hours. He put us in touch with Zach Gage and pointed out Zach would be able to make this game for iOS.

We quickly decided we'd rather do a game from scratch than port it with different graphics - which, of course would be done by the cloners months later.

What do you think went right on Ridiculous Fishing, and what do you think went wrong?

It was an interesting moment when our team got back together after restoring from the cloning thing. We had all made big games since, all learned a lot - we had this problem where all of us wanted to do things 'right', but 'right' was different from all of us. It definitely took us a while to get accustomed to our roles and our strengths in the project again. That was an interesting problem to have.

Hey! You guys are cool.

I have a couple of questions, one of which is not meant to offend or criticise, but I am curious about your opinion.

1. Did you use a specific framework/technology to develop Ridiculous Fishing?
2. You can skip this if it annoys you. I see that in some indie dev circles, especially the more self-conscious ones, people that know each other support each other unconditionally. So for example, on websites like Venus Patrol I see, most of the times, the usual bunch of names (many of which worked on Ridiculous Fishing). These guys are often great, do not get me wrong, but we all know there are hundreds of indies doing great things (I mean, just go to tigsource). Do you perceive the indie dev scene as open to new people or do you think there is a danger that it is becoming a closed circle in an effort to protect its current members?

Thanks for the awesome game!

As for 2., consider that Rami had never even heard of the indie scene until a few months before he started Vlambeer.

One of the things we sincerely believe is that the scene is generally welcoming and if you have any questions to someone, you can just email them. Many indie developers meet through asking questions, attending events or through news articles about one-another.

Sure, some people are close friends, but that doesn't mean you can't be friends with them too. Just make games, show that you know what you're doing and reach out to people that inspire you.

For example, Rami meeting Zach two years ago was super-weird for him because he is a huge fan of lose/lose and a lot of Zachs other work. Now they've worked on a project for two years, roadtripped across the US during the Week of Hatred and became pretty good friends.

Congrats on your guys' success! How does it feel to be considered by many to be better than the clone Ninja Fishing? Also, how does it feel to be Vlambeer these days, especially after Ridiculous Fishing's release?

Additionally, I honestly wasn't expecting an ARG to be written by the guy who wrote The Stanley Parable. He deserves mad gratitudes written all over his face for making an interesting backstory to Ridiculous Fishing.

It feels amazing. It is such a state of emotional closure after carrying around the burden of the game for so long. Vlambeer just really feels like Vlambeer again - we're having fun, prototyping a lot and generally happy to be at the office. That's different than it was a few months ago.

Rami has been friends with Davey despite Davey replacing a bottle of Coca Cola with a bottle of coffee, Pepsi and sugar before handing it to Rami to drink. It was his Stanley Parable Helpful Development Blog that got us to pick him for the ARG. This one is particularly good: www.galactic-cafe.com/2013/02/stanley-parable-dev-showcase-making-mistakes/

First of all, thank you for the wonderful experience the game procured. <3

Question - Who worked on what part of the game? Was the design a collaborative exchange between everyone?

Everything was sort of in collaboration with everyone, but we had people that were ultimately responsible for making the hard calls. In order of joining the team, those were:

• Jan Willem - Game design
• Rami Ismail - Production, Marketing
• Zach Gage - Programming
• Eirik Suhrke - Music
• Greg Wohlwend - Art
• Kert Gartner - Trailers
• Davey Wreden - ARG