In the talk “Nuke Possum Springs: A Night in the Woods Design Postmortem” given by Scott Benson at the Game Developer’s Conference in 2018, he discusses the discussion of the ups, downs, design philosophies, and decisions that went into making “Night in the Woods”. Benson discusses how he was an artist first and foremost and met the co-director of Night in the Woods over email after he had seen one of Benson’s vines. Through the work, he discusses how Night in the Woods started as this mystical town where the main character had a cape that fluttered and he takes the audience through the whole storyboard process that goes into making a video game. The two decide to take their concept and completely shift it into a new story. This was spurred on by Benson watching a movie called “Return of the Living Dead” which had characters that reminded him of his friends from when he was a teenager. He decided to move the art in the direction of anthropomorphic characters due to the “playful subversiveness” of their nature.

Having anthropomorphic characters in a game centered around a somewhat realistic depiction of life in a dead end town centering around young adults contrasts with the childish and cartoony nature of how anthropomorphic characters are usually used in traditional media. During the design process for “Night in the Woods”, Benson states “We want this town where you can walk around, we want to make this big world that you can explore, and we also knew that we wanted you to spend a lot of time in these places going back and forth, building this routine.”.

Benson didn’t just expand the length of the town, he stated how in games like “Fallout 3”, he’d be jumping around like this hero, so he wanted to extend the world with more verticality, allowing the player to bounce off of mail boxes, cars, windowsills, and even power lines, extending the height at which you can explore this town and really get into every possible space of it. I believe the most valuble thing to take away from this talk would be how games can forge a connection between the creator and the player, how even when playing as a cartoon cat, we can feel human emotion drilled deep into this game’s narrative and world.

Source: https://youtu.be/Xzhe45Q8780