Penko Park takes players on a journey through an abandoned natural area, letting them take pictures of all the weird, cute, and creepy creatures that roam within. If they can find them.
Game Developer spoke with Konstantin Kopka, the game’s designer, to discuss how ecosystems and stages helped shape the game’s unique animals, the challenges of adopting an on-rails style of movement in an open world, and why they gave the player a tool to fidget with while waiting for the perfect photo opportunity.
Game Developer: Penko Park sees players taking photos of creepy creatures in an abandoned wildlife park. Can you tell us a little about what inspired you to create this experience?
Kopka: Our main inspiration was, of course, Pokemon Snap on the N64 and our childhood memories of playing that. We tried a lot of different approaches to figure out the best design and ended up with our own interpretation of what we thought was the “heart” of that experience.
We took a lot of mechanics and tried to improve them to make the levels and monsters as interesting as possible, focusing a lot on replayability.
Penko Park straddles the line between cute and scary. What inspired you to capture those two feelings in the game’s visual style?
Art for Penko Park It was made by my brilliant sister, Elenor Kopka, who also makes animated short films and ceramicsWeird and spooky things were a common obsession for all three, but Elenor brought tenderness with her artistic style.
What thoughts went into designing the game's various creatures and creating an entire ecosystem full of strange beings to photograph?
Like all creative endeavors, this was a very iterative process. We started with a small list of creatures to see how they would look in-game and went from there. Over time, through the collaboration of Elenor (art) and Philip Feller (animation), the park’s inhabitants grew to over 100 distinct creatures.
Once we had a clear vision of the different levels, we tried to think about how the creatures would fit into the ecosystem of the park, why they would be there, what they would do, and how we could create the environment for them.
Image via Ghostbutter.
Likewise, what ideas went into the creature's behaviors and the expressions it makes? How did you create and design all the little actions and things it does so that they feel natural to this world and give the player interesting things to take pictures of?
Elenor and Philip did a brilliant job in this regard. I am really happy with the uniqueness of all of them.
We designed a system of symbols (e.g. a smiley face, a frowning face, etc.) to give us a general guideline for what poses we would build. In the end, most creatures ended up with a mix of “standard” poses and one or two poses that were completely unique to that particular creature.
A very important design guideline we found was that it was crucial to have that ideal “photo moment” in the pose to give the player something to aim for.
What made you decide to make the action happen on rails? How did that impact the game design, both positively and negatively?
Initially, for a long time, we had thought that the game would be set in an open world, and we were very excited because it seemed like something new and interesting to us.
However, we ran into a lot of problems with this. The world felt very empty and confusing. As soon as we stripped that away and made it a focused, on-rails experience, things just fell into place and became a lot more fun to play. It wasn't an easy decision, but I think the game ended up being better for it.
Image via Ghostbutter.
Since the game takes place on rails, what ideas are used to create a world and its inhabitants that offer interesting photographic opportunities when movement and perspective are limited?
The on-rails aspect made our level design process almost like designing an amusement park ride where you can control exactly when and where things happen. This made it easier for us to create suspense and even (very light) jump scares.
The decision to give the player the ability (eventually) to completely stop the cart posed some challenges, as it limited what we could and couldn’t do.
The game rates photos of creatures taken by players while they take photos. What inspired you to add this rating system? What thoughts went into how this system would rate photos?
One of our biggest frustrations when playing and replaying the original Pokemon Snap game was the tedious and slow evaluation process that occurred after you finished your round. So, from the beginning, we knew that this was something we wanted to improve and make much smoother.
The scoring algorithm is actually quite sophisticated. It even detects things like “how much of the creature is actually visible in the photo and how much is obscured by the environment, grass, etc.”
Finally, with our one to three star rating system, we enable 100% completion of the game, which is important for some players.
Image via Ghostbutter.
What considerations went into designing the photo album to give players a nice place to store their photos, while also offering some useful gameplay elements?
We wanted the photo album to be very rewarding and fun to browse, so we made sure the process of placing your best photos in their respective spaces was rewarding.
The camera has the ability to show the player a different perspective of the world with Ghost-o-Vision. What inspired you to add this feature? What interesting elements do you think it adds to the game?
The Ghost-o-Vision mechanic is introduced a bit later in the game and adds the new challenge of limiting the time the player has to find the ghost. It also ties into the lore of the park and I think it adds a lot of diversity to the overall mechanic.
What inspired you to allow the player to interact with the world using the Grappling Hand? What do you think this added to the game?
We thought it would be cool to shoot something with a huge grappling hook/hand, so that was the main reason we added it.
Over time, we've gotten a better understanding of how this would actually be used in the game. For example, the ability to shoot and destroy parts of the environments was added very late in development, but quickly became a favorite. It's also a cool “fidget” mechanic that allows players to do something while idle, especially if they've replayed the level a lot.