Lorne Lanning has been making Oddworld games for decades, and his new Oddworld: Soulstorm title for 2020 is a re-imaginging of Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus.
Oddworld Inhabitants has been telling the interactive story of Abe for more than two decades. And now it has shown off the first look at the gameplay of Oddworld: Soulstorm, which is coming out on the PC and consoles in 2020.
The game picks up from where 2014’s Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty left off, and it is a re-imagining of Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus, which debuted in 1998. That original game was a bit of a rush job, ordered to come out on a fast deadline by the publisher at the time, GT Interactive.
And Oddworld Inhabitants is returning to this title to remake it in the way that it should have been made. The game is the latest attempt to spur a rebirth in a franchise that has sold 15 million games to date, and it’s the latest brainchild of Lorne Lanning and his Oddworld Inhabitants game studio in Emeryville, California.
Soulstorm is the second in a new Pentology that takes place in the Oddworld universe, where Abe, a meek slave among the Mudokon. He discovers that his people will be slaughtered for food in a meat factory at RuptureFarms, and he escapes. Then he leads a revolution to rescue the slaves. In Abe’s Exoddus, Abe leads his starving Mudokons on further adventures in a search for the secrets of the Soulstorm brew.
The game continues to pick up some of Lanning’s favorite themes about environmentalism, capitalism, consumerism, and addiction that have been the hallmark of the Oddworld franchise. Oddworld Inhabitants is working with Frima Studio in Canada, as well as Fat Kraken Studios in England. This new game has a bigger budget because New ‘n’ Tasty sold more than 3.5 million copies.
I visited Lanning’s studio in Emeryville and got a first look at the Unity-based Soulstorm. I also interviewed Lanning about his latest “triple-A indie” title.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: Tell me what you’re doing.
Lorne Lanning: Last time we talked was when New and Tasty was just announcing, I think. We were at a GDC. It’s been a while. Since 2008, when we started the business digitally, self-publishing the library–that’s when all the rights had reverted, so it became easier to do that. Steam let us do that. From that, we were getting tens of thousands of dollars from old titles. Abe’s Oddysee was 10 or 11 years old and still selling. That led to us being able to start making things like converting Munch’s Oddysee to PS3. But we were it the organic way, purely from sales.
The sales were always a little bit exceeding our expectations. We didn’t have high expectations, but it was amazing that 11-year-old games were still selling. That led to us being able to get to the point where we made Stranger HD. That got really good Metacritic. We were surprised. It had pretty good sales. Then we got to where we started to be able to spend millions of dollars, and that’s how we got New and Tasty.
New and Tasty then became our largest venture, self-financed, paid for the old way, the business building organically from sales and not borrowing any money or doing publishing deals. New and Tasty moved 3.5 million downloads. That was a surprise. It treated us well and helped us set up ground zero here, with a new distributed development model. New and Tasty was largely done under one development house, with a couple of others coming in to solve various problems. We learned from that and went all cloud-based. We control all the data through many development houses.
Right now we have people in Vancouver, in Seattle, in San Francisco, in San Diego, in Los Angeles, in Washington D. C., in Quebec City, in England, in Scotland, in Ireland, and in Australia. That’s our day. Managing the time zones is pretty fucked. But we’re able to control costs a lot better. It’s operating more like film development, where you set up the company for development and use all contractors. If you want to keep on going, you keep on going. You swell as you need it and thin as it makes sense. That’s the way we’ve been doing it.
It’s tough finding anyone who has the highest bar. It’s easier when we’re getting animation talent, because then we get them from the film industry, or we get them from top-tier experience. Lighting, modeling, rigging tend to go more film, less game. Then you get into level design, you’re really in a hybrid of being able to contract out. Depending on the skill set it’s easier or harder.
Traditional outsourcing companies haven’t really worked for us because they want architectural specs, basically, and then they can function on that. We’re still looking at more of a distributed development team rather than hiring outsourcers. More like contractors who know how to build games versus — if you look at the history of India and China for outsourcing, it’s very, “Tell us exactly what you need and we can get you that.” But if we have to work together to shave cycles or figure out solutions, outsourcing groups get harder.
GamesBeat: How many people do you work with now?
Lanning: When it comes to individuals, right now it’s about 30 on the project. That will be higher eventually. They’re all spread out. At times we’ll scale down and scale up. As we get through the rest of the project we’ll scale up a little, because we have your systems established and code and things like that.
Where we are with it, we started this about three years ago.
