Prior to Summer Game Fest 2024, Final Weapon had the opportunity to interview Dong Zhou and Hongke Luo of Optillusion Games about While Waiting, the studio’s upcoming release. Our interview dives into the ideas and inspiration behind the game, learnings from the studio’s award-winning title Moncage, and things the team looks forward to watching players experience. A special thanks to Dong Zhou, Hongke Luo, and Chris Cook for their time. Please enjoy this exclusive interview!
Check out Optillusion Games on Twitter (X) and their official website.
How did Optillusion Games come about? What was the process of forming this studio, and what is your mission as a team?
Dong Zhou: At first, we didn’t even think about establishing a studio – we just wanted to finish our first game called Moncage while we were students at NYU. We didn’t finish at university, but we decided to carry on and finish it. It took a long time – almost four years. Once we finished Moncage, we didn’t want to stop there, so we proceeded to create a studio. We wanted to create more unique games like this, so that was our starting point.
Based on that, we created some other projects that were more experiential before moving to more commercial games that could be considered indie but beloved by many players. This has led us to While Waiting, which is quite unique and still acts as a form of art for ourselves.
How did the idea of While Waiting come about? It’s such a unique idea that I’d never considered something that could be a game. What went into the thought process behind creating this?
Dong Zhou: I think most of the inspiration came from our daily lives, like times when you go to work or are waiting for a bus. There are so many things you have to wait for. Sometimes, it can be boring, but as a Game Designer, I try to stay playful. I find myself daydreaming about what in our daily lives can be turned into a game, and I found this concept of waiting very interesting. So, we decided to make this a game.
We want the player to accept the moments of waiting in their daily lives. We all know waiting for something can be boring, but actually, you can find a lot of ways to kill time. This isn’t limited to browsing the web or using your phone; you can find all sorts of ways to spend time while waiting. So, we really want to convey this idea to players.
One of the most interesting aspects of our game involves the fact that waiting is always the automated solution for our levels. This means that trying to do something will make you wait for a longer time, which is our core design. We want to challenge the player to avoid doing too many steps; otherwise, they might end up waiting for ten minutes without realizing it. It might only take one minute or two minutes if you do nothing and wait, but if you do something, the time flies, and we want to convey that to players.
Bouncing back to Moncage, your team saw major success with that title. Moncage was the Apple App Store’s 2022 iPad Game of the Year. How did you use the lessons learned from that game to implement in the development of While Waiting?
Dong Zhou: One of the first takeaways we had from Moncage was paying lots of attention to details. Details are extremely important in games, especially in games where you want to tell a story with visuals. In Moncage, we had no text at all, so we added a lot of details to create a narrative. Some of these are symbolism and some are callback items, and we have done something similar in While Waiting to make the narrative work.
For example, Adam, the main character of the game, is seen across different stages of his life. We go through childhood, youth, and even old age. As Adam ages, the things he waits for change. You might wait for TV commercials to end in his childhood with his parents by his side. When Adam is a teen, he can be seen waiting for commercials, but this time, he is with his roommate. And in old age, Adam is still watching TV, but he’s holding an AC remote. We have a few sets of levels like this in While Waiting, and we want the player to wait in similar situations with different feelings. This helps convey our narrative as you can watch Adam grow throughout his entire life and wait for different things.
When I saw the trailer for While Waiting, one of the things that stuck out to me was the art style and the different stylistic choices that helped it stand out. Specifically, I noticed a unique use of color – what was the process of choosing certain objects to be colored and how did your team determine this stylistic choice?
Dong Zhou: We’ve tried different art styles in our first version, with everything being black and white, almost line art, with no colors. But it was pretty plain; I felt it made the waiting moments much more boring. Then, we tried our second version which colored everything, but we felt like something wasn’t right. It looked like a comic book, not like a game. Finally, we decided to find a balance in between and only color part of the stages. We tried to color everything that was interactable, but that made things less interesting for players. They’ll just go to something with color and wait for something to happen – we don’t want this to happen. We want the game to have a mysterious element and have players explore to find new ways to kill time.
You’ll find that not every colored item is interactable. Sometimes, maybe a door is white, but it’s still interactable. We want the player to feel surprised here. I think it’s a good thing to try and explore. We want the player to continue trying to find ways to kill time since that’s, of course, the main purpose of our game.
I love that even the art style and simple stylistic choices all revolve around the core message of the game. Since there are so many levels in the game, what is your favorite scenario in While Waiting?
Hongke Luo: I’m the Technical Designer for the game, and one level I was in charge of is my favorite – it’s waiting for your toilet. Our game is almost like a comic book where you can see different things on different screens. There is a spam upside down in this level that is tipped on a cabinet by the toilet. As you walk, it will get closer and closer to falling as the toilet shakes. When the Spam falls, there is a “Hallelujah!” music track that plays and it’s easily my favorite moment of the game.
One day I was working from home, and my girlfriend saw that level and thought it was really funny. We went to Costco sometime later, and she pointed to the Spam, which proved to me that this gameplay design was impressive to people who might not even play games.
Dong Zhou: This is our goal – we want the players to think about this game when they are waiting for similar situations in their lives. They might record that funny moment from While Waiting and laugh a little bit next time they are waiting for the bus or the toilet.
It sounds like there is such a unique and wide variety of scenarios you’ll have to wait for; I can already see scenarios like the toilet being all over social media. With these scenarios, what was the team’s thought process for creating these different waiting scenarios?
Dong Zhou: At first, we created a list of different waiting moments in our day-to-day lives. We came up with about 200 or more. Everyone had so many waiting moments in their daily lives, but each one of them shared different things. A good example of this is one person said waiting for coffee and another said waiting for lunch. You’re both waiting in a line, so we took that as one scenario. After that, we thought about the story of this game. We want to tell the story of Adam’s entire life, from birth to death, so we want to put each of these waiting moments in these various stages. This was quite challenging as you have so many different waiting moments at different points in your life. It takes a lot of time to fit everything together, so there was a lot of rearranging and shuffling things around. We had to delete some levels, flip some around, and even add levels in some instances.
In our initial design, the game is 100 levels, but we deleted some of them and added some as well. We found that the game ended up being 105 levels. We tried really hard to get an even 100, but we’ve found that we cannot delete even one level to tell our complete narrative. In each level, figuring out the gameplay can be challenging. We always think about adding minigames in levels, as minigames can be a good option for the player to kill time. But it’s also very hard to find minigames that fit each level – we want these minigames to be relevant to their respective levels and have a purpose.
We don’t want the player to feel that levels are repetitive in our game, so we tried to put different arcade minigames to keep things interesting. Some are puzzles, some are action, and some are just exploring and finding out how to interact with the environment.
We’ve briefly touched on the purpose behind this game, but what is the core message that you hope players take away from Adam’s life?
Dong Zhou: We don’t want players to be anxious when they are waiting in their day-to-day lives. Life is just like that – if something is going to happen, it will happen eventually, so you don’t need to try too hard to push it. Also, we want everyone to stay playful and find their own games in their daily lives while waiting. It’s almost like you are learning the tricks to kill time in your life. Sometimes, you can also call it daydreaming, right?
Finally, what was the biggest roadblock you’ve faced in development so far, and how did the team overcome the challenge?
Hongke Luo: There are two hard restrictions in the game that we didn’t touch: doing nothing will always be the fastest thing to do. If you mess up, you will end up taking way more time. Sometimes, we’d come up with really good game design, but we found that it would break this rule, and we’d have to ditch it. This game is all about waiting, so this doing nothing is fastest idea is going to be a fun idea to watch with speedrunners.
Our other restriction in the game was that there is no text. First, localization is really hard. If you put some text in the gameplay, you have to have all kinds of translations for that, and you have to adjust the text box. But later, we find that this can also give us a really unique style. If we were using text, we’d have to work on finding ways to visually convey the narrative. It actually makes the narrative much more meaningful and unique since the visuals are the only focus.
Also, with the numerous minigames we’ve included, many genres exist. One of the genres is a visual novel. We tried really hard to include visual novel gameplay into one of the levels of While Waiting, but we wanted to avoid using text. So, we created our own font that is essentially gibberish, and we did a lot of playtesting and tuning to determine that this wasn’t something players would find fun. Visual novels are meant to be read, and you can’t read any of this gibberish (laughs).
Dong Zhou: I’m still trying to find a place for this! I’m a huge fan of it so I hope we can find a place for it in our game.
Hongke Luo: So yeah, these are the two biggest constraints we have. I think putting these in place has made our lives much harder, but at the same time, if you get over it, I think our game will come out very unique.
Note: This interview was edited for clarity.
