Summary
Crush Houseis a unique hybrid of genres that combines elements of social sims and management alongside emergent narrative, putting players in the role of producer on 1999’s hottest reality show. The title comes from Nerial Games, which previously made the well-lovedCard Shark, and publisher Devolver Digital, known for indie favorites likeCult of the Lamb. Slated for release later this month, players will have to satisfy a wide array of audiences while slowly learning more about the house’s secrets.
Some viewers are more straightforward to please, like Butt Guys and Drama Queens, while others need a bit more finesse, like Suburban Moms and Schadenfreuders. Part of the fun of the game -besides watching drama unfold - is lining up shots to satisfy as many viewers as possible simultaneously. One of the mostimpressive parts ofCrush Houseis the way it utilizes emergent narrative mechanics to have dynamic social events occur each day - with 12 total contestants, and four chosen for each season, there are almost 500 combinations that can be made, all of which will result in different events.
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Screen Rantinterviewed Nicole He, the director ofCrush House, to discuss creating an interactive reality show, crafting characters audiences love to hate, and infusing the game with an overall sense of weirdness.
The Evolution Of Crush House
From TV Inspirations To Y2K Social Sim
Screen Rant: I’m so excited to talk about this game, I’ve been looking forward to it since right around GDC. I didn’t see it there, but we had an appointment a couple of weeks after that.
Nicole He: It’s a crazy time, because we’re going up to launch and finishing the game, which is really wild.
It’s been about two years, right?
Nicole He: Actually, it’s been about five years for me. It originally started with me and another collaborator, Arnaud, who used to be at Nerial. We came up with the idea originally in 2019 and started prototyping with a couple other people, and then we realized that the game was going to be just a bigger game that required more people. We wouldn’t be able to do it just a couple of people, so, what we decided was that if we could get it signed with Devolver, then we would bring on Nerial to work on it.
As far as the timeline, I’ve been working on it since 2019, just coming up with the idea, doing a little prototyping, just thinking about stuff,and then we signed it at the end of 2021. Nerial was finishing up their previous game, Card Shark, and so I would say it really kicked off 2022 with the full team. It has been a couple of years of full production and development and stuff, but for me it’s been longer. It’s surreal that we’re reaching this point now where it’s finally coming out. It’s wild.
Besides the scale of it changing, what are the biggest ways it’s evolved since you first started?
Nicole He: When we started, my original inspiration was the show Terrace House. It was a show that was really popular in 2018, 2019 on Netflix, and it’s a Japanese reality show. It’s very loose as far as the format. It’s just six strangers live in a house together, a beautiful house that they give to them, and then you just see slice of life, what happens between them. They develop friendships, they develop, of course, also some romance and some drama. But a lot of the appeal was that because they were Japanese, it was just very different from American reality TV, where it didn’t feel trashy. People felt like normal people, and relationships would develop at a speed that was maybe more normal than what you see on reality TV.
There was something about it, it was so compelling to watch, and that was the original inspiration. As far as the tone of the game from the beginning, we started a bit more Terrace House-like, where it was people just doing whatever - you’re watering the plants, you say hi to somebody in the hallway. One of the major changes that happened over a couple of years was that we just realized that that was too boring for what we needed, and hard pivoted to trashy drama, a ridiculous, over-the-top kind of thing. It just made more sense. The only reason it wasn’t like that, it’s just because the original inspiration was a specific show, but it’s not like it was important creatively or something that it was that tone. It was just more that’s where we started. That was one of the major changes.
Another major change was the actual gameplay. In the game, the main thing that you’re doing is that you are filming things around the house, and you’re trying to satisfy different audiences. We have different audiences who’d like to see different things, and you have to read their comments to figure out what they want to see and then film that stuff. Landing on that as the core mechanic of the actual game took a long time and took a lot of work, because just the idea of the premise of the game: you’re a producer of a reality show. What does that actually mean? How does that translate into gameplay?There wasn’t a clear answer, because this isn’t a normal video game where we’re just following a format.
Yeah, it’s not really an existing genre.
Nicole He: It’s not an existing genre. Sure, there are some aspects that are similar to The Sims, but that’s more of what’s running in the background. The simulation aspect of people doing things is something that’s happening, but then you’re like, “Okay, but what is the player actually doing?” Because you’re not God like in The Sims, where you actually tell them what to do.
The first approach that we took was you would choose the cast members - that’s the same. They would go on and do the reality TV stuff, and you would film it, but what we did was you would film it all day, and then at the end of the day you would go downstairs to your room and then edit an episode together by taking clips of footage that you had captured before. Then once you created an episode, you could air the episode, and then you would get feedback from the audience about how well it did - that felt intuitive as the approach to this.
When we actually built that out and started playing, it was also actually really boring, because you weren’t getting any feedback about what you were doing as a player. You’re filming stuff and you’re like, “Okay, but am I doing a good job? I don’t really know. I won’t know for maybe six or eight minutes,” because that’s how long a day cycle takes, which was just too long of a loop for feedback.
One of the other pivotal changes we made was changing it to a livestreaming model. The idea then is like, you’re filming things, an audience is watching in real time, and they’re reacting in real time. They’re commenting, but also there’s these little emojis that appear that indicate that they like it. That was another huge change that we made that immediately was much better,because then you could immediately get feedback. Also, it allowed you to do a lot of different things, or the audiences could push you to do lots of different things, rather than you just not knowing what you’re supposed to do.
It was really important to me that people don’t think this is a wholesome game, because the way that it looks is very bright and bubbly, which I think you could have the mistake of thinking that means it’s wholesome in the content or the tone or the story. - Nicole He
Obviously, it’s the title, the Crush House itself is extremely important, and how that’s laid out and the way you can add things to it. Since it’s such a key part of it, did designing the map itself take a really long time for you guys?
Nicole He: Yeah, we’ve had many iterations on the layout of the house. Actually, very early on, we started with the premise of different rooms. Things will happen in different rooms, and then they move to another room and a thing happens, so we designed the spaces such that there were discrete locations and rooms - we call them zones, actually. There was a lot of iteration. I was remembering this because I was looking back on our old builds and stuff to see how far we’ve come, art-wise.
The earliest versions, I think we didn’t put that much thought into it. You’re like, “There’s probably a living room, there’s probably a kitchen.” Terrace House has a room that they call the playroom in every house, which is a cozy TV room, so we were like, “Let’s have a playroom, a gym,” I don’t know. From the beginning, we already had a bunch of those things, but through the process of iteration, ended up doing remodeling, changing the layouts. There was always a pool - of course there’s a pool.
Of course.
Nicole He: Actually, even since the demo there’s been some remodeling, so the house is actually a bit different than in the demo.
You talked about how the art style has progressed. From the older pictures of builds I saw, it didn’t always have such a strong vaporwavey aesthetic that it does now. How did that evolve over time?
Nicole He: Yeah, so Delphine [Fourneau] is our art director and she’s amazing. We started with just explorations with her, “What should the game actually look like?” I think we landed on it should be bright and colorful. Part of the reason why those old builds just look like that is just because we had not been able to implement the tech yet to get it as bright or look as good, so, I would say that the colorfulness of it wasn’t so much of a huge pivot, it was just more like it took time to implement this stuff.
We did actually go more extreme. I think the house used to not be pink, and then suddenly we were like, “You know what? It’s going to be pink.” Then I was like, “We should have death spikes around the house and they should be pink, obviously.” [Laughs] Everything is really, really Barbie looking. The characters definitely had a glow up, because earlier versions, they looked a little bit more generic.
Then there was a point where we were like, “Actually, let’s try to make the characters a bit more distinct, a bit more voluptuous and little bit sexier.” If you see early versions of the characters, they changed to become that thing that they are now. That was an intentional iteration that we had made, but it’s been really awesome just to have all of that stuff come together and end up matching Delphine’s vision for what the art style would look like.
You mentioned a little bit about the shows that you took inspiration from and about how there’s someSimsinfluence, but I’m curious to hear more from the gameplay perspective where you were drawing the most inspiration, because it’s such an interesting hybrid of social sim and a little bit of tycoon-ish mechanics, almost.
Nicole He:Genuinely, I don’t think there are other games with our mechanic.Of course, we took some inspiration from other photography games, so Pokémon Snap is an example of something that we looked at as far as trying to come up with the earlier iterations of how the audience mechanic would work.
Basically, there’s the core design question of: how does the game know what the player is filming? How does the player understand what the game considers to be important that they’re filming? Because you’re filming in 3D spaces, tons of stuff, and this was our earliest problem - without having any feedback from the game about what you’re filming, you’re just like, “I don’t know if this is meaningful or meaningless.”
We had to create a system that did both of these things, weigh certain things as important, but then also tell the player that those are the things that are important and have them change. Before we landed on where we did, Pokemon Snap was a classic inspiration, and we were trying to think about how they handled it on a technical level.
You’re doing it and you see, “Oh, you get points for the pose and how big they are in the frame,” so there were some aspects of that that we took. But Pokémon Snap is literally on rails, and so you’re very in control. You know exactly what the player can see and capture, whereas for us, it’s you running around in the space, so it could be anything. Also, it’s procedural, so we don’t know what the characters are doing either.
There were a couple other things, games just like Umurangi Generation is another, it’s an indie game, but that’s another photography one. We really had to just grind it out as far as iterating on the design, because we looked at all these inspirations, but none of them fit exactly what we were doing, so we had to come up with our own thing.
In terms of the audiences, I saw a lot of them during the demo and during the preview too. Is there a set number of those?
Nicole He: I should actually find out what the actual number is. I think it’s 35 or 36.
Crafting Crush House’s Characters
Building A Roster & Designing Emergent Narratives
The way that there are so many different combinations of cast members is so crazy, and I know very little about how emergent narrative works. Could you give some insight into that process?
Nicole He: Sure. Basically, one of the first decisions that we made about the game, and this is back in 2019, was: number one, that you would be the producer on the show, not a contestant, which already just sounded more interesting. Because being a contestant on the show felt like you automatically go into dating sim, which would probably also be really fun, but it’s just like, “Oh, but what if you were the person behind the scenes? What would that be like as a game?”
Once we made that decision, you’re like, “Okay, what do you do as a producer on a show?” The first thing that comes to mind is casting, right? Wouldn’t it be really fun to look at all these potential candidates for cast members and get to make a decision about who’s actually on the show, because you think they’ll get along or they won’t get along? Things like that.
Because of that decision, what we ended up with is we have 12 cast members, and you can pick four at a time. If you do the math on that, that is actually 495 cast combinations. Because of that, that basically meant that the game could not be a linear narrative game. We wanted dialogue to happen between cast members and storylines that play out, it meant that we couldn’t - just from a volume level - we couldn’t write all these scenarios for 495 possibilities. If we wanted to be able to cast, that meant the players should have choice, and so we wouldn’t necessarily know who’s going to be in the cast at any given time, so what that meant is that the game had to be procedural in some way.
We had to build a system that could not be hard-coded as far as what’s going on between the cast members, but actually designed in a way that would be flexible as to all the different possible combinations. It was also really important that it didn’t feel like - an issue that you often have with procedural generation is that it can feel too random. If you’re just doing pure randomness, sure, that can give you enough content or something, but it wouldn’t make the characters feel like real characters who have their patterns and their traits, and stuff like that.
I think this was the biggest technical feat of the game, was building out the system that I call the reality TV simulation system. Internally, we call it rigmarole. It was a huge undertaking for the dev team. The way it works is that each of our 12 cast members have personality traits. There’s actually 12 traits, but it’s six binary: introvert, extrovert, passive, aggressive, things like that. They also have traits that they’re attracted to,so they could be introverted, but they’re attracted to extroverted people. Then we just have this grid of 12 characters who have, by default, certain attractions to certain characters and certain traits, and from that, you have something that if you put scenarios together, you may start to see things play out.
We ended up building the system that looks at those traits, but then looks at all these other things that are happening in the house, like what time of day it is, what props the player has purchased, what season you’re on, things like that. Then the writers wrote out these scenes of things that can happen with conditions, so they can be like, “This is a fight between two intelligent people, so this scene can only happen if there’s two intelligent cast members.” Then they can also write variations in the line, so Joyumi might say something in a way that’s different from how Milo would say it, or something like that.
We did a lot of that, and then we have the system that looks at all of this and then is able to schedule out the day given who’s in the cast, what their relationship statuses are, because that also changes over time, and their attractions to each other also change over time. Every time you play, it is unique. Even with our demo, which only has four cast members, so that’s only one out of 495 possibilities, when you replay it’s still different every time for everybody. There’s still a level of variation, though certain cast members will have their patterns, or two cast members are very incompatible, so it’s very, very unlikely they’ll ever hook up. It’s not necessarily impossible, but it’s unlikely.
It was really cool to build out the system, which was very difficult and very complicated, and then have our writers do all the writing and stuff, then to have it actually finally come together and see it really play out and feel like reality TV was really awesome and took a lot of work and a long time.
In terms of developing the actual roster, what was that process like for you guys? Did you know off the top of your head, like, “Oh, there’s this one moment from a show or a person from a show where I want to capture that essence?”
Nicole He: We just wanted to have a variety of people. This was also one of those things we punched up once we did that turn to make it a lot trashier. We really wanted to make sure that they all had specific flaws, things that are bad about them, but we didn’t want them to be completely negative villains, either. They all have a bit of complexity to them, or they have motivations that should feel realistic in some way, and that’s part of some of the things you start to learn about the characters as you play.
I think we were inspired by some of the classic archetypes on TV, and it was fun to work with the team to come up with all these different people, and then also think about how they would work together, and imagine those things, and then see those things actually start to happen in the game.
Do you have a favorite?
Nicole He: I think my favorite character is Gunther, who the world has not met yet because he’s not in the demo, but I feel like he’s going to be a fan favorite too.Actually, Gunther was such a strong character immediately that at some point we were like, “All the other cast members need to be as good as Gunther.“We need to punch up all the other characters so that they can match Gunther and how good of a character he is, because he’s our Redditor, like Elon Musk-type of person that you love to hate on the show, and he’s really pretentious.
It is really funny to see him, and his lines are really funny, and he’s just a strong, different type of character maybe than you would expect, but also it feels like it totally makes sense to have this guy that you’re just, like, “Oh my God, I hate him.” Actually, that’s one of the first comments - during the introductions there’s comments, and I think that’s one of the comments that the people say immediately.
Just, “Oh, I hate him?”
Nicole He: “I hate him,” yeah. [Laughs]
Countdown To Crush House Launch
Last Minute Changes & Developer Collabs
The ads really are a fever dream. It feels a little like Adult Swim reminiscent, but it’s also very Y2K, vaporwave vibes. How are those made on your guys' end?
I think one of the coolest things that we did with this game is that we asked a bunch of our friends at other game studios to make ads referencing their own games to work as ads in our game. Some of them are more obvious than others, but most of the time you have to be familiar with that game already to recognize that there’s an object or a character or something from a game that’s made into an ad.
That was just an incredibly fun part of the process too because - I mean, it wasn’t just to get free work out of our friends from other studios [Laughs], but I just felt like it was part of this thing where we’re making games in a community. I think it’s really fun to have crossovers between different games, not just in the game world itself, but also as a reference to our actual world, or the community between us, and us making this game and other people making other games.
The ads, we gave them some guidelines as to general style, but they’re very open to making whatever. Many of them are made in the art style of their own game, some of them are 2D, most of them are 3D. They often have some kind of joke in them, some of them are quite funny. That was really cool. I should probably count how many we actually have, it might be something like 25, or more than that, actually.
Are there any that you can reveal at all in terms of crossovers?
Nicole He: Yeah, so we are also putting together some Steam bundles for launch with some of the games that have ads, which is cool. One that we’ve talked about already publicly was Content Warning, which we had a funny story with. When I asked my friends at Landfall to make an ad, I was like, “Oh, we’re making this game, it’s reality TV, and you run around with a camcorder filming and stuff,” and they were like, “Wait, what? We are making a game where you’re running around with a camcorder filming, and you have audience reactions.” [Laughs]
The games are extremely different, but it was actually really cool, because we both had these design challenges that we had around the subject, that on both sides we thought about and tried to come up with solutions for. It was really cool just to hear that we were both doing that, and we were announcing the same week. They, of course, released the same day as their announcement, and that game obviously is just successful to a level that’s it unheard of.
When we found this out, we were like, “Yeah, they have an ad in our game which is great, but we need to do something even more. It’d be really fun to have crossover.” We have our mascot, the Chorby, in their game -it actually debuted in Content Warning, because our game was not out yet. One of the spooky items that you can find in Content Warning is our mascot, and then we have an object from their game that is hidden, a little bit of an Easter egg that’s in our game.
You recently tweeted about how in the final weeks, you may have a little more time to add in stuff that’s just for fun or to be weird. Do you have any examples of that?
Nicole He: We added in a really fun secret and kind of Easter egg. I don’t want to spoil it, so I’m not going to, but there’s a secret thing that you may do at nighttime that unlocks things that happen. There’s little things like that that we have been finally adding. Of course, there’s way more that I want to do that we don’t have time to get in, but a couple little things here and there.
That was also something I wanted to ask about, because obviously I don’t want to spoil it for myself or anyone else, but the secret other side of the Crush House and the mystery behind that, how did that part develop for you guys? Did you always know you wanted that dual gameplay?
Nicole He: Yeah,we knew pretty early that we wanted there to be some kind of dark twist to the game, or that there was something more going on than just the everyday reality TV stuff. It took some time for us to land on what that actually was exactly, and how it ties into all the things that are happening in the house and the day-to-day stuff and the characters. But it was always an intention that there would be this extra layer of a secret or a mystery that you’re trying to figure out.
Is the game rated T?
Nicole He: It is not rated yet. I think it would be. That’s my guess, but I don’t know, because it has vulgar language, but I think that’s the extent of it. Because we’re not releasing on console, at least not yet, I don’t think we needed to have a rating, so that’s why we don’t have it.
I was curious, because I was noticing they’re dropping some F-bombs and stuff in the game, and obviously there’s the sexier elements of it, so I was wondering how much you guys were like, “Oh, we have to tamp this back to keep it at a T,” or anything like that.
Nicole He: No, we knew it was going to be adult. When we did that shift of going from something that’s a little more chill to something that was not, it was an intentional push in a direction to make it more vulgar, make it more over the top in that way, and people saying things that are like trashy reality TV.
Which I think serves it well, in a way. Most simulation games try to be very, “Everyone can play this simulation game.”
Nicole He: Right.It was really important to me that people don’t think this is a wholesome game, because the way that it looks is very bright and bubbly, which I think you could have the mistake of thinking that means it’s wholesome in the content or the tone or the story. I wanted to make sure in our marketing and everything that we made it clear that it wasn’t that, and it was kind of trashy, but also there’s these darker elements too.
Yeah, it’s the kind of game where someone will probably call it cozy in a way, but I think that term gets just tossed around to anything.
Nicole He: I wonder if when people say that they mean feminine, because I would say that our game is feminine as far as what it looks like, whatever that even means, but I wouldn’t say that it’s cozy. It’s femme and queer, and I feel like when people see games that are like that, coziness or even wholesomeness are often implied, but we want to be like, “No, actually we can be femme and queer, but not feel like those other things.”
You mentioned how there are things that you wished you would have had time to implement but couldn’t for whatever reason. Is that something where you’re like, “Maybe we’ll add it later,” or?
Nicole He: I think we’ll have an opportunity for some of those things in the patch - of course, that also will depend on player feedback. I hope to squeeze in some more, not just things that fix the game or improve the game in general, butwe can add more weird, too. I think there was one funny, weird thing that we almost got in, but I feel like we maybe don’t have time to get in now, so I think that will go in the patch.
