Happy Birthday, Beacon Pines!

It’s the one year anniversary of Hiding Spot’s cute and creepy storybook adventure, Beacon Pines! Join us in wishing Luka a very happy birthday!

We’re kicking off celebrations right now: as part of the Fellow Traveller Publisher Sale on Steam where you can pick up Beacon Pines for an awesome 40% off. This is for a limited time only, so make sure you grab it now - and tell your friends!

To join in on the festivities, we sat down with Hiding Spot Games for a few words on their journey so far:

Fellow Traveller (FT): Every developer team has a backstory. How did you meet, and what made you decide to make a game together?

Matt: When I was searching for an artist to work with on Beacon Pines, I started by looking through ArtStation. Lots of great artists post their portfolios there along with their work availability. Ilse’s illustrations instantly caught my attention. We had an informal chat and clicked really well on ideas we had for making a game.

Brent and I met through a mutual friend years ago and worked together on a game for iPad called “Ephemerid: A Musical Adventure”. He created the art for Ephemerid by painstakingly cutting it out of paper and photographing it. Though Ilse was already creating the art for Beacon Pines, I knew Brent had great storytelling chops and so it was a natural fit for him to join the team to help tackle the writing.

FT: Beacon Pines has a lovely storybook feel to it. Being able to change the story outcome feels very satisfying, how did you come up with that mechanic? Matt: One of the early ideas for the game was that of finding words through exploration and then using those words to make choices in the story. From there, it was a whole lot of prototyping and difficult design iteration to determine how that would function as a game. At a certain point, we discovered that it was most interesting if the words stayed with you, as a sort of inventory of potential choices to make. So, you could find a word and use it at a later point to change the trajectory of the game.

It really started to feel good when we added the Chronicle. It’s a sort of built-in visual save system that lets you go back to any previous decision point and use a different word to alter the story. Even better, after finding new words in one story branch, you can use the Chronicle to take them back to a previous “Turning Point” and go down a completely different path. We leaned into that idea pretty hard. The word-choices in Beacon Pines dramatically alter the direction of the story. The Chronicle makes this basically frictionless, as it means you can see every branch of the game without restarting.

FT: There are a few themes that run throughout Beacon Pines’ story. What were your inspirations for the game - did any games, movies, or particular art styles stick with you while you were developing the game?

Ilse: We took inspiration from the visual novel genre in general, the main visuals like the portraits changing expressions as they progress in their conversation for example. Unlike most visual novels, we wanted the player to be able to walk around in this small diorama-like environment to enhance the exploration!

Brent: Matt and I drew a lot from the many 80’s movies that revolved around putting normal kids in wild situations, stuff