In Arctic Eggs, you play as a Poultry Peddler, an egg cook for a community of NPCs in dystopian Antarctica. You use your mouse to jostle the wiggly yolks around the pan, cooking them on one side before deftly flipping them over. If you aren’t careful, the eggs will slip out, forcing you to start again. Players must satisfy the hunger of everyone in the vicinity to gain an audience with the station’s ominous overlord, The Saint of Six Stomachs. An alluring question follows you around in the meantime – “Can you fry eggs on top of Mt. Everest?”
Fresh acquaintances offer scintillating dialogue and extra ingredients that complicate the cooking experience. A bottle of beer must be kept upright in the pan, lest its liquid drool out and lead you to failure. Cigarettes act as timers, and bullets explode, sending fish suppers into the biting wind.
Easy to play but hard to master, Arctic Eggs is a difficult game to put down – a mysterious and brilliant experience that is spitting with atmosphere and quotable wisdom. In the wake of its release, I hopped on Discord with The Water Museum to chop it up post-mortem style.
How did you start out making games?
I think it’s been almost two years at this point. This one guy, Miziziziz, he’s a big member of the Godot community. He released a Godot course, and I loved his dev logs – and I knew 3D modelling a little bit at that point because I work as an animator. I saw the course, and I was like, alright, let’s just try out programming. And I’ve been kind of stuck here ever since. It’s been a good time.
I watched your early devlogs on YouTube after I rolled credits. Arctic Eggs started as a fast food simulator, right? Though the idea of the protagonist making enough money to go to Antarctica was there. Can you talk about the journey from that idea to Arctic Eggs?
In that first vlog, I tried out a ton of different concepts, and the egg flipping was there, like take one, and it was so immediately fun. But in my head, it was like, “Oh, this is gonna be a big, fast food thing, so I need tons and tons of tons of other stations.” So the rest of the dev logs are just me trying to get those other stations to work, but none of them felt as fun as the eggs, so I think that’s why I was just like, “Ah, I can’t do this”, and I’m moving on to a different project now. But then, I liked the Antarctica idea. I live in Florida. So, you know, everything is just blistering hot here. I think I yearn for the colder weather. And that kind of always stuck with me. And then the game jam that we did rolled around, and it’s a game jam, so it’s allowed to be a smaller game. So I was like, okay, I’ll grab this fun mechanic and take it out of the fast food environment and centre it around that, and then it did really well. And now we’re here – made a full game out of it. People seem really happy with it.
What inspired Arctic Eggs?
There were a couple of inspirations, game-wise – like borderline plagiarism, I feel like. Scary to say it, but, um, Tales from Off Peak City by Cosmo D. Huge one. I practically just copied his dialogue and group conversations, practically just stole that from him, so I feel a little bit bad. And Cowboy Bebop, I was watching a lot of that at the time. The whole pitch was just like merging the style of Cosmo D with the world of Cowboy Bebop. And that’s kind of how the visuals were led.
Can you talk about your collaborators on Arctic Eggs?
So CD (cdbunker2, Cock Le Doody in Cruelty Squad), he’s big into the worldbuilding stuff. For me, it’s always just been like, oh, you know, I’ll throw cigarettes in the pan. And that’s just a gameplay element. But he was like, well, let’s try to figure out why. Why would people be doing that? And I think that’s where the nose tubes came from for the characters – but he handled most of the characters and a lot of the lore as well. It was just up to me to convey the lore within the dialogue. A huge part of the success of the project was the world, and that was mainly him.
And then, Cameron Ginex is our composer – a friend from college, he’s been stuck with me ever since. With him, I was just like, hey, I need some Cowboy Bebop stuff, get going. And then he just makes this masterpiece, which was great. Completely nailed it. Super happy about that. And then there’s Angelo or A. B. Marnie. He helped me a lot because he’s much more of a technical programmer than I am, so he was able to help me with the stuff you have to be smart for, like, anybody can program an egg flipping around in a pan [Editor’s Note: I don’t know about that one, chief] but you need to know what you’re doing a little bit when it comes to save systems. He got the game functioning as a proper thing. It was great working with him.
What draws you to simulated physics in your games? In Ibis Am you pick up the fish and then you lift the bird’s head and it slides down their throat – same with the very intentional take on pan cooking in Arctic Eggs. Obviously, that’s what we do IRL, but most games just automate that kind of stuff…
I haven’t thought about that too much, but I think that’s a great point. I think the worst cooking system of all time was probably Skyrim; you know, you just click a button and hit Y to cook or whatever. I think I like games that take a seemingly easy task and then actually make you manually do it. So, like you said, lifting the fish up and dropping it and eating it or actually having to flip the food around. Because in a lot of games – I was thinking about jousting. Like that’s incredibly difficult to do. I imagine – I’ve never done it. But in games, it’s just like two buttons you have to push. Yet, in reality, you have to actually spend years mastering that. So it’s kind of fun to make a game where you only have to spend a couple of hours mastering one thing, which in this case is eggs in the pan. So I think that’s what I like about it, that you can master something totally.
How did you go about pacing Arctic Eggs? Did you have a lot of conversations about how long it should be?
That was probably the biggest stress after the game jam. The game jam was relatively stress-free – in quotation marks – because it is stressful to make something in, like, a week. But then, after that, it did well in the jam. So I was just terrified to touch anything about the jam version. That’s why the first area is so similar to the jam version. But length was a big issue I was thinking about as well because people enjoyed the jam version. And as the credits rolled in the jam version, what a lot of them would say would be like, “Wow, those mechanics were really interesting; I’d love to see them expand upon it.” But then like 10 seconds would go by, and they’d be like, “Actually, it probably would have overstayed its welcome if it was longer.” So I was thinking about that the whole time, making the other three areas. And I think it was mainly just because I didn’t think people would care about the world, or the lore or the dialogue and stuff. At one point, I was just like, maybe it should just be like the jam version, and then the Saint of Six Stomachs, but I’m really glad they talked me out of it. It was really only me feeling that way.
One of my favourite aspects of Arctic Eggs is the dialogue. I saw you tweet about some people thinking it was AI-generated – that’s so weird to me because, in my eyes, I appreciate it’s kind of aloof, but I found it really beautiful and human, it totally finessed the atmosphere.
I completely understand because it’s very random sometimes. And AI is great at just spewing out massive amounts of slop. It really surprised me that people enjoyed the dialogue so much because I don’t know if you’ve ever played the original jam version, but the amount of spelling mistakes throughout the entire thing – I’m not a writer, I don’t write a lot, that’s why the dialogue is so short and concise. But it’s really cool to see that people enjoyed it. I’m never going to do dialogue again because there are just so many NPCs and so much writing. It was terrible. But it was fun to see that people wouldn’t just like click through it like I would have done – they were actually reading it.
It’s funny to hear you say you’re not a writer because a lot of it really stuck with me, especially the “pandering as erosion” bit in the prison. Were you reading anything at the time when you wrote the dialogue?
At the time, it was probably a lot of Cowboy Bebop. I think the storylines of the episodes inspired me the most, you know, one moment, they could be like, reliving their past. And then they’re trying to find this chess guru, that kind of ‘all over the placeness’. But in the end, it all fits. That’s kind of what I was trying to go for, as well. But I wish I had more literary influences to make me sound smarter, haha.
Towards the end, I was running on empty. I just moved to a new apartment, and it’s in a busier part of town. So I just started going outside and, like, on my phone, following people, like a crazy person, just writing down whatever they said.
How did you come up with the setting for Arctic Eggs?
The original fast food game was about wanting to save up enough money for a plane ticket to get to the Arctic. And then I wanted cdbunker’s help on the jam version. Because not only is he like a great artist, but he also just goes through things so quickly, he is so fast. So when I was coming up with it, I was like, I’ll just throw sci-fi in there to entice them a little bit. And then, when I explained it to him, he misunderstood me. I said, “Yeah, you’re trying to get to the Arctic,” and he just took that as “, Oh, you’re in the Arctic”, and I just didn’t bother correcting him. That’s where the Arctic aspect came from – an accident.
Did you hit any major roadblocks trying to implement ingredients?
There’s this meme of George Lucas where he says like, “Jar Jar’s the key to all of this,” right? Like “If we can get Jar Jar working…” It must have been a week or two before the game was launching, and in the underbelly section, the pier, I had the fish, but I didn’t have that wow ingredient for the area. There are cockroaches, and then there’s beer for the other area to get you interested again. And I felt like I was scraping the bottom of the barrel. And then I made a sphere and just made it super bouncy. And as soon as I just let that go and drop in the pan… just seeing it jump up and down, I was like, “Oh, puffer fish.” That’s the key. And then after that, the game came together extremely quickly. The biggest roadblock throughout development was finding a new ingredient and then making it make sense in the world.
Were there any ingredients that you had to scrap?
There was plenty. One that wasn’t bad at all was a clam. It was like sardines: You heat it up, and it opens up, and a pearl pops out. And then you’d have to flip the clam over to cook it. It was done, and it worked, but it wasn’t different enough, so we cut it.
Beyond talking and cooking, were there other elements of interactivity that were too high concept or didn’t make the cut?
Tons. Because I think after the game jam, we just got so excited by the reception. It got number two in originality, and it got really popular in Japan for some reason. We had like 4000 downloads from Japan. So we got too excited, and we added flying to the game at one point. I don’t know why I thought cooking needed flying, but, um, the idea was going to be like after you completed the rooftop area, you get access to a plane, right? The plane you see at the end, and it was going to be like… did you ever play Wii Fit? There’s that plane mini-game where you could fly around Wuhu Island. It was gonna be that where you could fly around Antarctica and land at different settlements and feed people there.
Another one was, in the pier are, you can stab the fish, and a bunch of lore gets dumped out. After that we wanted to add lore dump activities where it’s just a singular movement, and then you’d get lore. We wanted to add one of those to each of the locations. So you could open up the dolphin’s mouth in the prison, and he would say something about the world. And in the bar, there was going to be this soda fountain you could dip your hand under. Those got cut. I’m sad. Those got cut. Maybe now that I’ve got more energy, they might come back.
How did you get the eggs to be all translucent and wiggly?
The eggs, obviously, I had to get right. I must have spent, in the jam version, probably an hour just getting it to wiggle how I wanted it to, you know, like, as it moved across the pan because I didn’t want to try to do a liquid simulation. And for the jam version, it was meant to run on the web. So, a lot of the visuals at the beginning were very simplified. But, it was all just based on limitations that we had and things I didn’t want to deal with. The cigarette happened because I didn’t want to figure out how to code one side of the egg browning and then the other not – I was just like, okay, a cigarette will be the ‘burning’ element. It’s not really a unique concept; I just presented it in a unique way.
Since launch you’ve added a Sandbox Mode which is really cool – do you have any other modes or updates in the works for Arctic Eggs?
I’m not smart enough for this, but I would love to add some kind of versus mode. I don’t know if you’ve played Ultimate Chicken Horse – it’s like Competitive Mario Maker. I would love for a mode like that where you’re with a group of friends, and if you lose the challenge, you could decide to take away an ingredient from the list you have to cook or add one to make it harder. I think Chicken Horse tells you to work together to make the level challenging but still beatable. I’m thinking about playing with my little brother. Like we’re just cooking eggs, and a bullet falls down, and I would love to be able to just toss the bullet into his pan, you know, and make it into a hot potato. I’m not the best programmer ever, but if I ever get any better, I’d love to do something like that.
Arctic Eggs could have been a silly simulator game, but the set dressing and writing allows for some profound moments – it’s allbrow. Did you think a lot about the game’s tone?
I think it goes back to the original Devlog concept about a guy who wanted to save up enough money to go to Antarctica. That was at a time when I had just graduated college and got my first job. So it was kind of just, you know, that whole escapism thing. And Arctic Eggs, I think it all stems from, like, I went to an art school, and a lot of my friends, they went to go do Grad School and stuff like that, but me, I just wanted a job, so I could, you know, eat and live. And a lot of Arctic Eggs is about having that one idea like, “Oh, what if I went to grad school? or “What if I cooked an egg on Mount Everest?” and a lot of the Mount Everest conversations in the game are kind of my thoughts on art.
Like, you know, it’s either… you have to pander to people, or sometimes, the goals are unrealistic. And I think that’s why I wanted to take that silly concept and elevate it a little bit, you know, make it make it more dramatic… I don’t know why I wanted to do it – it could have very easily just been an egg-flipping simulator for the jam. It’s kind of about a goal that you have that nobody else really kind of cares about. But that’s kind of what the whole discussion with the Saint of Six Stomachs at the end was: he doesn’t care. He’s like, “I’m a head in a jar, I don’t give a shit if you can cook an egg on Mt Everest, I can’t do anything with that information.” But I guess he sees your ambition. And he’s like, go ahead, you know, yeah, knock yourself out.
Are there any upcoming indie projects on your radar?
There’s one coming out very soon – I just played tested it a little bit, made by our friend Laurie. Dungeons of Blood and Dream – that’s a cool one coming out soon [Editor’s Note: It’s out now!]. And Cosmo D is working on something again; I don’t know what he’s working on. But I saw like a dog guy… the biggest game that I want everybody to play is called Neyasnoe. I only found it after the jam version of the game, and it kind of led the way. Definitely check that out.
What’s next for The Water Museum?
I don’t want to do anything with dialogue. At least for one project, I’m just going to stay away from dialogue for one project. But there was one game I was working on before Arctic Eggs with like little naked people running around, and you can pick them up and throw them. It’s kind of like Pikmin and Monument Valley merged a little bit. I’d like to get back to that. But there’s also a fish game that I’ve been working on that, you know, might happen on accident.
What’s with the fish stuff in all your games? What’s going on with that?
I don’t enjoy fishing. I don’t like eating fish. There’s just something… I have the talking fish from The Sopranos behind my door here. But I don’t know what it is. There’s something about them. There’s something innocent, I guess, you know. I think as adults, we’re like, “Oh, fish can’t feel pain,” but when you’re fishing, they definitely can. They deserve better, I think.
