Jackbox Party Pack 4 is coming out this week on every current system (see below). It's part of a super popular game series you can play with friends with just your cell phone as the controller. Jackbox Games are a Chicago-based game making studio and have been making trivia games for years. They'll be in LA or technically Long Beach this week for TwitchCon. As they're gonna be so close, we thought why not ask them a few questions about making their games. So, read on as to how some of their games are made and if we might be getting any merch.
Jackbox Party Pack 4 Release dates
·
October 17: PlayStation®4 via the PlayStation®Store
·
October 18: Apple TV (4th Generation only)
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October 19:
Nintendo Switch™ via the Nintendo eShop, Windows PC and Mac via Steam,
the Humble Store and Bundle Stars, as well as the Mac App Store, Android
TV, Amazon Fire TV and Nvidia Shield
·
October 20: Xbox One through the Xbox Games Store |
| The new games |
Jonathan Bilski/TTDILA: You have the new game pack, Jackbox Party Pack 4-which I’ve been looking forward to- headed out the week of Oct 17th with multiple new games to try. Can you give us a little bit
on each to remind gamers to check it out?
Spencer
Ham (writer/director): Sure! We’re excited. This is easily our biggest
Party Pack yet as it has
five and half games! Anchoring the pack is Fibbage 3, which is loaded
with more question types plus the new game mode Fibbage: Enough About
You, where you try to guess all the obscure facts about your fellow
players. Then there’s Survive the Internet, a game
where you take your friends’ “online” comments out of context in
hilarious ways. For the romantics, there’s Monster Seeking Monster,
which is all about messaging and dating fellow monsters who have secret
powers. Bracketeering is a deranged debate tournament
where you have to make smart bets on what will win stupid arguments.
And rounding out the pack is Civic Doodle, a one-up drawing game where
your objective is to “beautify” the murals of Doodle Valley.
Just looking at how different all the games are in
the new pack, it seems you don't set yourselves into a corner on just
making sequels. How many other games didn't make the cut?
What were some of them?
Spencer
(writer/director): Yeah, we make a concerted effort not to just make
sequels. We pitch A LOT of game ideas throughout the year. Only
a handful of them get the green light, so that means a lot of ideas go
back into the incubator, are used for parts in other games, or just
never resurface. I think it’s safe to say the world will never see my
brilliant game idea of a rapping trivia host.
Arnie
Niekamp (writer/director): We like doing sequels, it’s fun to figure
out to how to make the
games even better… but we really love doing new games and one of the
great things about doing a Pack of games is we can do both.
Possibly going off that previous question. What is
the process in developing new games? Where does it start? How long does
it take to develop?
Arnie
(writer/director):We paper test a lot of ideas throughout the year,
especially in the beginning
of the year just trying out weird stuff, so our office is usually
littered with weird drawings and pieces of paper with nonsense writing
on them. Then we digitally prototype some of those and even less of
those eventually become real games.
A friend asked me about the amount of unique
dialogue the games generate. How much would you say you come up with? I believe
in some of your streams you explain there’s so much in there it even
amazes you.
Arnie
(writer/director):It depends on the game. Some games don’t have much at
all, while something like Fibbage or Trivia Murder Party
have so much it’s hard to even guess right now. We have a hard time
resisting the temptation to add too many jokes.
Spencer
(writer/director): As the host of Trivia Murder Party, I can confirm
that we wrote a crazy amount of dialogue. There are moments in that game
when I’ll
hear a line of host dialogue and think to myself, “Wait, I recorded
that? I honestly don’t remember that.”
I was just amazed the first time I played TeeKO,
the t-shirt battling game, that I could order the shirts that were
created, how hard was it to set up that process? And thanks for
doing it. I have very inappropriate shirt I wear when I play.
Arnie
(writer/director):It was definitely time consuming… and continues to be
iterated on and hopefully
improved. It’s probably not the most practical use of resources for a
small team like ours, but I still love that it feels like a magic trick.
“Wait… I can ORDER these shirts? What?!!”
You've made the games knowing they'll be on
Twitch/YouTube/ streaming somewhere, has that changed what games you’re
trying to make. Do they have to have an audience appeal beyond
just friends playing?
Arnie
(writer/director): We’re very invested in making our games work to
allow people to play together
by streaming, even with the delay… especially when it can lead to cool
things like up to 10,000 people actively playing along. But if we really
love a game idea and it doesn’t work as well to be streamed, like, say,
Fakin’ It from Party Pack 3, that doesn’t
necessarily mean it can’t make it into a Pack.
You don’t ever seem to
shy away from new technology. I remember playing you Don’t Know on
Facebook. Do you always want to be on the latest system or the next
product?
Andy
Poland (music/sound): We always try to innovate, technology-wise, and
we have some really amazing
programmer/engineers who are constantly trying to push the
technological boundaries. We’re also just trying to find ways to get our
games into the hands of more people. The Facebook YDKJ game helped us
reach a larger audience and the phones-as-controllers
thing has helped us cast that net even wider. Twitch has been really
great for getting the word out about our games. We don’t really have a
huge (or any) marketing budget, so we just try to be creative in finding
ways to increase our reach.
Follow-up, if so, are we going to see you in the VR realm any time soon? Is there anything cooking there?
Spencer: Nope, but if we did a VR game I’m sure it would be Word Spud 2.
Just imagine how realistic those floating words would look!
You seem to listen to your fans. I’ll sometimes
watch your live stream. (I’m watching it right now as I write these
questions.)Your community manager even answered one of my questions
on the DLC content for Jackbox 360 version in a thread I found online.
Would you say you’re more hands on with hearing your fans then other
game companies? Do you value the fan input more?
Spencer
(writer/director): As a small company, we definitely care about what
our fans think. We’re always
looking for ways to improve our game experiences and the best way to do
that is by just watching people play. We often watch streams of our
games to get insight into what’s working and what’s not. In fact, one of
our highlights during the launch of Party Pack
3 was hopping from stream to stream and interacting with fans. We ended
up on a fan’s stream who was playing Party Pack 3 with a few friends.
She didn’t believe it was us until we sent her a selfie of the company
watching her play.
Trivia Murder Party, perfect for Halloween and now
Monster Seeking Monster? Do guys love horror movies? Any influence
on the games?
Spencer
(writer/director): We’ve never been given orders to focus specifically
on a Halloween-related
game, but since we release in October it’s probably always in the back
of our minds. Also, Arnie is behind those two games so I blame him.
Drawing games always stand out in the packs. What keeps drawing you to create them?
Andy
(music/sound): Because our games use phones/tablets as controllers,
we’re always thinking of
ways to best exploit that device in your hand. Drawing is a great way
to use these devices in ways that a normal game controller never could.
Plus, most drawings that people make on their phones are inherently
funny, which is always a plus.
I’ve heard so much interest on collectibles of the
dolls from Murder Trivia or TeeKO mascots. I want to buy the pin you
gave out at PAX, but it’s $30 on eBay. On that, why no team-ups
with iam8bit, Fangamer or Gametee up in the UK on merch? Or really any
merch other than some t-shirts on Amazon. I mean some of your design
work is so great.
Spencer (writer/director): Thanks, we do have a bunch of talented artists. Good question. We should probably
forward this someone on the business side of our company. Should we be making billions of dollars?!
Have you thought of making a real stand-alone story
driven game using the same mechanics of using phones or tablets? I’ve
seen some attempts at IndieCade, an indie gaming festival
and want to see what happens with PlayLink and Supermassive’s Hidden
Agenda. Is there anything like that you might like to try? A story game,
people can play with their phones?
Spencer (writer/director): Making games that are more narrative is something we always talk about. We did
that a bit with Bomb Corp. It’s certainly possible that we’ll explore a story game in the future. To be continued...
Lastly, humor seems to be the best part of Jackbox,
what makes you games so funny? Did you start off trying to get work as writers or
be comedians? Are you constantly thinking of strange
facts and jokes?
Andy
(music/sound): Funny people make for funny games. A lot of our writers
and directors come from
the improv/acting world. Since the very first YDKJ games, we’ve sought
out funny people to create our content and Chicago is chock full o’
hilarious, talented people. We try to come up with games that, at their
core, allow us to be as creative and funny as
possible. And it’s not just the writers -- pretty much everyone in the
office contributes to the humor in our games, in one way or another.
Except the programmers. They’re not funny at all.
Finally, props to your sound team. I love all the
little sounds made while playing the packs. Thanks again for taking the
time to answer these.
Andy (music/sound): Thanks! [SFX: wet fart]
