Interview with Eva Navratilova about the Scarlet Deer Inn

On Friday and Saturday, the Brno expo complex hosted a fairly traditional Game Access conference. It included not only lectures from Czech and foreign developers, but also demos of dozens of indie games from small teams and individuals who presented their projects here. One of them was Scarlet Deer Inn, an embroidered game from husband and wife Eva and Lukáš Navrátilov of Attu Games, who are also behind the metroidvania Feudal Alloy. Even their new release at the end of the event she won prize for the best art page, but before that I had the opportunity to interview Eva, whom I asked about the development to date, inspiration, structure, and also, for example, about last year’s tweet that went viral all over the Internet.

First of all, I would like to ask how you would describe Scarlet Deer Inn in a few words, in terms of gameplay and story.

We call it a story-driven platformer, which is part adventure and part platformer. It’s set in the Middle Ages, inspired by Slavic folklore. And it tells the story of Eliška, a mother of two who, due to certain circumstances, is forced into situations and places where she would normally be, and she’s faced with exactly that challenge.

The idea to make an embroidered game is about eight years old.

Your previous game Feudal Alloy had a pretty unique visual style, but here you went even further by using embroidery as a pattern, so how did you come up with something like that and how much more complicated did it make the whole game to develop?

The idea of ​​making an embroidered game has been around for about eight years, even during the development of Feudal Alloy. However, it was just an idea, one of many ideas that came to our minds that maybe one day we could make such a game. Besides, we didn’t know much about it and didn’t even know that there were machines that could embroider. So, the original idea was that we would embroider by hand. Which means that it should be easier for us to even achieve this. And we basically threw the idea in a drawer, not really knowing how to take it, and let it go. As Feudal Alloy developed, we thought more about it. And after we released it, we focused more on it and found out that there were machines. That you don’t necessarily have to do it by hand, but you cook it on a computer and the machine embroiders it. And because of that, we knew that we could afford to make more complex characters and animations and make them better than we expected.

Half of the game is adventure passages where you move around the village, talking to the locals. And it’s very reminiscent of Obsidian’s Pentiment, or more specifically the team led by Josh Sawyer. Was that an inspiration for you?

No, no. We watched Pentiment, but that was later, we had this idea earlier. It’s more inspired by the adventure part of Night in the Woods. We played it, we liked it, we just missed the part where you have to walk more, because it’s like a platformer, the same type of game. And there were some parts where there were jumps, but there weren’t enough of them, so we wanted to develop that idea here.

And is the game purely linear, or can you make some decisions that will affect the story?

Yeah, they’ll be there mostly from a gameplay perspective. Because we understand that it’s a combination of two different genres. That people who play adventure games might not want to play more challenging platformers, and conversely, people who play platformers might not care about the story at all or not that deeply. So we want to put some extra details there. For those who want to enjoy the story, so that the platformer will be easier to get through. And for those who are interested in the challenge, there will be more different twists and turns and options that will make the challenge even more difficult. And the same goes for the story. If someone is more interested in what’s going on there, there will be different options.

The game will last about five to six hours.

And how long will the game last?

Well, the demo (which was available on Game Access, editor’s note) is about an hour long and takes up about a fifth of the game, so we’re looking at about five to six hours.

You also mention Slavic folklore as a source of inspiration, so what exactly did you draw from that?

I don’t even know if I want to reveal it… But we were inspired a lot by The Witcher, more by the sense of danger and the Slavic creatures and especially that the world is not black and white, but the biggest one, the villains also have good qualities. But I think I don’t want to give it away completely.

Sure (laughs), cool. And does the game take place in a specific historical period or is it a fictional setting?

It’s not quite accurate. Our game is not historical, it’s historicizing. We don’t want that to be a limitation, it’s our version of the Middle Ages. But we try to make it feel like that. In that sense, it’s pretty close to Pentimenti, although of course they had that, but they also had a village there that doesn’t actually exist, but it feels like it could have. And we try to go in that direction, so as not to be tied to, for example, what color shoe leather someone had at the time, I don’t want to deal with that. (laughter)

Last year you managed to break into the world with one, actually quite simple tweet. Today it already has 26 million views, 260 thousand likes. Were you able to retain your potential customers and how did they appear in Steam wishlists?

I honestly don’t know how the numbers ended up being, the numbers were completely abstract to me and I didn’t really understand what was going on or even compare it to what other people had, but it must have been a real massacre. We probably kept interested people. People who were interested in the end, yeah. But of course it became mainstream, so those were people who maybe weren’t even gamers. And then we got to people who don’t play games at all, and those were artists or people who do some kind of handicrafts. But I think we reached a lot of people who are potential gamers and might be interested. And that showed up in wishlists. The spike wasn’t as big as we thought it would be, but it’s true that it’s still an indie game and not exactly “mainstream indie.” If it was an RPG, something action-oriented, I think it would attract more people, or maybe it would be some kind of management game. It’s really a very niche area, so I think what we have is pretty satisfying.

I had no idea what was going on, but it must have been a real massacre.

You showcased the game at Game Access last year, how has it changed since then and how has the overall vision changed?

Well… we reworked it a little bit. We modified the platforming part a lot, but we didn’t have time to finish it at all last year, so it was very preliminary. Now we’ve prepped it, we’ve somehow managed to put it together so that you can play it from start to finish. And then we swapped graphics there. So we tested it again, I think it looks better, but it’s definitely not the final version of the demo. It’s the developer version, for people who are ready to accept it and know that it’s part of the game. The graphics are mostly done, but sometimes they’re just black and white where they’re not done yet, so it’s not out there for the public yet.

Recently, a third member, Kuba Špiržík, joined you. What led to this and what areas of development does he oversee?

We didn’t want to add anyone to the team at first, and we don’t want to add anyone to the team at all. But we got to know each other, and it was more like we were sitting together as people. He’s also one of those people who is into everything: music, art, and maybe programming. So we thought it would be great to work with him. And we found that there was a really big overlap of those interests, so we reached out to him if he wanted to, and he said yes. It probably also had to do with the fact that he’s been working in big companies for a few years now, and there was probably a period in his life where he wanted to try himself in a smaller team. Now he writes music for us because he has a band, and that’s what he’s interested in, and he’s into art. I believe that in the future he’ll do design as well, but we haven’t gotten there yet because we’ve only been working together for two months. It took us a while to learn how to communicate and work with each other, because most of what we do is in our heads. Or we know, but to imagine it to another person… We had to learn what it was like to do it with someone else.

You’ve probably already partially answered this because you say the demo isn’t quite presentable yet, but are you planning on releasing a demo in the future, like at Steam Next Fest?

Yeah, I would love that. It depends. We would rather release it sometime sooner, but we’ll see. We wanted to sign up so many times, saying it might work now or next time, but it seems like we can’t do that. There are still so many things that need to be worked out. And like I said, the developers here are great because these people know this and they’re counting on it. But there are still a lot of things that need to be worked out.

We are running out of releases this year. Maybe next year, in the first half.

And do you have any idea when the final version of the game might be released? And what platforms are you planning to do it for?

Well, it won’t be this year, unfortunately, we won’t be able to come. Well, maybe next year it should be, let’s say, in the first half. And it will come out on PC, basically we have some Steam, then Switch and Xbox. That’s what we’ve officially announced at the moment. If there is something further, we are not against it, but we haven’t done it yet.

I saw that you also have a Steam Deck there (at the Attu Games booth, editor’s note), so does it work on the Steam Deck?

Yeah, yeah, sure. I see it as Steam, but sure. Plus we have ROG Ally, it works there too.

I think this is exactly the kind of game that would be suitable for such devices.

Yeah, I think so. It looks even better on these little screens. I think it’s a game for the couch or somewhere you can curl up under a blanket and play.

Finally, a question outside of development: Do you have time to play any games yourself, and if so, which ones have you enjoyed recently?

Probably not so much. We don’t have time at all, but right now it’s mostly Steam Next Fest, we’re mostly playing the demo, and it sounds great to me. Then of course we tried Manor Lords, because it’s a medieval and Slavic movie, so that setting really inspires us. I really liked that. And then the demo of Tiny Glade came out, it’s this cozy, management, building game. It’s about building fortifications, castles, but it’s so relaxing, so we liked it.

Thank you for your time and good luck in your development.

Please and thank you.