How Papers, Please Was Made and The History of The Developer

“You play a border inspector at a contentious check-point. People are coming into your booth, and they want to get from one side to the other. You’ve got to check their documents and make sure everything’s in order before you let them through.” This is how indie developer Lucas Pope describes one of his own games called “Papers, Please” and while it may not sound like the most thrilling gaming experience out there, Lucas somehow managed to captivate millions of players and create something that’s not only fun to play, but also puts your moral compass to the test.

On top of that, he made the puzzle simulation game all on his own. Before going deeper into how exactly Papers, Please was developed, let’s first take a look at how Lucas started out in the gaming industry and what chain of events led to his idea for an award winning indie game.

The developer grew up in Virginia and creating games became part of his life at a young age. It all started when his parents bought him a Macintosh Plus that came with a packed-in application called Hypercard, which provided a way to script tiny interactive pieces of software through a programming language. Lucas tinkered around with the application, creating sprites that could move around, interactive buttons and so on. He said that that was when he first started realizing how much cool stuff you could do with software.

His parents encouraged him to pursue art and that drove him to start learning how to play piano, as well as taking up drawing in his free time. Besides the piano, Lucas also started playing the drums in high school as part of a band called Aftermath. Furthermore, his dad was a handyman, giving Lucas plenty of access to mess around with parts and tools, which developed his interest for mechanical engineering. 

Eventually, he decided to pursue engineering as a career when he became friends with someone in high school, that shared Lucas’ interest in computers and robots. They started experimenting with robots they got from Radio Shack by tearing them apart and hooking them up to Commodore 64 systems so they could program them. It wasn’t anything too impressive according to the developer, but it did lead him to apply for a mechanical engineer program at Virginia Tech university.

However, once he got into the university, he started to realize his true passion lied in programming, not engineering. “What I learned is that the real world is messy and hard. You’ve got to deal with gearing and lubrication and switches and sensors, all the stuff that I actually wasn’t that interested in. Once I got into C++ programming, I realized, this is where I want to be. The magic happens in software. There’s no rules.”

Programming also allowed Lucas to combine his love for drawing, playing music and video games. As a kid he loved playing on the Atari 2600, before moving on to the NES and experiencing “Wizards and Warriors”, one of his fondest gaming memories. The summer after his freshman year at university, publisher GT Interactive released Quake, which not only reinvigorated Lucas’ passion for gaming, but also compelled him to take a first real shot at a game development project.

He started making friends with people all over the world during multiplayer matches in Quake, as well as with people that were on the official forums. Lucas and his group of friends eventually decided to form a development team called Epochalypse and started working on a Quake mod called Malice. The developer helped with the art, modeling and also did parts of the back-end work. Malice would turn out to be so good that publisher Quantum Axcess bought the rights and put the mod on store shelves in 1997. That year, the Quake mod managed to win a couple of awards and was later even packed-in with a Quake retail package by GT Interactive. 

Shortly after their initial success, Epochalypse officially incorporated in Virginia as Ratloop Games. Unfortunately, their first project as an official game development studio didn’t quite work out. In February 1998, Ratloop started development on Hab-12, an ambitious 3rd person action/adventure game. However, the inexperienced team had problems successfully pitching the game to publishers and back in those days, without digital stores or platforms like Early Access to fall back on, publishers were absolutely necessary to get a game to the public.

“You had to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in printing discs and putting them in boxes and shipping them to Walmart. You had to produce all this crap before you made any money and that means you needed a publisher. So you had to have a publisher and a distributor that takes care of those expenses, because we were a bunch of kids and we couldn’t afford that kind of thing.”

While Ratloop was trying to sell Hab-12 to publishers, Lucas came up with another idea. Something less ambitious, but much more unique and something that played into a growing trend at the time: discount CD-ROM software. The developer wanted to create a car mechanic game titled Gearhead Garage, where the only goal is to fix up cars, without ever actually driving them. He believed there could be a niche for that sort of game. “I grew up working on cars with my dad. That angle worked out really well, actually. It’s like a position in your mind, of what you’re getting. You’re getting a car mechanic game.”

When Ratloop was pitching Hab-12 and Gearhead Garage the developers noticed that lots of game companies had a value division that specifically put out games to sell for cheap at places like Wal-Mart, directly playing into the discount CD-ROM software trend of the late 90’s. So, they arranged a meeting with Activision Value, an Activision subsidiary, who were impressed with the prototype Ratloop had built and agreed to publish Gearhead Garage. It was released in 1999 and became quite a hit, selling a couple of hundred thousand copies according to Lucas. 

Activision was pleased with the results and they immediately wanted to expand the Gearhead Garage concept to other vehicle activities such as Jet Ski Garage for example. However, the publisher also wanted to implement driving sections on top of the mechanic systems in place, something Lucas was firmly against. The contract between Ratloop and Activision clearly stated that Ratloop retained the rights to all their IP’s, making it impossible for Activision to produce more Gearhead games on their own.

After this brief clash, the members of Ratloop started to go their separate ways. Without more ideas or projects keeping them together, it was time for Lucas to start a new chapter in his development career. Funnily enough, one of his next projects was a sequel to Gearhead Garage on the Gameboy Advance that featured an outdoor driving mode. When the original Gearhead game came out on PC, 3D graphics were still somewhat of a novelty and Lucas wanted to recapture that magic on the Gameboy Advance. While 3D was certainly possible on the handheld, it remained a rarity because of the weaker hardware.

During development however, the impending launch of the Nintendo DS and its advanced 3D capabilities demotivated Lucas to finish the project, as he mentioned in an interview with Ars Technica. This unlucky chain of events compelled him to, quote, “get a real job”. Upon further inspection, it’s still possible to download a 30 minute demo ROM of Gearhead Garage Adventure on the Ratloop website.  The webpage also mentions that the GBA game demo was developed in 2006, two years after the release of the Nintendo DS and that it was never released due to pricing issues with Nintendo’s cartridges.

When Lucas decided to get his first job at an established game studio, he moved to Los Angeles in the hopes to find work quicker. His plan succeeded as he soon joined Realtime Associates in 2003, which is where he also met his wife, Keiko Ishizaka, who’s a game developer herself. While he enjoyed working there for a few good years, things eventually got too tense between the investors and the development team, prompting Lucas to look for another job.

Luckily for Lucas, Naughty Dog soon started hiring many, many people after they cancelled a Jak and Daxter project for the PSP. The studio simply couldn’t develop both the original Uncharted and Jak and Daxter at the same time so they passed the project onto High Impact Games who reworked the project into Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier that was released in 2009 for both the PS2 and PSP. In 2006, Lucas was hired by Naughty Dog as a GUI programmer/designer and much to his surprise, he was the only one at the company working on GUI tools full time.

“The key for me at Naughty Dog was I liked tools programming, I like visual tools, I like user interface kind of stuff and no-one likes that. Literally, in the games industry, it’s really hard to find people who like writing tools, so that was kind of my advantage.”

Lucas joined the studio eight months before the first Uncharted would be released and during those months, he developed four major tools that would assist the other designers for things like mapping out all the levels, the game’s menus, the game’s save system and language localization. All these tools vastly improved efficiency. For example, before Lucas joined the team, one person was assigned to manually manage thousands and thousands of voice and text files for roughly 12 languages on an Excel spreadsheet. His language localization tool, along with the other GUI tools, saved the day on several occasions according to former Naughty Dog President Christophe Balestra.

The developer’s multiple skills and talents certainly helped him excell at the studio, as he was able to design and program things like a menu system all on his own. Normally such a task would require multiple dedicated artists and programmers. Despite that, development on Uncharted was still a rocky experience with important decisions being made while the game was nearing its release. 

“One of the cool things about Uncharted 1 is, we had no idea what we were doing. Uncharted 1 was announced, and then Gears of War came out and Gears invented the modern third-person shooter. Suddenly, Gears came out and showed them how to do it. So we changed everything, six months before release.”

Lucas stuck around at Naughty Dog for Uncharted 2, fulfilling the same role as before. He was eager to learn more from his talented colleagues and implement more ideas he had for new GUI tools. However, during Uncharted 2’s development, he got an itch to start creating games independently again. About a year before Uncharted 2’s release date, the developer took two weeks off to develop a game called Mightier with his wife Keiko. The whole idea behind the game was based on camera-import functions, something similar to what the EyeToy did a few years prior. Although it’s probably fair to say Lucas and Keiko had something more ambitious in mind.

Mightier required players to print out puzzles, draw on those puzzles and then hold the drawing to a computer webcam. The game would then create a 3D level based on the player’s drawing where you could jump and run around in. It would go on to be nominated for an award at the Independent Games Festival competition, hosted by the yearly Game Developer Conference. None other than Valve took notice after Mightier’s nomination and asked the duo if they wanted to put the game on Steam as a free download. Since they both had full time jobs as game developers, they weren’t necessarily looking for any financial compensation so they agreed to put Mightier on Steam.

Despite not winning the award, the game put a seed in both the developers minds and sure enough, one year later after Naughty Dog wrapped up development on Uncharted 2, Lucas and Keiko left their jobs to become full time indie developers instead, in 2010. Aside from wanting to make smaller games again, Lucas simply didn’t have any motivation left to work on another Uncharted game. 

“Working on Uncharted at Naughty Dog was great, but for me, I could see the next game was going to be Uncharted 3 and I had ideas about small games I wanted to make. So I was sort of not looking forward to working on Uncharted because they’re great games but they follow a definite formula. And after Uncharted 2, which I thought was an awesome game, I couldn’t see a lot of potential for new, cool ideas in the franchise, I guess.”

Lucas further said that there was never any animosity and that he’s still friends with former Naughty Dog president Christophe Balestra and current co-president Evan Wells. They both didn’t want him to leave the studio, but they weren’t surprised either that Lucas wanted to go his own way and follow his dream of becoming an indie developer.

Since Lucas and Keiko weren’t tied down to a certain location anymore, the couple decided to move to Japan to be closer to Keiko’s family. Their first project was a game titled Helsing’s Fire and Lucas specifically chose the iPhone as their platform, because he wanted to challenge himself and figure out an interesting way to make use of touch controls.

It didn’t take long for the duo to settle on the core mechanic: moving around torches as sources of light that pierces the shadows to ultimately destroy the monsters in your way. While it won Best Mobile Game in 2011 at the Independent Games Festival, it didn’t do great financially. “We sold 60,000 copies in the first week, but those weren’t enough to replace our former Naughty Dog and 2K salaries.” 

After Helsing’s Fire, Lucas and Keiko got the opportunity to port the game Rocketbirds to PS3 and this project would serve as the catalyst for Papers, Please. In order to work on the Rocketbirds project, the couple had to temporarily move to Singapore for about a year. During that time they decided to travel around Southeast Asia and see the sights which meant they had to cross a lot of borders. This included occasional trips back to the US and Lucas remembered this one time he was greeted by someone from the customs checkpoint. 

“A huge guy, barrel-chested, with a bulletproof vest on, tells me, ‘Welcome home.’ Just hearing that from this guy kind of hit home of how, like, welcome I felt coming home to America, and how I didn’t get that feeling at all going to other places. How other people don’t get that. It brought the border experience to a nice head.” Additionally, he found the actual job of inspecting people’s papers fascinating. “Those guys are checked out pretty much the whole time. They have a specific thing they’re doing and they’re just doing it over and over again.”

While Lucas had plenty of ideas on how to turn those border control tasks into game mechanics, he was lacking a compelling story to justify making a game around that concept. However, he recalls watching either Argo or The Bourne Identity and that’s when he realized it would be possible to mix a good story on top of those core mechanics. At the time, he and Keiko were living off their savings and on top of that, Keiko had just become pregnant with their first child. Therefore, they agreed Papers, Please would be Lucas’ last project before he had to find a real job again. 

In mid-November 2012, he officially started developing Papers, Please and back then he estimated it would take a couple of weeks to finish development. Once the developer had established a concept and a mockup to go along with it, Lucas decided to keep a public development blog on The Independent Gaming Source forums. The people there took a liking to the concept, even providing valuable feedback throughout the entire development. 

This gave Lucas some much needed confidence, since he was unsure if a wide audience would actually like a game about checking documents. During interviews he frequently mentioned how stupid and weird the concept of simply checking people’s documents sounds, but that aspect ended up becoming part of the game’s appeal. It made people curious as to how a concept like that would actually translate into gameplay. Additionally, the fact that it sounded so boring, was a challenge for Lucas to make it interesting, to go against what people were expecting.

Whenever the developer starts a game project, he always puts the mechanics first to make sure it’s actually fun to play before adding some greater meaning to the game. Therefore it didn’t take long for the developer to share a build on the TIGS forums where you could simply move some documents around your desk. That simple prototype already received some praise on the forum.

Lucas decided to develop Papers, Please with the open source platform called Haxe and he used the NME library to make cross-platform development easier. Most of the art and animations were done with Photoshop. The developer would share new builds of the game with the The Independent Gaming Source community in quick succession, allowing him to identify more precisely what was working and what wasn’t.

Papers, Please would prove to be the ultimate challenge for Lucas. Finally, he had a project where he was able to completely let loose and use all of his different skills without compromising. After all, he was responsible for all the art, writing, music and programming. His interest in user interface interactions still shines through though as Papers, Please is a very UI heavy game, but Lucas was arguably able to make it work in all the right ways. Additionally, he put his programming skills to the test and developed procedural generation systems to generate thousands upon thousands of random travelers, as well as their accompanying documents, with just a click of a button.

The dystopian document thriller, as Lucas calls it, is set in the fictional country of Arstotzka, which might sound familiar to fans of the developer’s work. Earlier in 2012, the developer wanted to flex his programming muscles in preparation for Ludum Dare, a popular game jam competition. The result was The Republia Times, a flash game where the player takes the role of an editor-in-chief of one of the main newspapers of Republia, a country at war with Arstotzka. 

While it may seem that Lucas had ideas for a greater universe, he admits he had no intention of creating interconnected games. “There was never an idea for the universe. The gameplay concept for The Republia Times is something that I had talked about with my wife a little bit, like ‘I want to make a game that’s just text that has to deal with propaganda’. It just has two countries in it, which are just two typical battling countries with names that both sound similar and are typical double-speak kind of names.”

He further explained that The Republia Times benefited greatly from its dystopian, fascist setting, because you can just tell the player they have to do this because your communist government is telling you that that’s your job and those are the rules. Incidentally, this backdrop also suited Papers, Please’s concept. “That played into Papers, Please perfectly because I had the core mechanics of moving papers around and comparing information, but I didn’t have any setting and from the beginning, there was no idea that this was going to be in the same universe.”

The look and feel of Papers, Please has a very Orwellian vibe to it and that’s no coincidence. Lucas is naturally attracted to Orwellian communist bureaucracy ever since reading Orwell’s 1984 so those themes come a little easier to him. He’s also naturally OCD so building a world ruled by rigid systems imposes a structure that he likes.

While it’s clear that the game takes place in a communist setting, Lucas was very careful with the wording and certain descriptions. He worked hard to make it so Arstotzka wasn’t specifically anything and made it more like a collection of tropes than anything else, since the developer believes that makes the setting richer. Anytime there’d be something that would nail it down as Soviet, Lucas would leave it out or smooth it over. A good example of that is the fact that the word ‘comrade’ is never used, because that would otherwise indicate that the game takes place in soviet Russia and Lucas believes that would have hurt the game. 

As work on Papers, Please continued, the indie developer thought of more ways to expand the core mechanics, making them more interesting as the player progresses. However, Lucas didn’t just want to dump them on the player without any context. Therefore, he added more story elements to Papers, Please which not only gives players more context, but also places them in difficult moral dilemmas. 

For example, some travelers will try to bribe the player to let them through with false papers. The extra money could help pay for you and your families’ bills, but it could also get you into trouble with your superiors if you keep taking bribes. Besides providing context, these story elements also gave Lucas the opportunity to help players understand the political difficulties of running a border control checkpoint.

“I wanted to show that in politics, all sides of any kind of issue have some justification. There’s not just the good guys and the bad guys – even the bad guys have some justification for why they want to do something. I felt like that kind of setup would work well in the game where I could explain to the player why things are happening and get them onboard a little bit with some of the less nice things that go on to help them understand that running a checkpoint is hard.”

Lucas said that taking all the scripted interactions, rule changes, border attacks, night-time events, and longer story arcs and combining them into both a sensible narrative and an effective sequence of gameplay progress, was by far the most difficult part of development that took weeks to finetune and countless rearrangements. According to the developer, the game teeters on this complicated network of dependencies so adding even one little encounter or rule could mess up all the scheduling for the rest of the game.

In April 2013, the game was submitted to Steam Greenlight but Lucas was convinced it wouldn’t get enough votes to be approved, despite receiving positive feedback from the Independent Gaming Source community. To his surprise however, after only a couple of days, Papers, Please received plenty of votes to earn the right to be distributed on Steam. 

He credits that sudden success to a lot of big YouTubers that made videos playing the public betas of the game. As a kid, the developer loved watching other people play games and would pine after VHS tapes of people beating Nintendo games. Therefore, seeing other people playing his own game was a huge ego boost for Lucas.

The internet was loving Papers, Please so much in fact, that you would randomly find phrases like “Glory to Arstotzka” on message boards and comment sections. Pictures of people cosplaying as the border control inspector starting circulating online as well. Seeing all this, Lucas decided to show his appreciation by inviting the community to send their names to be included in the game. He did add that joke names wouldn’t be implemented and he also asked people to make their names more eastern-bloc style if possible. 

The response he got was almost too much to handle for one developer. Nearly 30,000 unique names were sent in, although after inspection, only half were usable. Many of the names were popular fictional characters and others were Czech, Finnish or Polish names whose English translations aren’t printable.

As Lucas shared more and more progress on the TIGS forums, some people criticized some of the more simplistic elements of the game, like the family status screen that lacked any visual representation. The developer addressed this and said it wasn’t because of time constraints or laziness, rather he simply wanted to keep things vague and non-judgemental throughout the game. That way players can more easily project their own family onto the family in the game. 

“This follows through to the game’s daytime encounters as well. I worked hard to reduce the amount of dialog, keep things ambiguous, leave some things unresolved, and to rely on the player’s imagination to fill in the blanks.”

At a certain point during development, Lucas realised that Papers, Please was becoming more than just a game that was purely entertaining to play. By adding more characters and story driven situations that question the moral compass of the player, the indie game was being compared to other “empathy games” like Cart Life. This was no accident however, as Lucas intentionally added those elements to show how challenging it is to be a border control inspector, to have to make those difficult decisions every day.

“A lot of that came from just my worldview, which is that any polarising issue has got legitimate stances on either side of it. The empathy angle rose up from the way the story developed, and how I could see the mechanics working with the story. I wanted to add a search scanner, so you can see the person naked. OK, there’s a reason for this; it’s because there’s a suicide bomber. So you kind of see both sides of why it is you need this thing, but also the suicide bombers are really rare and you don’t really know a lot about their motivations. You feel a little bit skeezy scanning everybody from this one place. I wanted that to happen, too.”

The trailer Lucas had put together for the Steam Greenlight submission promised the game would be released in Summer 2013 and that launch window was fast approaching. Being a solo developer without even a publisher meant Lucas had to not only develop the game, but also take care of things like marketing, making the webpage, sending out review codes, signing contracts for the distribution, set up store pages and much more. Since he was so busy actually making the game this whole time, all that other stuff had to be done in the final two weeks leading up to the release date of August 8th, 2013.

In those final weeks, it wasn’t until three days before the release date that Lucas managed to finish the game. To say he was under a lot of stress at that time, is probably putting it lightly. Of course, he could have easily delayed the game, but he wanted to keep that promise of Summer 2013 above all else. He didn’t want to disappoint fans, especially not after all the positive reception the game had already received during its development. One can’t help but wonder, if it would have been easier if Lucas had hired more people to help during development and he was asked exactly that during an interview with Edge magazine.

“My personality… if I was managing people, I’d be a micromanager; I’d be a terrible manager, basically. The good thing about doing everything yourself is that if you get tired of one thing, you can do something else and you’re still being productive. You’re not stepping away completely; you’re switching away to some other task. That was really useful during development.”

The indie developer ultimately managed to keep his original promise and released Papers, Please on August 8th, 2013. The game was met with critical and commercial success, scoring an 85 on metacritic and selling over 1.8 million copies by August 2016, including sales from ported versions on Linux, iOS and PS Vita. Unsurprisingly, the indie title dominated the games award season in 2014 and won plenty of awards at numerous Game Award shows.

Papers, Please became by far the biggest and most popular game that Lucas had ever done. The former Naughty Dog employee had found success all by himself and was now known all over the gaming industry. It was no longer necessary to honor the deal he had made with his wife, because Papers, Please’s financial success basically meant Lucas is free to do what he wants, without having to worry about an income. There is one downside however, now that he’s a staple in the industry, he feels a lot more pressure with whatever he decides to do next. “It was nice when I was just releasing games and nobody knew about them. Nobody cares, and you can do what you want.”

Looking back at the whole experience, there’s only one thing that annoyed Lucas. Many reviews pointed out that the game is something everyone should play, but that it’s not exactly fun to play. He can see why those reviewers were saying that, but the developer always tries to put fun first when developing a game and wants players to just enjoy his creations above anything else. He does understand where those comments come from and said that it’s part of the narrative for empathy games. Lucas thinks the news cycle portrays empathy games as not fun because they’re something different than what came before them so you have to define them differently.

Luckily though, developing and releasing Papers, Please was mostly a dream come true for Lucas as he’s now able to continue the rest of his career as a full time indie developer. He released his next game Return of the Obra Dinn in 2019 and decided to take a little break after that to spend time with his family. “I’ve been making a lot of promises that I need to follow up on. Things I gotta do for my wife. A stack of games taller than me that I need to get through. Movies I need to watch. Things I need to do with my kids. Things I need to build with my kids.”

Lucas mentioned that his next game is probably going to be something smaller scaled than Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn, but then again, he initially planned on making the latter game something smaller as well. “Now that this initial follow-up is done and over with, maybe I won’t feel so much pressure to make the next game perfect. I thought Obra Dinn would be small, but it wasn’t. So I’ll just try again, to do something small.”