The Clam Man Cometh
Interview with Martin Hanses
Clam Man 2: Headliner is a Disco-like adventure game with RPG elements developed by Sideby Interactive. This solo studio is headed by Martin Hanses, a Finnish-Canadian indie developer and stand-up comedian. I previewed the public demo a while ago and enjoyed it quite a bit. You can read my preview below.
Clam Man 2: Headliner — Opening Set
This interview with Martin started as an email conversation after my preview, and developed into something else. I get the feeling that it’s the beginning of a longer conversation about gaming, comedy, writing, and why we do the things we do, even when there is little return on our investments of time and energy. We will certainly resume this conversation as the game finds its way to release. Martin was gracious to write detailed answers to my questions, so I reproduce them verbatim here.
Why stand-up comedy? What makes this particular genre or entertainment form suitable for an adventure game with role-playing elements? How did you first conceive of this as a unique niche?
I’ve always been a fan myself - I even did standup back in Finland for a brief period of time. I’m pretty sure there’s still Eddie Izzard shows I can recite word for word, and I still procrastinate writing by watching stand-up online. Clam 2 actually started out as me trying to remake Fallout 2 in Unity, and when I realized I had something functional, I figured I’d rather make something of my own. I brainstormed a bit on what I wanted to do, and since I wanted to keep it simple, I decided to go all narrative and no combat. I’m not a great artist, so I decided to stick with the Clam universe since I can draw in that style, and I just enjoy writing comedy - it wasn’t any deeper than that.
As for what makes it suitable, nothing. It is arguably the worst kind of comedy you can try to write in a game. Trying to write what is inarguably a very verbal type of performance is an absolute pain, but through that I also realized early on that the actual jokes themselves aren’t what makes stand-up or comedy in a game the most interesting part. Comedy is all about subversion and surprise, so when the player expects a joke - and expects it to be funny - there’s very little you can do to deliver. The comedy shows in the game are essentially “boss fights” - that’s what my design doc says, anyway - and I found that players mostly just want to succeed at telling the joke, and that’s enough satisfaction in its own right. The funniest parts of telling jokes in Clam 2 is failing, (each joke is tied to an attribute and the player rolls a d20 + their modifier to succeed) because then the player has no idea what will happen. It’s also funny to me, because I can make the player say awful shit by having them fail the roll and giving them a clearly awful, stupid, or unfunny response, and the rest is just riffing on that. I try my best to tell players not to reload saves when they fail, because while the player character has an awful time on stage, the players themselves usually get the funniest outcomes when they bomb.
I have no clue if that’s a good idea. Some people seem to love it, some people seem to take it really personally when they fail. At the end of the day, it’s a weird fish RPG about making jokes. If you feel personally attacked by whatever side comes up on a twenty-sided dice, I don’t think RNG is your biggest problem.
Final note: making a comedy game is really fucking hard, because you’re setting yourself up for failure. I remember seeing a comedian make this point on some show online; if you tell others you’re funny, or others introduce you as a funny person, the immediate reaction from most people is scepticism. You think you’re funny? I’ll be the fucking judge of that. In that situation, there’s nothing you can do to make people laugh - you either confirm that you are in fact funny, or you confirm their suspicions. “Yeah, that was pretty funny” or “Huh. That wasn’t very funny.” There’s very little in-between on that spectrum. I try to not call it a comedy game for that reason - now it’s just “a narrative roleplaying game about a guy who hates his job and becomes a stand-up comedian.”
What is your process for writing the jokes in the game? How do you fit them into the dialogue options and give the player a sense of freedom at the same time?
It’s mostly riffing. I start off every dialogue with a general sense of what the player/NPC wants to achieve, and then I improvise from there. Some of the most fun I have when writing Clam 2 is when I have no idea what’s going to happen, and I just let the character voices take over. This means that usually one of the characters in any interaction is the oddball and the other plays it straight - the most fun ones for me are when the player is able to be funny, rather than the NPC. Another thing I enjoy doing is trying to make sure that even the basic questions/responses have something baked into them - you can flavor a lot of simple lines with minor throwaway jokes. For example, a character might mention that they’re doing prep work for something; if the player doesn’t want to continue the conversation, just saying “Let’s talk about something else.” is less interesting than “Prep? I’m sorry, I’m not interested in your education. Moving on.”
Writing jokes is tough since I’m a solo dev, and I work in a vacuum. It’s really rare that a joke I write into the game is funny as I’m writing it - it usually takes a couple months and a new playtest, at which time I’ve forgotten it, for me to find it funny again. Twitter helps sometimes - every once in a while I’ll post a joke and if people respond to it positively, it stays in.
I also particularly like giving the player at least one oddball response to interactions - I feel like that joke works on multiple layers. Firstly, the player might never pick that option and instead just chuckle at it, which is something I think a lot of great RPGs do. If you’re interacting with a baby, it’s just really funny to have an option along the lines of “You’re a fucking idiot. I bet you can’t even count to ten. I can.” Most people will never pick that option and just leave it on read, which is the first part of that joke. The second part is realizing that it’s a valid option that moves the conversation forward, making the player wonder what exactly happens if they choose it, and the final part is actually picking it and seeing whatever weird shit happens as a result. This is also why scope creep is a constant issue in the game - little throwaway lines that make me laugh often end up ballooning into long, weird tangents, sometimes even with quests you wouldn’t get any other way. For example, there’s a dice check in the game that, if you critically fail (5% chance), the narrator tells you that your eyes hurt and that you should see an optometrist. There’s like 4 people in the world that will ever see that joke/questline, but those are just the things that make choice-based games and narrative RPGs worth it.
Another note; I also try to imagine what a tabletop RPG player would do or say, and what they would do to try to break the game. There’s plenty of opportunity to argue with the GM/Narrator of the game, which in some cases might lead you to very different outcomes. There’s also a few options that are only available through either cheating or very serious planning - if anyone finds them, hats off. There’s at least one (intended) infinite money glitch in the game that has the narrator just tell you “Okay, you know what? You want to break this shit? Go ahead. See if I care.”
How will different comedy styles play into the comedian archetypes? It should be more difficult to explore some kinds of comedy than others, but how can you accommodate some of those different styles through the archetypes?
Originally, the four attributes in the game were Detection (observational comedy), Aquadynamics (physical comedy), Improv (absurdist/improv comedy), and Self-Awareness (self-deprecating or emotional comedy). Those worked for a while, but I found that there were a few more comedic archetypes I didn’t manage to cover with just those four, so now there’s also Assertion (angry/assertive comedy), Deadpan (self-explanatory), and Luck, which has no bearing on jokes but causes weird little random encounters and dialogue options throughout the game.
Those attributes also affect dialogue options - those are typically less about making jokes, and more about giving you a variety of outcomes and options depending on what kind of character you’ve built. A low self-awareness character, for example, might end up in situations where they just assume they’re better than everyone else - a high Detection character, on the other hand, might make observations on how NPCs speak or act, which in turn gives you access to additional paths through conversations and quests.
In the story, the player also encounters three comedians as part of the main cast - these comedians are supposed to represent particular types of comedy, with other ones being introduced as side characters. I’m hoping to cover most typical comedy styles, and do some general commentary on all of them, and the player collects jokes throughout the game they can work into their shows - all of which are connected to one particular attribute. Failing/Succeeding at telling these jokes have different outcomes, depending on that attribute; failing an Assertive joke, for example, might make you have an outburst on stage for people being too sensitive.
It’s funny, I’ve actually received messages and emails from people who have failed jokes and have taken offense at the route they receive - there’s one joke about science, which if you fail, deems that science is entirely unfunny and can not effectively be made fun of, and I received a long message from a player who told me how wrong I was.
How much reactivity and choice/consequence is possible in a game of this scale? Are there difficult checks that depend on lucky rolls to unlock specific content in the dialogue? Does this kind of content add more to the overall experience, or is it only extra?
Since there’s no combat I’ve definitely focused on reactivity more than anything else. It varies from little things - if a character mentions something early on in a dialogue and then do it again, they’ll tack on a “like I said” - to ways of entirely bypassing sections of dialogues and quests simply due to having the “right” stats. I want to make sure that the game is replayable, so in your first playthrough you’ll not even see half of the dialogue in the game, and new things always become available depending on your character build. A typical mid-sized dialogue can have anywhere between 5000-8000 words, and you’re probably only going to see about 2000-3000 in a playthrough.
Skill checks are crucial to the experience (d20 + modifier), and I do my best to try to stop people from reloading saves. The general design is always that ‘failure is a valid path forward’, and there’s a number of quests and interactions in the game that you can only have if you fail a dice roll. The point isn’t to win or lose - it’s to make sure that the player’s experience is as unique as possible, and always feels as fresh or entertaining as I can make it. If you succeed, great - your stats mattered and you conquered the situation. If you fail, well, now you’re going to have to do something completely different. Failure = content, I guess, and that seems to work for youtubers, at least. As for XP, Clam 2 works on a milestone system (level up at the start of each day) but certain interactions can give you buffs or penalties to certain stats, or provide you with a bit of cash, or even open up new narrative directions. Like I said, I’m doing my absolute best to make sure that every playthrough is as different as possible. I obviously can’t tell myself, but there are definitely moments when I’m playtesting and end up in a dialogue branch that I completely forgot existed, so that’s a good sign.
How do you deal with the ‘anxiety of influence’ as the developer of a Disco-like game? Sovereign Syndicate was compared with Disco Elysium, but some fans didn’t like it because there was less focus on the ideology choices. How can Clam Man 2: Headliner avoid those expectations?
I don’t think there’s any way around it - Clam 2 borrows a lot from Disco (the dialogue widget is the most obvious contender for that comparison) and I’ve made peace with the fact that I’ll probably get compared (infavorably) to one of the best written RPGs of all time. That said, I’m hoping the style of writing and the art is different enough to really set it apart from DE - it’s less serious, more jokey, and just way more casual. It’s all about managing expectations, I guess - if Clam 2 dealt with serious, political issues, I’d stand no chance, and it’s easier and more fun for me to instead let the player weirdly fantasize about tentacles doing the dishes or get run over by an evil car. Now that I think about it, neither one of those would have felt out of place in Disco. Shit.
Why a Clam Man? Why anthropomorphic marine life and sea creatures? Are thalassophiles kinky, like a furry fetish? Is there sex in the world of Clam Man? Would he be able to have sex with a curvy blobfish or a goth vampire squid?
That goes way back to Clam 1. We were making a platformer for fun and I drew a little clam person in a spacesuit. We loved the design because it was so stupid, so everything became fish-themed from then on. I also can’t draw for shit, so weird anthropomorphic fish people is weird enough for my style to not look completely awful.
I guess there is sex in the world of Clam Man, which is a sentence I never thought I’d type. I usually dislike romance options in games, since it usually boils down to ‘say the right thing and give gifts and now you receive love’, so there’s no planned romance in the game. That said, there’s plenty of making fun of romance options, along with rejection and a couple of sex jokes in there - I have to be sparse with them though. It’s pretty funny if a weird, beady-eyed little cartoon drawing suddenly starts talking about the clitoris in a particular context, but if I do it too often it gets stale real quick, and I dont think stale fish are very interesting sexually.
I’ve yet to see the thalassophiles find Clam 2, and I’m not sure if I hope they do. If I ever do a crowdfunding campaign to finish the game and let people design NPCs, I’ll know who requested a goth vampire squid. (For anyone reading this, please don’t message me about adding in goth vampire squids. I’ll cave under the pressure, and I really don’t want to have to explain that to my mom.)
This interview was a like-minded collaboration between an independent developer and an independent writer. If you enjoyed reading this and would like to support us, try out the Open Mic demo, then wishlist and follow Clam Man 2: Headliner on Steam.