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Art of the Joke: How High On Life 2 Turns ‘Funny’ Into ‘Fun to Play’ Leave a comment
Art of the Joke: How High On Life 2 Turns ‘Funny’ Into ‘Fun to Play’
Summary
- Narrative Director Alec Robbins shares with us about the science behind the funny in High On Life 2.
- Learn how the team balanced humor with fun gameplay, so it resonates with such a wide audience.
- High On Life 2 is available today for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, and day one with Game Pass Ultimate with support for Xbox Play Anywhere.
The original High On Life connected with me on the absurdist comedy level like nothing else I had ever played before. I’ve laughed plenty in other games, but what Squanch Games pulled off in the original clicked with me on several hysterical levels. It hit me at the start with what seemingly felt like a joke-a-minute and never really let up, on everything from fart sounds to sight gags to snappy dialog. I really enjoyed my time with it.
Now with High On Life 2 available today for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, and day one with Game Pass Ultimate with support for Xbox Play Anywhere, I had a chance to connect with Narrative Director Alec Robbins to learn a bit more about the science behind the funny, and crucially, how you help tell jokes with a player, not just to them.
“If it makes us laugh, nine times out of ten it makes it into the game,” says Robbins when asked about the development of a joke for High On Life 2. “Sometimes that’s a random line of dialogue, other times it’s ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if we made a real, fully-fleshed-out murder mystery?’ Most jokes in the game come from either something that’s making us personally laugh or from something we’ve always wanted to see in a video game. I would say a huge amount of jokes come from the characters themselves.”
Some of those characters are also the main weapons in High On Life 2, the talking Gatlians, who each have their own personality to write to. “Sheath is deadpan, Creature’s a wildcard, and Travis is a selfish, pathetic coward,” Robbins explains. “Often we’re writing directly to the performer – we know exactly what sort of line Ken Marino (“Wet Hot American Summer” and “Party Down”) is going to be able to work with, and we know what a better fit for a different voice actor might be; Tim Robinson (“I Think You Should Leave”) is one of my favorites to write for.”
Travis’ introduction in High On Life 2 demonstrates this in action. Befriending him at a bar, he’s clearly distraught that his wife has moved on, leaving him with an extra cruise ticket in his possession, which we need to complete our next mission. Marino’s performance here captures this perfectly as he shifts from misery to hilarity in the span of a few minutes, as the two of us engage in a series of drunken and disorderly activities, giving Marino a chance to bring this new character to life, channeling bits of his known acting charm and talent into the role.
But how do you balance humor with fun gameplay, so it resonates with such a wide audience? High On Life 2 is a complex first-person shooter with a wide variety of exploration elements to consider. Robbins tells me that one of the ways to strike that balance is to have it run counter to what a player may expect in each situation – sometimes the best jokes come from intuiting what would be the funniest thing to happen at any given moment to the player.
“A lot of good comedy comes from surprise,” Robbins tells me. “When you stand in front of Gene (your mentor and handler) while he’s watching TV, he gets mad at you – that’s not really a joke, but it might make you laugh because it’s an observed, relatable thing. In the first game, when you agree to watch a guy’s bicycle for him, it magically and inconveniently disappears the exact second you finally look away from it – that’s full-on absurd set-up, punchline stuff, and it’s something you could only do in a game. We’re trying to fill the game with a good mix of grounded humor, like Gene and the TV, and surprising interactive humor, like the bicycle gag.”
The trick to a lot of this is timing. Because High On Life 2 is an interactive experience with many moving parts, I was fascinated by how hard it must be to ensure the timing of a joke hits at the right time. Compared to a film or a TV show, there’s no control over how the player is going to react, or even position the camera. “That’s part of the fun – and challenge – of writing comedy for a game! If a visual gag won’t land when the player isn’t looking in the right direction, we kind of just have to live with that. We don’t like taking control away from the player, and we only do it when absolutely necessary for the story. Our philosophy is basically: you can ‘opt-in’ to the humor. If you want to walk away from a joke, you usually can! We can live with that.”
Robbins also acknowledges that not every joke is going to hit for everyone — it’s a long game and there’s a lot of jokes — so chances are, a joke that suits your sense of humor might just be waiting for you around the corner. “I think that invites our audience to be more receptive and generous,” he adds.
One of those “around the corner” moments I nearly skated past while moving through the open hub world of Circuit Arcadia. A large, slug-like alien was having an argument with her skinny alien husband, accusing him of purposely getting them lost (a relatable experience). Then it takes a turn, that the thing they’re running late for is witnessing the “first bath” ritual of her sister – not something the husband is eager to do, citing how bizarre it is to see his sister-in-law naked. It’s a small bit of relatable humor and world building, reinforcing that the universe of High On Life 2 is indeed a bizarre and hilarious place to discover, if you just take the time to stop and listen.
Taking Big Swings
Another aspect of writing for a sequel is finding areas to build upon an already-proven comedy formula. The Gatlians are clearly some of the biggest stars in both games, with their witty dialog and unique abilities that feed into what playing a High On Life game is all about.
For High On Life 2 the team seems to be taking this opportunity to really branch out more with the newer Gatlians by putting them in your hands as soon as possible. “A huge thing I wanted to do with this sequel was give you the new weapons earlier in each mission, so we could write stories around them joining up with you,” explains Robbins. “It goes a long way towards helping you bond with newcomers like Sheath and Travis when their stories feel like they’re organically intersecting with yours.”
The intersection of writing and design for a game as big as High On Life 2 can equally be a challenge to work within. Naturally, during the creative process, there can be times when gameplay and humor will clash. Sometimes a joke that worked on paper will get in the way of the game designer’s intent. “Unless it’s a particularly important joke, I usually like to step out of design’s way in those cases. Other times it’s just the team checking us for going a little too far.”One such pitch that Robbins tells me about was to create an incredibly long, tedious side quest which would yield no reward; I can absolutely see the humor in that. But as Robbins tells me, it would have taken a lot out of the QA team – who’d have to play and test every second of that dull journey – to try and wrangle.
“I like big swings like that,” Robbins says, “where you’d hear about it secondhand and go ‘What? Really? You can do 12 hours of [redacted] in High On Life 2? And it does what afterwards?!’ It reminds me of hearing you could beat The End in Metal Gear Solid 3 by letting him die of old age. People don’t generally consider Metal Gear Solid 3 a ‘comedy’ game but it’s really one of the funniest games of all time, and it’s full of great jokes like that. Kojima is a big inspiration for me, and he’s kind of the king of marrying a joke with gameplay.”
Can You Have Too Many Jokes?
The self-aware, absurdist humor that High On Life 2 thrives on requires as much buy-in as possible across the team. As touched on earlier, if enough of the team is laughing at the joke, they’ll do everything in their power to preserve it. “Sometimes one of the directors might not be vibing with a joke, but if it’s generally hitting, we trust that it’s gonna work for enough players,” says Robbins. “On the flip side, though, sometimes a joke just lands with a thud, and everyone can feel it. Unless I feel like it’s something that can be fixed with some tweaks, we’re usually pretty ruthless and just cut it. There are too many jokes in here to get hung up on the ones that don’t work.”
High On Life felt bold yet familiar with how its humor resonated with me, and when learning about some of the team’s influences, I could better understand why. “Personally, I’m drawing on everything from Alan Partridge to ‘I Think You Should Leave’ to ‘The Venture Bros.,’ but we’re also trying to hit that very specific unique Squanch Games voice.”
Robbins tells me that High On Life had him writing grosser and cruder gags than he’d usually have written elsewhere, but that was driven a lot by everything the development team found funny. “All the designers and artists are putting a lot of what they love into it – it’s very collaborative. There aren’t that many video games doing comedy out there, but we see what they’re doing and we love it, too. I’m a big fan of Mother 3 and Portal 2 when it comes to funny video games, and hopefully you can see a bit of their influence in what we’re doing.”
With so many jokes being carved out for High on Life 2, I wanted to know if there were any jokes or gags that surprised the team with how well they landed. “I think one that really won everyone over was the human petting zoo,” says Robbins. “We’ve got this guy held captive in a zoo, but he’s really chill about it, and I just had this full vision in my head for him. He had to be voiced by Cory Loykasek, a comedian I’d worked with before on a show called ‘The Dress Up Gang’ — he’s just so authentically relaxed and breezy. He came in and absolutely nailed it, and I don’t think the team was expecting his dialogue to be as funny as it is. We loved him so much we even expanded his part a bit.”
Another thing that I’ve liked about both High On Life games is they feel as though they’re not pulling any punches when it comes to humor, even at the cost of them possibly turning off their players from the experience. So, I asked Robbins if he had a proverbial line when it comes to handling humor that might be too divisive – how does one check themselves against that during the creative process?
“I think shock humor is hacky, and the more sensitive a joke is, the funnier it needs to be for it to be worth it,” he says. “I don’t really think anything’s off limits, per se, but I do think you really need to know whose expense your joke’s laughs are coming at. You can’t be ignorant of that. I love dark humor, but a lot of what people mistake for dark humor is just hate speech or something sociopathic dressed up in joke structure. I think High On Life is a really open-minded game – even if it can be juvenile and crass, it’s still really kind. Instead of being close-minded, it’s usually funnier to go the other way.”
An example that Robbins drew upon was how many of the characters found throughout both games are seemingly genderfluid and pansexual – like the alien slug couple mentioned earlier. “Logically it’s funnier to me that they’d feel gender and sexuality on Earth is super-limited in comparison. It’s way more interesting and fruitful to go there with a joke than somewhere mean and hateful.”
Going on a Bible Adventure
Some jokes don’t come about by development, but by hard-earned planning. One of my favorite moments from the first game was being able to sit down and watch the entirety of cult-classic movie ‘Tammy and the T-Rex’. When I first played the new game a year ago, I was expecting to see another equally silly film to watch – but what I got was entirely unexpected, as I found myself playing the bizarre (and totally real) NES game, Bible Adventures inside High On Life 2. I asked Robbins what that selection criteria are for it to make it into a game like this.
“Bible Adventures was the big one we got – I think that might have been the very first one we even tried to get. We’re big fans of it here – there’s a book by Gabe Durham that’s all about the history of that game and its developer, Wisdom Tree, and how they skirted the law to sell bootleg NES carts. It’s such a crazy story, and it’s an honor to feature the game here. I won’t spoil the other ones, but Bible Adventures does get featured hugely in the game during [a boss fight]. I’m really proud of that part – it took a lot of work and we did it just because it made us laugh and seemed like an insane thing to commit to.”
But alongside the jokes that come with huge amounts of planning, there are also ones that sprung up by chance – game development’s “improv”, perhaps. Throughout a creative process there will no doubt be surprises along the way, elements you had not expected, or chances to take that just happen to work out. In the case of High On Life 2, that came in the form of the tutorial to help get you on the new skateboard for the first time.
“It’s very early on in the game, and to teach the player how to use their new skateboard we have Gene look up a video online, and he shows it to you,” Robbins tells me. “The video is just something I shot with my friend Jon Millstein, a skater and comedian, with my phone in a parking lot near the Los Angeles Zoo. I wrote this long monologue for Jon to read, full of specific game controls and instructions, and he memorized it nearly on the spot in an alien mask. It’s one of my favorite parts of the game and it came together quickly on the cheap, at the last minute. We shot it in an hour, I went home and edited it that night, and by the next day it was already in the game. That’s the Squanch magic!”
This “magic” is what holds the ambitiously hilarious High On Life 2 together, through crisp writing, creative gameplay (skateboards!), and an incredibly immersive world for us to explore. It’s developed with a swagger, confident that their sense of humor will resonate with enough of us to take even bigger swings at turning “fun to play” into “funny.” High On Life 2 is about to show us what can happen when a group of creative game developers craft something that’s centered around a singular purpose: To make us laugh our asses off.
High On Life 2
Squanch Games, Inc.
You’ve done it. You’ve taken down an intergalactic cartel, brought humanity back from the brink of extinction, and hunted dangerous bounties to the far corners of the galaxy. Bounty hunting has brought you fortune, fame and love; but when a mysterious figure from your past reappears and puts a price on your sister’s head, your cushy life gets thrown into chaos.
Do you have what it takes to risk it all and bring down an intergalactic conspiracy that once again threatens your favorite species (humans)?
High On Life RETURNS as you and your beloved rag-tag team of alien misfits shoot, stab, and skate your way through gorgeous, dangerous worlds all across the galaxy to blow up the EVIL pharmaceutical conglomerate hell-bent on putting price tags on HUMAN LIFE!
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