Papers, Please creator Lucas Pope says he no longer reveals what he’s working on in case it’s stolen or ‘slurped up by AI’

Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn creator Lucas Pope has shared some insight into his current status as a developer.

In an interview with Mike Rose (No More Robots co-founder) and Rami Ismail (Vlambeer co-founder) in their podcast Mike & Rami Are Still Here, Pope explained that he had no aspirations to build a team of developers and was simply content to “sit at the computer, draw shit at the keyboard, and write some songs and put together some programming code and try to make games”.

Ismail suggested that while he’s the sort of developer who has “one foot in the medium, just like, I want to make stuff” and “one foot on the business side of things”, Pope instead is “foot first in the medium” and creating things purely because he wants to, until one of his projects reaches the point that he realises he could probably release it as a game.

Pope replied that he doesn’t often get to the stage where a game is ready, and that while he likes to work on things until they’re finished, he also usually likes sharing what he’s working on but no longer has the inclination to do so, because he’s worried his ideas will be copied before he’s finished.

“I don’t get to the point where it’s done that much,” Pope explained. “I do have this kind of curse that I really want to finish things, actually – I’m very production-focused in in the sense that I want the production to work. I want it to be efficient. I want it to finish. I want to actually produce something at the end.

“But I I also like to talk about the stuff I’m working on, and I think just now the the situation kind of feels different to me, that you don’t really talk about stuff when you’re working on it because I don’t know it’s going to get slurped up by AI or people are going to copy it or something else like that.

“I mean, it’s not a hard rule. It’s just, I got the kind of feeling about that, and I just didn’t feel as comfortable talking about the stuff I was working on again. So I hope that sort of breaks and I can feel comfortable talking about the stuff I’m working on.”

Pope also said he was more wary of releasing a major new game now because he enjoyed such critical success with Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn that he doesn’t want to let players down.

“There’s also the sense that I was pretty happy with Obra Din and Papers, Please and I don’t… you know, maybe I can’t do it again, kind of thing. Do I really want to maybe just go out on a high note? Why drag my myself down with the next thing that people may not like?

“I feel lucky with those two games. You know, I can do the same things again. I can sort of focus on narrative and and gameplay and mechanics and stuff like that, but who knows, it could be a total miss. And I don’t really want to push my luck too much in that sense.”

Ismail said he had similar concerns after the release of Ridiculous Fishing and Nuclear Throne, both of which were praised by critics and players alike.

“I remember when we did Ridiculous Fishing and it was the first big swing of my life where I was like ‘oh wow, wow, hey, good, I did it good,” Ismail said. “And then we had to do the next one and we were like ‘oh no’.

“And it I think it took a while before Nuclear Throne really started going, because that was our our actual next thing. And I think a large part of that was because we were stuck with this feeling of like, ‘oh no, we did it good, now people’s expectations are high’. I think at some point we just went back to jamming and finding the fun and making stuff again instead of worrying.”

“Yeah, that’s me,” Pope replied. “I’m just finding the fun over here. The last six years – just finding the fun.”