Puzzles, Lore & Inspiration: Get Glimpse of Newest Rusty Lake Game Development
We asked Robin Ras, Co-Founder of Rusty Lake, about its latest game, Servant of the Lake, the lore, and puzzle-making.
The brilliant puzzle series Rusty Lake has just welcomed a new member: Servant of the Lake offers a glimpse into the life and relationships between the Vanderboom siblings and reveals some familiar faces.
We talked with Robin Ras, the co-founder of the studio behind the mysterious franchise, to see how the company designs the mechanics and works with lore.
Introduction
Hi there! I’m Robin Ras, Co-Founder of Rusty Lake. I have been working on building our universe and studio for 11 years now. Including Servant of the Lake, that’s 19 games in total. We also have a publishing company, Second Maze, to help other indie devs release their games.
Together, we are a team of 6 core members. Maarten Looise is the Co-Founder and developer/puzzle designer of all our Rusty Lake titles, who’s been working alongside me on both Rusty Lake and Second Maze since the inception of both projects.
Andreea Bosgan is our Senior Community Manager and our first long-term employee who joined us right before the launch of our first co-op title, The Past Within, and has been a part of the development process of every Rusty Lake title since the Cube Escape Collection.
Damy Vermeire is our Junior Community Manager and has been helping us since The White Door and its ARG, first as a moderator on our official Discord, then as an official part of the team during the development of Underground Blossom.
Next is Jordan Walsh, who joined us a little over a year ago to help with social media and influencer marketing.
And last but not least, Ruben Aldenhoven, who, after working with us for years as a QA tester, has officially joined us part-time and has proven vital to helping us ensure Servant of the Lake is as bug-free as possible on release!
Together, with our core team, we have have received additional help on most all of our projects from composer Victor Butzelaar for our soundtracks, Driftwood Audio for sound design, Johan Scherft for background paintings, Luuk and Martijn who are responsible for porting the whole game to Unity and with whom we’ve collaborated on the development of The Past Within, and a lovely group of over 20 independent translators who have ensured our games are accessible and localised in most languages.
Since we are a small team, we need to keep a sharp focus on one project at a time, so we’re currently very focused on the launch of Servant of the Lake for Rusty Lake, but we’ve also been able to share some time with Second Maze, as we’ve just renewed our collaboration with HiKing Mind Studio to publish their second game, Falling Apart!
Servant of the Lake unveils the story of several prominent characters, deepening the already complicated lore. When you work on these games, do you have a plan for the whole franchise, or do you come up with lore as you go? Have you ever had to retcon something, swipe facts off as part of a character’s imagination?
We didn’t have everything planned out from the very start, but when we created the first games and the Rusty Lake universe, we wrote down our own “rules” based on themes like memories, trauma, and reincarnation, which are present in all of the games. We already had ideas for some of the main storylines, like those involving Dale, Laura, and characters like Mr. Crow and Mr. Owl, but at the very beginning, we weren’t sure if we could sustain ourselves as a new indie game studio.
For Servant of the Lake in particular, we always knew we wanted to go back to the location of the Vanderboom house from Rusty Lake: Roots and deepen the story of the original Vanderboom siblings and the creation of the elixir. Of course, if you come back to something after so many years, it is quite hard to make everything fit, but we believe we managed to stay quite true to the background story and characters with this one.
As for retconning, we have quite a nice baseline for the early lore with enough vagueness in the narrative that we can now build upon the existing facts with relative freedom.
The story offers an unexpected twist on the elixir creation, I believe. So far, it looked like Aldous and William worked on it together, but Servant of the Lake shows animosity between the two. Do they reconcile after the end and join forces, or did you change this part of the story?
True, in Rusty Lake: Roots, we saw Aldous and William working on the elixir together during a secret level, but we never shared the full story of what happened before, during the first creation of the elixir. To this end, Servant of the Lake will shine a light on the events taking place during these early years, together with the fact that the brothers did not always get along well, including their supposed rivalry. We don’t want to give spoilers, so players will have to play Servant of the Lake to see how their brotherly relationship develops to fit into the existing lore of Rusty Lake.
Was Alexandra’s part always meant to be what it is in the game, or did you evolve her role later?
We wanted to explain more about James's lineage, and we knew we wanted this strong female character in the game from the start of the design process, so Alexandra became a complex and demanding character with a very important role in the Vanderboom family dynamics.
Every Vanderboom generation has a girl and two boys. Is it intentional? Is there a secret that players will uncover one day?
It wasn’t intentional, but we can imagine there will be some new theories about this.
Closer to the end of the game, I thought I was witnessing the becoming of a different animal-like character, so I have to ask: will we see a similar story about the immortal dog?
Hopefully, one day! We’re also quite fond of the immortal dog. Luckily, in Servant of the Lake, there will be several new pets waiting for players.
How do you design puzzles for your games? Is there a sudden strike of inspiration, or is there a specific process? Could you tell us more about your choices and workflow? Rusty Lake definitely has some staples when it comes to puzzles, do you indulge fans’ expectations on purpose?
We always start by looking at a location and a scene and thinking about what objects and items could be there that would both make sense and benefit the story. For Servant of the Lake specifically, the 19th-century house that first featured in Rusty Lake: Roots gave us some fresh inspiration. Something like a hunting scene could be a fitting story point and location, creating the opportunity to explore new gameplay mechanics; we could use these older bathroom tiles typical to that era for a puzzle; there is a dinner to be prepared by the household staff; and there needs to be alchemy happening at one point during the game. The many real paintings made by Johan Scherft also offered us a lot of opportunities to incorporate them into the puzzles, while also enhancing the visual style of the game.
We do our best to make sure that the puzzles in a new Rusty Lake game always feel fresh for our existing fans, as they always want more puzzles and, specifically, more difficult puzzles. At the same time, we believe there should be a flow to the difficulty level of each puzzle, with more accessible ones at the start that do not need a lot of instructions, and then puzzles that gradually build up in difficulty as you progress further in the game.
Nowadays, we also test the puzzles and tweak them throughout the whole development process to make them both fun for fans and accessible to new players. In our earlier games, we didn’t test them as much, and some of the puzzles in our older work can be a bit frustrating, sometimes quite early on in the game, which we realise, in hindsight, can be quite difficult for newer players trying to get into the Rusty Lake saga as a whole.
Servant of the Lake is one of the more lore-heavy titles in the franchise. Will the next installment be smaller, or are you planning to focus on similar stories, like Roots? Could you share your plans for the next project?
Yes, a project like Servant of the Lake takes us more than 2.5 years to develop from idea to end product. It started as a smaller game but turned into a way bigger project over time, so that might happen with our next project as well. We have enough ideas for what could be next, but first we want to focus on Servant of the Lake, because there might be more to it than people think.
Servant of the Lake is out now on Steam, iOS, and Android.
