MOUTHWASHING Q&A: PART III

08 Nov 2024Developer post

Source: Steam Community (opens in a new tab)

WELCOME...

...to the third and final part of our Q&A series! But don’t worry — this isn’t goodbye. We’ve still got a ton of exciting stuff to share.

It’s been such a blast answering your questions. We’re still deep in the amazing support and love you’ve shown for Mouthwashing. It’s starting to feel a little retrospective on the production side, but it’s still surreal. Each piece of fanart, fan edit, and even fan animation (you guys are INSANELY talented!) brings us so much joy.

So please keep it coming! Use #Mouthwashing, tag us @Wrong_Organ on Twitter, or post on the Wrong Organ and CR Channel Discord servers.

By the way, if you haven’t already, check out the Steam Point Shop for some Mouthwashing emoticons and backgrounds!

AND NOW, ONTO Q&A PART III:

What were the choices behind sampling in some of the songs? (The dialog in God's Favorites, Confrontation, Who Is The Birthday Boy, for example) A lot of choices were made by intuition and what "felt" right for the scene. The dialog in god's favorites is a mangled Pony Express advert, mangled and mixed with lines throughout the game. Like a bad memory. Most of the music is just picking up on themes and ideas that already exist in that scene but translated into music form. Who Is The Birthday Boy is directly inspired by Creep Show and the loud abrasive synthesizer work used throughout the movie, the synths sounded like they were screaming, which we thought was very fitting and something that would work for our game as well. Confrontation is just Jimmy going through it again.

Who broke the Polle Statue in the lobby? Jimmy. Swansea, drunk off mouthwash, thought it was hilarious.

Tulpar crew :)

(via @_C4NDYC41N, on Twitter)

I just want to know if the Pony Express crew has any silly-fun hobbies they enjoy? Swansea’s kids are all grown up, but there’s always something broken or needing repairs in their apartments. It’s also an excuse to go make sure they’re keeping their places clean. He’ll treat them to a meal, the kids should be eating good at least. Swansea makes a mean paella but his wife is sick of it at this point. Not to worry, he takes her to fancy restaurants when they want a night out. They’ll call ahead to see if the dog is allowed to come too. Curly is into weightlifting. He spends most of his time on Earth around friends and family. Someone always has something interesting going on, and Curly enjoys trying new things when he’s not stuck on a haul. Winter is his favorite season because he’s a snow sports kind of guy. Daisuke is a regular at his local arcade. The machines are like, totally rigged though. But maybe this next try…? Anyway, Daisuke is also into thrifting some sick unique vintage clothing. He has an eye for the good stuff, and no one else is gonna show up with the same outfit either!! His parents don’t get it at all. Anya spends most of her free time studying. She runs to clear her head. When she really needs to zero out she binges the worst reality television and fast food known to man. But she’d never admit to that. Jimmy is into weightlifting. Hobbies are for people who can afford them.

The Tulpar ship feels almost like a character itself. How did you design it? The hallways were designed to mimic the hallways an old submarine would have, really cold and not comforting in any manner. Then we wanted to contrast that with the common room being made up to look like some kitschy 70s interior design magazine and have a strong contrast between the two. Or Anya’s office which was inspired by classic dingy middle school nurse rooms. This was to highlight the absurdity of the design of the ship where giving the crew comfort by the company is always done in a soulless, ineffective way. We also made it a point early on in development to never show the ship from the outside. We didn’t even want any real windows or visible view of outer space itself. Both of these decisions were to underline the claustrophobia and oppressiveness of the crew’s situation now that they’re trapped. The inside of the ship is the only thing the characters can see. They don’t know if they’ll ever see anything else ever again

If each crew member were voice acted, who would they sound like? Martin.

“take responsibility…”

(via @cremecande, on Twitter)

Did the development team anticipate this level of reception to Mouthwashing? No, absolutely not. Between our publisher and the developers we talked about bracing ourselves for a, at best, lukewarm reception. There are always points in a game’s development where everything seems hopeless and it feels like the game will never actually be finished, but that moment was particularly strong here. Mouthwashing was a project that only really came together right at the last few weeks of development when all the music, visuals and mechanics were implemented fully. It very narrowly escaped cancellation before that.

What inspired the sun imagery in the common room? The sunset imagery was one of the first visuals we associated with Mouthwashing. Johanna pitched a slideshow to the rest of the team with her initial inspos, ideas for the game, etc. The screen being stuck on “sunset mode” was the way we justified it narratively, but from the beginning orange sunset was one of the core ideas for the visuals of the game we wanted to incorporate. For parts of early development, we played around with the idea that the ship was designed to make the crew feel more at ease through imagery of environments from Earth. The skybox would move with your camera as if you were looking out in the sky, the doors to personal rooms and the common room would have fake screens that displayed a sandy beach. We decided to scrap these ideas in favor of what you see now.

Who did the voice acting for the characters? Was Polle's voice sampled from a specific piece of media, or were they voice-acted? All voice acting was done by Martin. That includes Curly, Daisuke and Polle and anything that isn't an advert in the tv sections. We wanted Polle to feel like it was pulling voice clips from random adverts to string a sentence together, so the words were recorded individually and cut into sentences in post.

It was such a pleasure answering all of these questions! If we missed anything, you might find the answer in our upcoming developer diaries.

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