“Our game is almost out, so everything is on fire.” Yet musician and game maker Paul Deetman stands remarkably calm in the trendy white-and-green canteen of his game company KeokeN. He knows how it goes, he says. “The younger employees are more nervous.”
A little further on, a small group of people in their twenties and thirties are working concentrated, surrounded by plants and blackboards full of mathematical formulas. There are mini spacecraft replicas hanging from the light bars. There are plenty of desks: enough for the core team of eight permanent employees, but also for the more than thirty employees who have been here in recent months.
Paul’s broad-shouldered brother Koen watches from their shared office, with bags under his eyes. “I’m trying to launch a game while I’m moving and my wife is pregnant for the third time.” He smiles.
Without that good courage, game studio KeokeN would no longer exist. Since the brothers graduated ten years ago – Koen did game design, Paul an audio course – they have been chasing an ambitious dream: to make narrative adventure games that look just as slick as big blockbuster games like The Last of Us. Rare in the Netherlands – Dutch game makers like to start with smaller dreams and are sometimes hesitant to become too big.
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Simon Lenskens
Everything gone wrong
Not without reason, according to KeokeN’s story. Their road to a first game was long and grueling. Spoke three years ago NRC them just before the launch of their debut title, astronaut game Deliver Us the Moon. Everything had gone wrong. Lender bankrupt. Koen in a burnout. Don’t finish game. Out of necessity, they published an unfinished version – thus attracting a new backer. So came Moon off anyway.
“We fully repaid that publisher, Wired, out of the revenue of Deliver Us the Moon”, says Koen now. A pity: otherwise there might have been money to invest in a new game. But Paul shrugs it off. “The real value is in the game,” he says. “We can now say to lenders: hey, we have successfully launched a game.
They are satisfied with the results. “More than a million people have played the game, we know that,” says Koen. “But sales figures are difficult these days.” Paul nods. “That’s because the game industry is in between two revenue models: newsstand sales and game subscriptions.”
Although Koen does have a favorite state: “Almost 50 percent of all our players on PlayStation played the game. For a lot of blockbuster games, that might be 8 percent.” Paul looks at him. „Deliver Us the Moon is also relatively short, isn’t it.”
Also read the report on KeokeN’s first game from 2019: The tough journey to the top in games
Now comes Deliver Us Mars, their second game; it must be another step towards the dream. More professional, bigger, more cinematic. “We didn’t want another game where the hero wears a helmet all the time, so we decided to invest in facial animation and motion capture.” Suddenly actors came into play – with ‘mocap’ facial expressions, movement and voice are digitized and pasted onto game characters.
Astronaut Simulator
In the brothers’ office there is a large collection of space toys, but also magazines and other prizes, which they have since Moon have earned. Prominent on the coffee table is a copy of the British games magazine wire frame, with the face of KeokeN’s new hero on the cover: Kathy Johanson, an astronaut who goes in search of her missing father. Played by British TV actress Ellise Chappell. „Mars is a family drama and astronaut simulator in one,” summarizes Koen. “It was quite difficult. You can spend a lot of money for one good protagonist, but then the lesser actors drag the level down. In the end, we chose actors with different backgrounds so that they can help each other. Film, TV, voice acting…”
He chuckles. “We were also allowed to hang from the scaffolding for a scene, in the mocap studio that we rented for two weeks in London.” Paul: “You saw the director think: oh, let those boys also participate.”
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Simon Lenskens
Time in such a British mocap studio is precious. So KeokeN did the planning of all scenes in the attic. The air conditioners are roaring along the walls, and huge steel ventilation ducts run upstairs. And on the floor: glue residue. “We had given the lines with colors,” Paul points out. “Our story director would walk here with a screen that showed you rooms in the game, as if you were actually walking there.” This allowed him to visualize where the actors had to be.
“Older game makers now tell us: your difficult start is actually your strength, you know how it works when things go wrong.” Paul walks to the room on the other side of the office, which is filled with game posters. “Here is the music studio of our other company, Hunchback,” he says. “We are working on promotional campaigns for big games like Control. We actually want to expand this in the future. Other Dutch game studios sometimes ask us for help, now we have to say no. But maybe not any time soon.”
At KeokeN, the ambitions are only getting bigger, it seems. The studio may come up with a new project this year, says Koen. “We still have so many ideas for philosophical, narrative games. Not only about space, but also about our consciousness”. Paul nods. “It’s just not in our DNA to think small.”
Deliver Us Mars will be available from February 2.