“Belatedly, I’m discovering that the deeper you dive into the idiosyncratic, the more likely someone’s going to be able to recognise themselves in it.”
it however they want. It’s out there in the public, and that, as creator, it does make me feel exposed. But I’m slowly learning that it’s not about me. I just need to remove myself from the picture – it belongs to other people just as much as it does to me now.” This isn’t to say that Yuts is disappointed that Norco has found a global audience, of course. While he remains too superstitious to celebrate his success (at least out loud, anyway), he’s clearly appreciative that his game has been so beloved – and has had such an opportunity to educate the wider world about what life is like in Norco. Yuts’ journey to align his own intentions with Norco against
how some have perceived it is, in part, born from the lower expectations he had going into the project – having not anticipated that there’d be such global interest in a localised and specific story.
“I was so naive about the market of indie games that I’d never even considered Norco’s marketability. Belatedly, I’m discovering that the deeper you dive into the idiosyncratic, the more likely someone’s going to be able to recognise themselves in it.
CRUNCH Norco has been quite the success story for a studio’s debut title, and an excellent addition to the growing list of incredible hyperlocal games. But its development was often a painful one, riddled with the all-too familiar story of crunch.
“It took a lot of personal sacrifice,” says Yuts. “It put a lot
of stress on personal relationships. Near the end, we were all working unbelievable hours trying to finish this game. There were no free evenings, no free weekends – it was non-stop for months on end. And that has continued to some degree just in trying to maintain the project trying to get localization done, gamepad support, all these things. “It can be frustrating, because the amount of work that we put into this was so overwhelming, and continues to be in some ways. And I think there is a kind of consumer culture of video games, even by small studios who are
60 | MCV/DEVELOP May 2022
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