Joel Mason: Writer and programmer on Dredge

We’re delighted to welcome Joel Mason, author and programmer of Dredge, for an interview today. Dredge is a game acclaimed for its unique blend of Lovecraftian horror and fishing mechanics, developed by studio Black Salt Games. In this interview, Joel shares with us his background in the video game industry, his key role in founding Black Salt Games, and the literary and cinematic inspirations behind Dredge. We also explore the technical and narrative challenges he faced, as well as the close collaboration between team members during development.

PnT: Can you tell us about your career in the video game industry before co-founding Black Salt Games? What motivated you to take the plunge and set up your own studio?

Joel: I, like everyone else at Black Salt Games, worked at a company called CerebralFix. It’s a work-for-hire studio mainly focused on creating mobile games and experiences for existing franchises. I’d been there about 8 years, the others a little longer. Many folks at CF wanted to be making original games, but it was hard to juggle internal projects when external, paying work came in. The idea to split off and form a separate studio was Nadia’s. She was the one who managed to carve out some funding, space and time for us, and Alex and I followed her over. We knew it was our best shot at making something original.

PnT: Can you tell us about any literary or cinematic inspirations that influenced the creation of Dredge’s narrative universe?

Joel: Narratively, I adore games like Darkest Dungeon and Destiny that aren’t afraid to break out adjective-laden sentences. I don’t have a problem with dropping in words that people might have to google. That’s how I learned a lot of my vocabulary too! As for other inspirations, the (glacial) pace of Red Dead Redemption 2 really does it for me. It might sound counterintuitive, but working your way up by skinning a rabbit for $0.17 and working towards upgrading your weaponry feels really impactful and meaningful. Dredge is a slow game, and I like to think that players feel the impact of the day’s harvest when they return to dock at night.

PnT: Where did the initial inspiration for Dredge come from? How did you decide to mix Lovecraftian horror with fishing mechanics?

Joel: I honestly couldn’t say definitively. I’ve always liked fishing as side activities in other games, and wanted to see if we could make something larger out of it. I’m personally terrified of deep water (read: any water where I can’t touch the bottom) so the “mysterious/terrifying” angle fits really well with the theme for me. While I’ve never read any Lovecraft directly, it’s hard to avoid that influence from basically every other form of media.

PnT: As a programmer and scriptwriter, how do you reconcile technical requirements with narrative in your games?

Joel: I’ve never written anything before outside of highschool, so I can’t compare the experience to anything else – but I found it had a number of advantages. My writing-self knew the limitations on the types of interactions, and knew the various edge case requirements such as “we’ll need a line for if the player’s inventory is too full to accept this item, and another line for when the player returns to pick it up”. But similarly, my programming-self knew that if the writing would be significantly improved by an addition, I could make it. For example, in the latest expansion, The Iron Rig, there are some dialogue sequences with a character called The Scientist. As the story progresses, these sequences get more sinister. In those first sequences, I instruct the sky to darken and cloud over. In some of the later sequences, I actually orchestrate a lightning strike timed to the delivery of certain dialogue lines. Wielding that ability as a programmer x writer feels very powerful!

PnT: The development of Dredge was very collaborative. Can you describe how ideas were exchanged and integrated within the four-person team?

Joel: It’s all very free-flowing. We designed each area of the game separately, a few months apart, so when we’d meet to discuss the layout, quests and design of the area, we’d be throwing all kinds of ideas into the ring. We also do more concentrated playtesting sessions, either amongst ourselves, or with friends, or with players we don’t know at all. All of those sessions typically result in us each taking pages of (literally) hundreds of notes with improvement ideas.

PnT: Why/how did you come up with the idea of a fishing game to tell such a story? What were the constraints involved in creating this type of game that interested you in becoming the medium for this adventure?

Joel: We were always interested in creating something that we felt was different to what players had seen before. We knew that as a team of 3 (originally), we couldn’t compete with the scale or even quality of the experience – so we had to break through with our uniqueness.

I looked at games like Papers, Please which provide such a meaningful and fresh experience without being overly complex. That was the gold standard of scope control for us, and I think we managed to create something that felt new to players.  Fishing was one factor, but I also point at things like our lack of direct combat and our strong atmosphere without too many overt jumpscares.

PnT: How did you decide on the specific lore and mythos for Dredge? Did the Lovecraftian elements evolve as you developed the game, or were they part of the core concept from the start?

Joel: A lot of the lore was built up over time. It wasn’t particularly cohesive or complex at the beginning, we just had one central plot point (the discovery of The Collector’s Book of The Deep) which we then obfuscated by just…not telling players much about it. Over development we sprinkled in hints and sparse dialogue alluding to it. We also stitched other elements i to our growing spider web of lore, but as I said, that all came in over time.

PnT: Time and space management are essential to Dredge. How did you approach the design of these mechanics, in particular with the integration of fishing and the organization of the hold?

Joel: Initially inventory management was much more standalone. It was just a mechanism for holding your fish. Then we came up with the idea of slotting engines and rods into this layout. Then, we realized that instead of a traditional health bar, we could make damage affect your inventory – and so on! Eventually, we tied more and more mechanics into this central spatial inventory system.  

It resulted in a number of challenges, for sure. One example is that we almost never directly place an item into a player’s inventory, we allow players to choose where items go. This means that the game has to be structured around giving players these moments of pause in which to organize their cargo. It changes the flow and pacing of the game.

PnT: The world-building in Dredge is rich in implicit detail and environmental clues. How did you design this world so that it tells a story even in the absence of dialogue or explicit narration?

Joel: In some ways this is a result of scope control! We didn’t have time to tell every story in our canon. Also, we didn’t want to overwhelm players with words. There are so many ways to tell a story, even down to where we choose to place items in the world.

PnT: The concept of time, particularly the transition between day and night, plays a crucial role in the unfolding of the story. How did you use this mechanic to influence the narrative and the player’s perception?

Joel: The night is such a key part of our atmosphere. The fog is almost a central character in our game, and it’s incredibly oppressive and stifling. Reducing player visibility has such a profound effect on the way players navigate the world and plan their days. It’s a surprisingly strong – yet ethereal – gameplay mechanic. Narratively, we play into it too, with many characters warning the player in no uncertain terms not to go out at night. You have to, of course, eventually. But we let players choose when they feel prepared enough to venture out.

PnT: Was there a particular narrative moment in Dredge that you found difficult to implement technically, but you felt was essential to the story? How did you overcome that challenge?

Joel: Any of the work we did with cutscenes ended up being more complex than I’d have liked. We never envisaged we’d have in-game cutscenes from the outset of development, which probably played into the difficulty. Our cutscenes influence a wide range of things in the world; summoning weather, adjusting wave heights, changing the time of day. That’s all on top of the things you might expect a cutscene to do; play music, animate models, move cameras, etc.

PnT: Dredge has a lot of DLC, ranging from the addition of items or zones to narrative quests. In such a complete game (and especially with a “closed” map), how do you envisage adding this type of content? How does it work in terms of design, narrative and environmental modification?

It wasn’t something we’d planned, to be honest. We never expected DREDGE to be the success that it is, so didn’t have a firm plan for DLC before we launched. When we realized players liked the game and wanted more, we started designing The Iron Rig, which didn’t expand the world per se, but added some more quests and mechanics. 

When we realized we weren’t going to be able to deliver The Iron Rig in 2023 as we had promised, we pivoted to a smaller DLC The Pale Reach. This was “just” a new area, which is what we’d been developing relatively reliably as we worked our way through the game’s world, so we reasoned we’d be able to get that out in time – and we did.

In terms of how these additions integrate, we never want to outshine the base game’s ending, and we always want the content to be approachable at any stage in a playthrough. Those are our core pillars of DLC design.

PnT: One of these DLCs introduces a modern platform, whereas the previous atmosphere was rather outdated.  With this addition, oil pollution makes its appearance in the Dredge universe. Is the preservation of marine ecosystems a theme close to your heart?

Yes! It’s actually something we worried about a great deal when storyboarding The Iron Rig. The theme of DREDGE is “the player is doing something objectively bad (handing in relics), but they keep doing it anyway” which is a pretty common theme in cosmic horror. We kept that same structure for The Iron Rig, but it felt uncomfortable to make the player continue to devastate the local environment. So we found methods of abstraction to take that responsibility away – at least, after the first little bit of drilling.

PnT: With the success of Dredge, what are some narrative and technical lessons you’ve learned that you’ll carry forward into future projects?

Joel: I’d like to think we’ll be able to take our time a little more with both the narrative and technical design. There are some flaws in the core loop of DREDGE (for example, there aren’t enough things to spend money on) which we were able to address in The Iron Rig.

With 3-4 people and a 2 year development, it isn’t all going to be perfect. And as far as we knew, DREDGE was going to be our only shot at creating a game! Thanks to its success, we’re in a position to aim a little higher. But as always, we need to take some time to set our sights.