Inside Goodbye Volcano High’s creative process, out August 29
Some of the best coming-of-age stories happen in times of great upheaval: war, revolution, calamity… but graduating high school while you’re staring down your almost-inevitable extinction, at the hands of one of the greatest disasters to ever hit planet Earth? That’s some rough stuff. Such is the setting of Goodbye Volcano High, a dramatic, narrative-driven tale of awkward proto-avian teenagers at a turning point when they should have the rest of their lives ahead of them–except they don’t.
Montreal-based indie studio KO_OP has been working on Goodbye Volcano High for several years now, and its tale of prehistoric high-school life is releasing very soon on PS4 and PS5. We sat down with the game’s director, Kyle McKernan, to get a deeper dive into character writing, wrangling the narrative, and how to weave mini-games into the fabric of a sprawling drama.
“The themes at the core of Goodbye Volcano High are love, friendship and youth facing what feels like an inevitable catastrophe,” says McKernan. “The game explores what it means to embrace family and found family in a time of crisis and the different ways people cope with impending disaster… One of our driving focuses was how you reconcile all your wants, needs, goals and love when the time to reach closure has been cut short.”
No matter what species you are, being a teenager isn’t easy, and the narrative of Goodbye Volcano High can often tackle some tough subjects: love, facing others’ expectations, drug use, and the looming specter of premature death. “Crafting the narrative was challenging because it demanded we probe some serious and often difficult topics for ourselves in order to realize them in our characters,” McKernan continues. “Facing mortality isn’t an easy
Read more on blog.playstation.com
