When the player is making choices, they aren’t just picking something, they’re seeing what Fang thinks and what they are willing to do or say.” Prehistoric personalities “Our UI can reflect Fang’s thoughts to the player. Tough situations means sometimes making tough choices, and when faced with tough decisions, you’ll be able to peer directly into the mind of protagonist Fang. Making sure we honored those feelings in our story was important to us and we placed a lot of pressure on ourselves to get it as right as we could.” “Facing mortality isn’t an easy thing to ruminate on, and it especially isn’t easy to focus on for years of development. “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.

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.

“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.” “The themes at the core of Goodbye Volcano High are love, friendship and youth facing what feels like an inevitable catastrophe,” says McKernan. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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