What is your game called and what is it about?
Our game is called I AM YOUR HOST. It’s an audio deduction game where you use a custom operating system to restore a series of lost podcast episodes.
How big is the development team?
There are three of us at Calligram Studio. Eleanor Summers is the artist, Alexander Smith is the sound designer and composer, and I, Jigmé Özer, do the rest.
How long have you been working on it?
About two years. We started about after Phoenix Springs was released at the end of 2024; it was our first game and had been in development for seven years. The idea with this one was to have a short, manageable range. Fingers crossed that it will be ready in a few months.
What is the origin story of I AM YOUR HOST? Share what inspired you.
I’ve done a lot of video and audio editing in the past, and I’ve always been fascinated by the elements that don’t make it into the final cut. The dailies, or BTS images, are the bad shots. All that stuff left on the cutting room floor. It’s like a liminal space between the worlds of reality and fiction. The idea with I AM YOUR HOST is to give players a simple linear narrative through the structure of podcast episodes, but also allow them to feel a parallel story emerge via dropped interviews, field recordings, and other audio clips.
Editing is essentially manipulation. This is a major theme of the story, revolving around paranoia and technological coercion.
Talk about the importance of audio, and particularly narration, when it comes to crafting an immersive, methodical mystery.
If you close your eyes and listen to what is around you right now, you can try to imagine that it is an audio recording for ten seconds. Perhaps there is chatter in the office or ambient traffic noise in the distance. Audio contains a huge amount of information in such a short space of time. Who is speaking and what mood are they in? Where are they in the world? Are they lying? These are all clues that we pick up on in a split second, and it’s a really fun texture to play with when building a deduction game.
What draws you to the retro-futuristic aesthetic and how does this visual style support the mechanics of I AM YOUR HOST?
Even though we call it an audio game, the truth is that I AM YOU HOST is secretly a text game. And when it comes to displaying text on a screen, nothing is as evocative or textured as older computer operating systems. I researched a lot of retro user interfaces for the project, especially no-frills scientific research software. They have such a goofy quality. But I kept coming back to the early Winamp and Avid, which are video editing software.
There is a modern version, but my film school had an old analog copy with a big, specially designed keyboard and jog wheel – like a big dial that you could turn to move through the video frame by frame. It was so tactile and tangible. I guess that’s why it’s more attractive than a modern phone UI where you gently tap the glass with your fingertip.
Why are video games your preferred form of expression?
I think maybe there’s a simple model for storytelling and technology that looks like this: First we tell stories orally, then we write them in books. Then we added audio and broadcast radio broadcasts. Then video, and that led to film and television. Then interactivity, and that’s where we are with video games. And maybe the temptation is to think that interactivity means choice, but I’m much more interested in playing with the linearity of time.
For example, you die once in an area and respawn with a new skill or knowledge on an enemy. It’s a journey through time. I get excited when I think about all the storytelling possibilities this medium offers.
Calligram studio
What’s the biggest obstacle you’ve faced as a small developer?
Honestly, I can’t think of anything. We made a conscious effort to carve out our own niche for the studio. Maybe one foot in the very obscure jam/itch.io thing and one foot on the outskirts of the industry. We are happy with our journey so far.
If the game fails, I’m sure I’ll find plenty of culprits.
What can big companies and publishers do to better support developers like you?
I’m trying to think of an interesting answer that isn’t just: money. But it’s difficult to answer because we spoke to some big publishers for this project and they were all very supportive. It just wasn’t the right time or the right time.
However, if among the big companies you include distributors like Steam, then, yes, I would happily make good use of the 30 percent cut we pay them. It is absurd that the sliding scale currently benefits AAAs, who pay lower fees the more units they ship. This seems completely backwards.
Let’s take him home. Sell I AM YOUR HOST in one sentence:
Think His storybut weirder.
Calligram studio
I AM YOUR HOST is in development and will be published by Calligram Studio. It will be available on PC, Mac and Linux and can be added to your wishlist on Steam. Its release date is “fingers crossed it will be ready in a few months”, or to be determined.
