Made In Australia: We Talk Lone Pine With Bang Bang Bang Interactive

Australia has a varied indie game development scene, yet point-and-click games are a rare breed. Powerhoof’s The Drifter has shown that devs Down Under do have the chops to develop excellent adventure games, and Brisbane’s Bang Bang Bang Interactive is hoping to do the same with its debut game Lone Pine. I recently sat down with the Bang Bang Bang Interactive team to find out more about the upcoming game.

WellPlayed: What is Lone Pine?

Lachie Macintosh: Lone Pine is a 2D narrative adventure game about a girl named Izzie, who heads into the fictional Lone Pine National Park trying to photograph ‘cryptids’. As she explores the park, she discovers more about its strange mysteries and dangerous inhabitants.

We try to mix a few different genres and gameplay elements together. It’s a 2D adventure, it has point-and-click elements, puzzle solving, and expressive player choices. It also has a photography minigame!

WP: How did the idea come about and how long has it been in development for?

Sam Martin: Lone Pine started as a game jam project in November 2023. The theme was ‘scale’ and a lot of the core ideas came together during that time. Unfortunately, Lachie became quite unwell with COVID so we weren’t able to finish in time, but we kept the ideas and decided to see the project through anyway.

Initially, Lone Pine was supposed to be a short narrative experience where Izzie scales down the mountain after a spooky incident and is guided by a friendly mountain spirit. We all love the outdoors and camping, so doing a story set in a national park was something we were really interested in.

Once Lara came on board as our artist in mid-2024, we weren’t so limited by what we could do visually, and we started exploring the idea of Izzie travelling to this isolated location to photograph cryptids. Once we opened that can of worms, it felt like everything clicked into place.

WP: Why did you want to make a point-and-click adventure game?

SM: Honestly, we didn’t set out to make one. We were inspired by narrative games like Firewatch and Oxenfree and wanted to make something inspired by those games. As Lone Pine developed though, we found ourselves wanting more interactivity and puzzles, and that’s when we started looking at classic point-and-click adventures for inspiration. One of the things we love about the classic LucasArts point-and-click games is the sassy characters and humour. I think that really helped us develop Izzie as a character. We love giving her funny dialogue.

WP: What are some of the games that have influenced Lone Pine’s design?

SM: Firewatch was a big one. The park setting, the atmosphere, that constant feeling that something is watching you… I’ll admit I spent probably half of Firewatch completely on edge because I genuinely felt like someone was going to jump scare me. That tension stuck with me.

Oxenfree was another big influence. The spooky atmosphere, paranormal happenings, and that classic radio mechanic were all things that inspired us. It’s light on interaction outside of dialogue choices, but it made those choices feel like they really mattered.

Return to Monkey Island was a huge influence on how we designed our node system. A lot of point-and-clicks are keyboard and mouse first, and since we prefer playing on the couch with a controller, Return to Monkey Island felt like it really cracked how to bring the genre to console.

WP: The adventure genre has been around for decades. What’s something you wanted to do different to most adventure games with Lone Pine?

LM:  Sam and I both played adventure games when we were younger, but they’ve evolved a lot since then. We did a lot of research into how they’ve modernised and what people liked and didn’t like about the old ones. I don’t think we’re reinventing the wheel or doing anything crazy, but it’s one of those things where you make a game that you want to play, so I think we tend to hone in on the stuff that’s appealing to us. For example, the photography mini-game, the dialogue trees, and the way Izzie and the world is reactive to what you do and when.

WP: Talk to me about Izzie and her character. From what I can tell, there’s more to her visit to Lone Pine than just wanting to capture cryptids in action. What inspired the decision to give her story more emotional depth than we usually get in adventure games?

LM: You can tell a lot of great stories in adventure games, but there are a lot of limitations for a small studio working on a debut title with zero budget. I think emotional depth, however you can incorporate it, is an important part of storytelling, but it’s also a way for us to compensate for what we can’t do. We can’t expand much further out in terms of big set pieces, or cutscenes, or number of areas, so we have to drill deeper. A lot of Izzie’s choices have to be driven by her alone, and what’s going on in her own world. A big part of why we started Bang Bang Bang in the first place was because we love story-driven games.

Izzie’s age, motivation, and personality are all things Sam and I brainstormed together. We went through a couple of different ideas for who Izzie is and why she’s come to Lone Pine, beyond just wanting to get photos of cryptids – there had to be a pretty compelling reason for her to come to such a weird and isolated place. From there, it becomes about figuring out who Izzie is not, as much as who she is.

It’s like that funny quote about how to carve a statue from a block of marble – you just chip away anything that isn’t the Statue of David, and there you have it. Knowing broadly who she is and what kind of place Lone Pine is, we just removed anything that didn’t feel right for Izzie. I looked at what we could do with the tools we had available, and poured in as much as we could possibly fit.

WP: Are the characters in the game based on any real people?

LM: There aren’t any characters in Lone Pine based on real people. The most you could say is that Izzie’s scrappy love of the outdoors borrows from our artist Lara. Maybe Ranger McFadden thinking he’s smarter than he really is is based on me.

WP: Part of the gameplay loop sees Izzie take photos of the cryptids, with the game teaching you about photography in the process. What was the reasoning for this mechanic?

SM: Originally we were just going to have a standard point-and-snap mechanic. But Lara and I are both photography nerds, and after I gave a short talk on photography I started thinking about how adjusting camera settings is its own kind of puzzle. Getting the right exposure involves balancing three different variables against each other, and that felt like it had real potential as a game mechanic. That’s when the scope creep kicked in and the camera minigame was born.

We introduce the settings gradually so players can get a feel for what each one actually does. The hope is that by the time someone finishes Lone Pine, they come away with a slightly better understanding of how a camera works.

WP: The demo mentions that the mountain is abandoned and alludes to the involvement of a cult. I assume these are storybeats that will be fleshed out in the full game?

LM: Definitely! Lone Pine being abandoned, and why, is a central part of the story. The many comedic and unusual cults are only one part of the whole picture, stemming from what makes Lone Pine such a unique place. But you haven’t seen the last of them.

One of our taglines for the game is “Uncover the mystery of Lone Pine,” but really there are a few different mysteries to uncover… Or maybe it’s like Ranger Coleman says to you on the radio, it could just be all the moonshine they brew up there taking its toll on people.

WP: How long are you aiming for Lone Pine to be?

LM: We’re hoping the full game will be between 3–4 hours, with some replayability for both endings, and a few different hidden interactions and secrets.

WP: Lone Pine has a gorgeous storybook art style. What made you go with the style you did?

Lara Roche: It’s partly the style we think suits the sweeping landscapes of Lone Pine, and it’s partly my personal style and how I like to draw. I love old landscape paintings, and the life and texture traditional art brings. I think it suits a narrative-driven game like Lone Pine.

WP: Lone Pine was developed with a controller-first mindset. Why was this the case?

Dan Yalg: I don’t think there is a specific decision that was made at the beginning of development or anything. I think we all just prefer playing games on a couch and it’s obviously a lot easier to do that with a controller! From personal experience though, after attending events like PAX and Queensland Games Festival, people seem to be a lot more willing to pick up a controller and it seems like it’s more intuitive for people who aren’t super familiar with the traditional WASD keyboard layout for most games. 

WP: You went with Aussie voice acting (currently done by the dev team). Why did you want Australian voice acting, and are there any plans to get professional voice actors to replace your handiwork?

SM: Voice acting was important to us from the start. Since I have a small studio setup, we decided to record some scratch VO in the hopes that we’d secure funding and replace it later. We’re a small team and this is our first game, so that funding hasn’t materialised yet, which means you’re still hearing us.

Even if we did get funding, we’d still go with Aussie voice actors. Lone Pine is a fictional location inspired by national parks all over the world, so that gave us the excuse to do what we wanted. It’s also just really nice to hear more Australian voices out in the wild. Recording the voice acting has been one of the highlights of production. I recommend starting a game studio just for that.

WP: So far Lone Pine is coming to PC, are there any plans to bring it to other platforms? Is there a console that you’d target first?

DY: As Lone Pine is our first game, we’re just focusing on PC for now. We’ve never released a game of this size before, so don’t want to jump the gun too much with promising other platforms. But we would love to see Lone Pine on consoles in the future! If the launch goes well and we get some traction, I think we could start considering it, but nothing is set in stone right now. We’ve also thrown around the idea of releasing it on mobiles, more specifically tablets.

LM: Also from what we’ve seen and been told, this kind of game seems to do pretty well on Switch, so we’d love to be able to do that sometime in the future.

Bang Bang Bang Interactive is Lachie Macintosh (Narrative and Level Design), Sam Martin (Animation, Sound Design and Music Composer), Dan Yalg (Development), and Lara Roche (Visual and UI Design).

Lone Pine is scheduled to release late this year. You can Wishlist and download the demo here.