How the creators of Kentucky Route Zero ended their seven-year saga
For the past nine years, Cardboard Computer has been careful about not tipping its hand. That’s no longer the case.
“Elated,” says Tamas Kemenczy. “I am ecstatic! I am happy!”
Up until the very end, the creators of Kentucky Route Zero might still surprise you. With the conclusion of their nine-year production — and seven since the first episode’s release — the three-person game studio is finally ready to discuss what it took to see it through.
Responsible for their game’s eye-catching aesthetic and its visual programming, Kemenczy makes up one-third of the team behind the critically-acclaimed point-and-click adventure game. Writer & co-developer, Jake Elliott, and musician & sound designer, Ben Babbitt, make up its remaining two-thirds. Indicative of their collaborative spirit, each is credited with the game’s design.
Set mostly within and inspired by the real-world Mammoth Cave, the enigmatic title has rolled-out over five distinct but serialized acts. Act I debuted in 2013. And as of today, Act V is finally here.
A lot can happen in seven years.
For Cardboard Computer, among the biggest changes were two kids and more than one relocation. In the face of such tectonic shifts, both the survival and evolution of Kentucky Route Zero hinged on its elasticity. “Whatever kind of life changes have happened, it just kind of has followed us, wherever, whatever,” says Elliott. The trio, quickly and jokingly, notices a parallel with the 2014 horror film, It Follows. “No matter where they go, this thing follows them,” recalls Kemenczy. “It just always walks to them.”
As the wait between acts has unspooled from months to years, many fans wondered what to make of it all. Many others spared themselves the agony, opting to wait for the complete set.
Perhaps that’s because of how precious everyone’s time on Route Zero truly is, leisurely as each trip has gone. Like tours of Emerald City, there’s so much to see, but so little time to take it all in. Yet within the hollowed-out earth beneath Cardboard Computer’s Kentucky, the flow of time is unhurried. Merchants drift along ancient waterways. Musicians live favor-to-favor. Rum-soaked bureaucrats peer into the abyss of its limestone halls. Most are just passing through, but many call it home.
Now at the end of their magical highway, Cardboard Computer is reflective with a similar calm. Call their “Development Status Hotline” at 1-858-WHEN-KRZ, and you can hear it for yourself.
Even as the bearer of bad news, Kemenczy sounds unphased. “We just found a bug, even just today,” he says, speaking a couple weeks before the release. “So, yeah — it is kind of never ending.”
But it must end.
“We’re really happy with Act V and everything else about how the final version of the game has come together, though,” says Elliott. “This is definitely the ending we wanted to make.”
So what did it take to finish Kentucky Route Zero?
Where it all started, and then nearly stopped
Kentucky Route Zero found an audience before it was available, thanks in part to a Kickstarter campaign that ran in 2011. The team originally asked for $6,500. It received roughly an additional $2,000.
The Kickstarter funds would only go so far as to support necessary and costly software licenses, allow the team to expand on the game’s existing art assets, and buy some time. They were enough to get Act I done by 2013, and the game made an immediate and lasting impression.
[The rest of this story contains spoilers for Acts I-IV.]
As the sun set on Equus Oils, a mid-century gas station nestled in the hills of Kentucky, the game’s protagonist, Conway, was just stopping for directions. One final delivery. Where it sent him, and players, was on a Rubik’s Cube of a road trip. The only way there was through Route Zero.
The act’s final and haunting shot, of Conway’s delivery truck being quietly swallowed by the fleeting maw of Mammoth Cave, left players hooked and ready for more. Whether or not Cardboard Computer was ready, too, is another story.
“Act II was really intense,” says Elliott.
“As our lives have changed in different ways, the project has always kind of been there. We’ve had to make it work.”
The four-month turnaround on Act II built on the team’s newfound momentum — an anomaly in hindsight. “We felt that we had made a commitment to a certain timeline, and we really did our best to stick to it for that one.”
However, getting Act II into the hands of players so quickly came at great personal cost to the team’s quality of life. With the company still a two-person team at the time, “it was way too much to take on,” says Kemenczy. “It was an inappropriate workload with just the two of us. It didn’t add up. It was really unhealthy.”
While it can be hard to spot in any creative endeavor, sometimes there is a difference between a problem and a choice. “We backed off after that. ‘We can’t work like that anymore,’” says Elliott of the futility to press on through indefinite crunch.
Sales of Kentucky Route Zero were enough to support the team for a significant period of its protracted development. “That was the case for a few years there, which was awesome,” says Elliott. But nothing lasts forever.
Citing more recent support from publishing partner Annapurna Interactive, a Patreon page, and previous traditional forms of income, “it was different things at different times,” says Elliott. “When Tamas and I were first working on it, we basically had day jobs for the first few years. At some point, we were able to switch to not doing that for awhile.”
The search for additional funds eventually sent the team across the world. Much of Act V was completed in an Airbnb the team shared while briefly living in Milan.
What called them to northern Italy was a suite of teaching gigs on art, sound, and writing for video games, as part of a master’s program at IULM University. While fresh lessons were being pruned from the development of Kentucky Route Zero for those interested in bringing their own games to life, the team’s reunion came at a crucial point in the production of its own. “[That] was, I think, one of the only times we had all been in the same space like that,” says Babbitt.
“Again, as our lives have changed in different ways, the project has always kind of been there,” says Elliott. “We’ve had to make it work.”
Feeling around in the dark
If their timeline was going to suffer instead of their wellbeing, the team figured their ideas should also become liberated along the way.
Elliott recalls a breakthrough prior to Act III that helped the team lean into the pivot. “We were thinking about the idea that these episodes should be of a similar length and scope, [and] it was sort of like, ‘Where did that idea come from? Why would that be the case?’”
Whatever rules Cardboard Computer assumed applied to the team, or to video games for that matter, suddenly didn’t.
“[We didn’t want to] give ourselves a big homework assignment that we wrote nine years ago, and now it’s just we’re doing our homework ever since,” says Elliott. “We wanted to leave some of it open to making decisions when we got there.”
The team members decided to let their game mature alongside them, giving them space to explore whatever ideas felt most urgent. New obsessions, such as the untapped theatre of Mammoth Cave’s Echo River, created inroads for life outside of Kentucky Route Zero.
“It wasn’t like, ‘I’m really into this philosophy of forgetting right now, but I’m still making this game that’s just about driving a truck and making deliveries, so there’s no way I can work that in,’” says Elliott.
Creatively, Cardboard Computer was anything but painted into a corner. Even the slow twist surrounding Conway’s autonomy in Acts III & IV was on-deck long before. “We were planning that pretty early on. Since Act II, at least,” says Kemenczy. “That lines up with what happens [in Act III]: you just can’t control him anymore.”
In order to both earn these moments and make room for new stories along the way, they’d have to gain control of whatever was driving them all forward.
Technical debt
Video games tend to serve as technical benchmarks for the entertainment industry. Yet even the most acclaimed studios often breathe new life into dying technology.
Elliott refers to a developer-friendly term, “technical debt.” Simply put, this is the cost of building software without the foresight, or patience, to account for future needs.
“That’s kind of what this project has become,” he says.
One of the most troublesome issues involved a rather unlikely suspect: text. The toolset pumping blood to the game’s heart, its prose, was repeatedly shattered from consecutive updates to Unity, the engine Kentucky Route Zero is built on.
Eventually, the support beams Cardboard Computer’s artistically-aliased typography relied on were removed entirely. “It wasn’t just, ‘Oh, we’re just changing how it works under the hood,’ [something] that we could adapt to,” says Kemenczy. “They were finally just like, ‘Nope, this is finally gone.’”
New twists on how to engage with dialogue and the added task of localization compounded things further. “Links in the middle of a sentence were working great,” says Elliott. “And then we tried running them with Japanese text and Korean text. They were totally broken again.”
“It’s like Kentucky Route Zero: Remastered at this point.”
Frustrating as these obstacles became, they laid the foundation for making some quality-of-life improvements to the team’s design over time.
Along with Act V and the newly minted “TV Edition” of the game, a new “Ephemera” menu visually catalogs the player’s odyssey through Kentucky, offering useful (albeit cryptic) hints along the way. Meanwhile, a push for accessibility resulted in options for resizable text and a variety of inputs.
With the extra time Cardboard Computer bought itself, the game’s artistic ambitions also outgrew its technical confines. Today, you can see this in the game’s steady evolution of its atmosphere and visual storytelling.
“I was really anticipating being able to work on a bright light scene,” says Kemenczy. After the first two acts spent time in subterranean dwellings, on deserted streets, and in dive-bars, Act III quickly established an unfamiliar tone. Under the guise of a daydream, a rare slice of Conway’s past is drenched in an even rarer sunrise. “Working with that sort of bright scene really took me out; it was like a breath of fresh air.”
These creative impulses planted the seeds for ones further down the road. While dynamic sources of light had been a presence throughout, environmental shadows were originally painted onto their minimalist 3D models by hand. “We always would do fake shadows, and just cut them out into the polygons,” says Kemenczy. “We’d have a lot of control.”
This manual approach guaranteed Kemenczy the crisp linework that makes Kentucky Route Zero instantly recognizable, but it had to mature if bolder sources of light were to ever reach the needs of the story.
”It’s like meat and potatoes for most video games,” says Kemenczy. “Shadows aren’t even next-gen any more, but they felt like next-gen for us! I’m not formally trained as a computer scientist or programmer, so I just had to sort of slog through all of that and figure it out.”
“It’s like Kentucky Route Zero: Remastered at this point,” says Elliott.
“It feels like we actually made 10 games that are just called Kentucky Route Zero,” says Babbitt.
Babbitt is referring to the additional “interludes” that arrived between acts to satiate expectant players. In hindsight, the interludes served a greater purpose as vertical slices of new features and world-building for the game.
“Limits & Demonstrations,” for example, offered a voyeuristic window into the life of a forthcoming character by way of an interactive art exhibit. But the menagerie had a second purpose: testing and resolving specific graphics issues being reported by players.
More recently, the team struggled with its final trailer, hoping to both tease and protect Act V’s intrinsic surprises. Eventually, the members realized that the cover of rain storming their latest interlude afforded them a clever out. “Basically, what you’re seeing [in the trailer] is what’s happening right up [to] and during ‘Un Pueblo De Nada,’” says Kemenczy.
“That kind of stuff became a big part of our process,” says Elliott “[It was] a way of doing better work and doing smarter work. And making it not kill us.”
[The rest of this story contains light spoilers for Act V.]
Kentucky Route’s Zero’s most show-stopping moments often come down to the simple vulnerability of a song. The game’s soundtrack, equal parts grounded folk and spaced-out synth, rests in Babbitt’s and The Bedquilt Ramblers’ hands. But the degree to which music is a bonding agent between them all is evident.
“Sometimes, being in a DIY arts community was kind of like being part of a church or something,” says Elliott. “I would think about my work as a noise musician all the time. Every week, once a week or more, I’d be going to these similar venues and seeing the same people. I get a lot of value out of being a part of those kinds of communities.”
It’s personal stories like these that found their way into Kentucky Route Zero thanks to its unpredictable delivery, and have kept it relatable despite its density. “We wanted to honor that way of living: of being in a found family or in a found community. Our vision for it was that by the time you reach Act V, there’s really no central sort of ego,” says Elliott. “You’re really playing as the community.”
This playful sense of fellowship extended to the creative dynamic within Cardboard Computer, too. “Jake, you’ve always been good about communicating that to Tamas and I, when you’re working on a piece of writing for the game, and you feel sort of stuck,” says Babbitt.
“When I’m having a visual block, I just need some prompts to start working on some graphical detail,” says Kemenczy, equating it to Oblique Strategies, a card system co-developed by Brian Eno to exercise creative constraints. “Then I go look through the conversation files that Jake has written.”
“If it had just been any one of us trying to make this project [alone], we probably wouldn’t have made it to the finish line,” says Babbitt. “Things might have gone very differently.”
The way things have gone, the creators of Kentucky Route Zero were fortunate to have found each other, and to now find themselves in a unique position. Whatever ratio of hard work, creativity, luck, and success it took to keep all the moving parts together, it was enough.
Despite the delays, each act’s release imbued the long-term project with new vigor, glowing reviews, and reminded fans that they were not sitting idle in the dark.
“At that point, you’re all the way in the rabbit hole,” says Babbitt. “You’re in the caves, and there’s no way out but through.”
Five and done
By now it’s clear that Cardboard Computer is ready to move past a time where Kentucky Route Zero was incomplete.
“It’s been really present in our minds this whole time,” says Elliott of the prolonged development. “Sometimes it kind of seems like we were working at a slow pace, or taking our time. But it’s felt pretty urgent.”
No longer introduced as “a game in five acts,” Kentucky Route Zero now boots up with the words “a game by Cardboard Computer.” As both the first and final change to its tagline, the amend is subtle but highly suggestive.
“I’m looking forward to working on another game,” says Kemenczy, though he admits, “we could be looking at things through rose colored glasses.”
“We can start fresh,” says Elliott.
Details are scarce on Cardboard Computer’s next project. For now, the team says it doesn’t intend to follow the episodic structure with this one. “It’ll be nice to be able to approach it where we’re not so invisible and cagey, and can share stuff with our audience,” says Kemenczy. “It was hard working on a mystery.”
But for the moment, all eyes are on KR0’s ending. Now officially the team’s best kept secret, “this ending more or less has been intact the whole time,” says Elliott. How that knowledge informs repeat playthroughs should give players much to discuss for years to come.
As with the in-game community players find themselves rallying into Act V, it makes sense for Cardboard Computer to turn towards the real-life one that took up residence along the way. “We’re curious about what the experience is going to be like for people,” says Elliott.
Even the player’s first choice, of which act to start with, raises new questions. Previously a simple list, both the main menu and the game’s narrative structure are now cyclical in their presentation — somewhere between a compass and a ouija board.
Start from the beginning? Jump to the end? Revisit whichever act you least remember? “It’s something that people ask us about,” says Kemenczy. ‘What’s the intended way to play it?’ Personally, I don’t have an answer.’”
Aptly, “memorializing and being forgotten,” are the core themes returning players have had to sit with since 2016’s Act IV, says Elliott. One such conversation appears early on.
“When you go into the kitchen for something, and as soon as you pass from one room to another, you forget what you wanted,” says Conway, enjoying a beer on his hollow victory lap aboard the Mucky Mammoth. “You have to walk back to remember.”
As the conversation shifts to the story’s other main role, Shannon — on edge over Conway’s newfound debt — the player is presented with two responses:
“I guess you owe them.”
“I think you do have a choice.”
Cardboard Computer has learned to live with its choices. The rest are in the hands of players.
But for those in need of a more empathetic set of instructions, the ancient vessel’s beer cooler offers some timely advice:
“Take what you need and leave the rest.”
Bringing computer education up to code
This story originally appeared in Yale Engineering Magazine.
Inside the gymnasium of Bishop Woods Architecture & Design Magnet School in New Haven, about 150 students are showing off the results of months of computer programming work. It’s the last big event of Code Haven, an ongoing alliance between Yale undergraduate students and the New Haven Public Schools.
In addition to Bishop Woods, the students here are representing East Rock, Celentano, Lincoln Basset, Fair Haven, and Wexler Grant. Among the presenters are sixth graders Lana Almalek and Taniya Armstrong, who have developed a mobile phone app that allows them to draw over photos.
“We did this because we both like drawing and sketching,” said Lana. “It was a lot harder than we thought it would be.” She wants to be a doctor, while Taniya has her sights set on becoming a veterinarian. They both expect, though, to continue working with computers.
Now in its fourth year, Code Haven has helped spread an enthusiasm for computers to more than 200 students at multiple New Haven middle schools. About half of those students had no computer science experience prior to Code Haven. Every week during the school year, Yale students go to schools in the New Haven district to teach computing. Online lessons, group activities, and class-wide demonstrations are all part of the lessons.
Code Haven is driven by the philosophy that all students should have access to computer science lessons. While many middle schools in New Haven lack computer science programs, the abundance of knowledge and resources at Yale can go a long way to make up for that.
The large majority of the middle school students are from groups that are traditionally underrepresented in computer science, such as Latinos and African Americans. Code Haven is designed to correct this.
“Right now we have a system where people are not equally exposed to computer science at a young age, and that creates a lack of diversity in computer science in high school, college, and industry,” said Daniel Urke ’21, who is co-president of Code Haven with Stephanie Bang ’21.
Code Haven was founded in Fall 2016 after a conversation between Nathaniel Granor ’09 and David Weinreb, a teacher in New Haven Public Schools. They met at the Yale School of Management Education Leadership Conference. Granor attended as a representative for TEALS, an educational program of Microsoft that promotes computer science at the high school level. The two began talking about the lack of computer science education at the middle school level and saw an opportunity for a group like Code Haven. Granor talked to Computer Science Professor Dana Angluin about the idea, and she contacted Annie Chen ’19 and Dennis Duan ’19 to lead the charge as its first co-presidents.
A pilot semester was launched in Weinreb’s sixth grade classroom at Fair Haven School, with 18 students and 16 mentors. Since then, Code Haven students have made more than 120 apps in 13 classrooms.
For the first half of the year, the students learn the fundamentals of computer science. The lessons are basic enough that even undergraduate students who don’t major in Computer Science can teach them.
“One of the things we talked about when we were recruiting people to be part of Code Haven is that you don’t need to be an expert in computer science because we teach fundamental topics,” Bang said. “One thing that’s exciting about the program is that it could be anyone teaching, as long as they have the basics.”
Students enrolled in Code Haven go during the school day. Code Haven mentors say that’s critical to eliminating the self-selection bias that’s prominent in computer science — that is, students who choose not to pursue it because they don’t think they’re cut out for it.
“Our mission is very much centered around inclusion and increasing access to computer science,” Urke said. “We don’t think you can do that in an extracurricular setting. It’s key that it’s not seen as something like an advanced math program.”
Code Haven students show off what they’ve learned in the gymnasium of New Haven’s Bishop Woods Architecture & Design Magnet School.
For the second half of the year, the students work on building apps on Android phones (Code Haven recently received a grant from Google IgniteCS to purchase new ones for the students to use).
“We give them one of three variants and when they finish that, they’re able to expand on that with their own ideas,” Bang said. One app features the Mario Brothers chasing mushrooms, and the students can add more levels and more sprites to chase. A second app is illustration-based. The third is a “fortune cookie app” — kind of like 8-ball on the iPhone, where you press a button and get a random fortune.
All of the apps are designed to give enough direction for beginning programmers, but allow enough creative freedom for the students to make it their own.
“It was easy at first, but got harder as we went along,” said Brain Kelson, a sixth grader presenting his app at the Project Fair. He and his teammates chose to make a Mario app.
Beyond developing specific apps, the students learned the broader benefits of programming.
“Being in Code Haven helps me learn about technology and how it can make the future better,” said fifth grader Luis Adoniz Perez.
Computer skills are only part of the lessons that are being learned. Bang and Urke noted that soft skills such as working collaboratively are emphasized. Code Haven also holds a TeachTech conference every year for teachers from kindergarten to eighth grade. There, they offer guidelines on how to implement computer science lessons into the classroom. Other events include Demo Day, in which Yale Computer Science students speak about projects they’re working on and answer questions from the students. For Urke and Bang, though, working directly with the students is the heart of Code Haven.
Students at Bishop Woods take a picture break.
“My favorite part of Code Haven is going into class,” Urke said. “It’s tiring because they’re middle school students, and they’re high-energy, but it’s very rewarding.”
Weinreb said the time his students have with Code Haven has given them a new perspective on what’s possible.
“By introducing them to a group of Yale undergraduate students who become their friends over the course of a year, computer science becomes a lot more real,” he said. “These people materialize as role models and the students can visualize what it would be like for them to become computer scientists in the future.”
Weinreb, whose students are mostly Hispanic, said work with Code Haven counteracts many of the factors that could steer students away from considering a career in computers.
“The research substantiates that we are advertising computer science and robotics more to boys than girls, and also more to white people than to people of color,” he said. “We have to show them that this can be for them, even if they don’t know people who do it, and even if they don’t yet have role models in their lives who work in computer science and understand information science.”
Granor noted that middle school is a great time for the students to catch the computer science bug.
“That’s when you’re starting to branch out into more distinct subjects but schedule-wise, there’s more flexibility than in high school,” he said. “Getting that first exposure in middle school means they may now be more interested and prepared to take on whatever programs that do exist at the high school level.”
Sixth grade teacher Amy Binkowski said Code Haven’s been a big hit with her students.
“They were excited when I told them about it,” she said. “And now they enjoy working with the Yale students. At the start of the day, they’ll ask me ‘Do we have Code Haven today?’”
Ask the doctors: It’s vital to limit screen time for kids
By Eve Glazier, M.D. , , Elizabeth Ko and M.D. Andrews McMeel Syndication
Dear Doctor: My husband and I are pretty strict about screen time with our kids. I read about a new study that indicates that screen time actually changes a child’s brain. Is this true? How much screen time is OK?
Dear Reader: As parents ourselves, we share your struggle when it comes to limiting screen time. But considering how we adults often struggle to put down the phone or step away from the computer, it’s not surprising that our kids face the same challenges.
Screens are so instantly absorbing, it’s all too easy to hand a fussy baby or toddler a phone while juggling several other tasks. And with so much social interaction now shifted to the online world, tweens and teens can feel cut off from their peers without screen access. Add in the increasing amount of schoolwork now done on computers and online, and it can feel like a screen-centric life is all but inevitable.
A recent study supports a growing body of research that suggests it’s time to rethink our acceptance of screens. Published last November in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, it found a link between screen time and a drop in language and literacy skills among young children. Not only that, brain scans found that kids who spent a lot of time in front of a screen experienced certain changes to the physical structures of their brains.
The researchers began by assessing the cognitive abilities of 47 children between the ages of 3 and 5. They also gathered detailed information about screen habits from the children’s parents. MRI scans of the children’s brains revealed that those who exceeded the recommended one hour of screen time per day had lower levels of development and organization in brain tissues known as white matter. White matter is made up of long nerve fibers surrounded by fatty protective tissues, and it plays a key role in language development and cognitive skills.
The children with higher screen time and structural brain changes also had poorer outcomes on tests measuring language and literacy skills. This all sounds dire, so it’s important to note that this was a small study with a narrow scope. The authors noted that the question of screen time for children deserves further study.
As for how much screen time is OK, that’s the big question right now. According to updated guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics, children younger than 18 months should have no screen time at all, other than video chatting with parental supervision. For children between ages 2 and 5, the AAP recommends a maximum of one hour of high-quality programming per day, watched with a parent present to explain what they are seeing. After age 6, the advice is consistent limits that maximize physical and mental health, as well as face time with family and friends.
It’s important that as parents, we lead by example and step away from our own screens.
Send your questions to askthedoctors@mednet.ucla.edu.
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