Welcome! If you’re reading this, you may have arrived here from the NORCO end credits. If not, please note that this document may contain spoilers. This list is an ongoing effort to capture any relevant inspiration, resources, and production details related to the game. Many artifacts are spread across old Discord chats, Git commits, journals, etc. We’ll continue to share any interesting ephemera as we uncover it. NORCO’s not affiliated with, or endorsed by, any of the works or creators listed below.

• Miscellaneous
• FAQ
• A Note on Versions
• Gameplay & Design Influences
• Narrative Influences
• Archival Ephemera

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• The tab that’s open in the bedroom is a sub called “scp_anglers” - ie, St. Charles Parish fishing.
• Here’s a post/discussion that covers the regional use of the terms bruh/breh/brah.
• Superduck’s incarnation as a duck monstrosity was inspired by the prodigious ducks and geese that congregate in Metairie and New Orleans. Less than a month after NORCO was released, the Times-Picayune ran an article about the abnormally large numbers of ducks wandering Metairie neighborhoods “fouling driveways and yards.”
• While “Promenade Mall” is a composite of several locations around Greater New Orleans, the squalor of the Esplanade Mall in Kenner has been interesting to observe. Kenner moved their city hall into the abandoned Macy’s before moving out a little over a year later. A developer purchased the massive property with a plan to convert it into a mixed-use residential development but it continues to idle in a partially abandoned state.

Here are responses to a few questions we’ve been asked in interviews, forums, or on social media.

• Q: What was the game’s production timeline?

  A: It started in 2015 as a JavaScript project, using the Phaser.js framework. The project signed with Raw Fury in 2020, at which point we ported the game to Unity. It was published in March of 2022.

• Q: Can I skip the combat minigames?

  A: You can as of version 1.3.2. Check the “gameplay” settings menu and enable the “Automate Combat” toggle. This will still animate the combat sequence but won’t require your input.

• Q: Will there be a sequel?

  A: We’re not planning a sequel, though we were unable to develop certain scenes, endings, and story arcs due to resource constraints. We may consider a director’s cut in the future to complete our original concept.

• Q: What authors influenced the game’s prose?

  A: The game’s prose was influenced by Southern environmental authors including Albert Cowdrey, Janisse Ray, and John Barry; several sci-fi/cyberpunk authors like William Gibson, Philip K. Dick, and Octavia Butler; and Southern Gothic authors like Cormac McCarthy, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor.

• Q: Why don’t Kay and Blake have faces?

  A: Yuts used crude emojis to represent some of the characters very early in production. As the game developed, these placeholders became a feature of the game’s iconography and lore.

• Q: I enjoyed NORCO and would like to play more games like it.

  A: Here are some recommendations for first-person, text-based adventure games similar in style to NORCO:

  • Deja Vu - “a point-and-click adventure game set in the world of 1940s hardboiled detective novels and films.”
  • Snatcher - a goofy, beautiful Blade Runner ripoff by Hideo Kojima.
  • Policenauts - spiritual sequel to Snatcher, near-future near-space point and click Lethal Weapon.
  • Rise of the Dragon - hardboiled cyberpunk p&c.
  • The Horror Of Salazar House - “a gothic, Italian horror inspired haunted house game with Virtual Boy style graphics and rotoscoped cut-scenes.”
  • VA-11 HA-11 A - a laid back dialogue-focused point and click. You’re a bartender making drinks for patrons and learning about the post-dystopian world they inhabit.
  • Mothmen 1966 - “a ‘Pixel Pulp’ - a visual novel fusing exceptional writing and stunning illustration, inspired by mid-20th century pulp fiction and 80s home computer graphics - set amongst the strange occurrences of the Leonid meteor shower of 1966.”
  • Read Only Memories - “a cyberpunk thriller that explores the social challenges of tomorrow through classic adventure gaming.”
  • Citizen Sleeper - “live the life of an escaped worker, washed-up on a lawless station at the edge of an interstellar society.”
  • Critters for Sale - strange and difficult to describe. Deep-fried, black-and-white cosmic delirium.
  • Roadwarden - “Roadwarden is an illustrated text-based RPG that uses isometric pixel art and combines mechanics borrowed from RPGs, Visual Novels, adventure games and interactive fiction.”

NORCO has undergone many changes since its inception. Back in 2016, when the game was a solo project, Yuts released a rough proof of concept that introduced several of the game's characters. We later published a demo of Act One in 2021, changed some things around, and published it again in 2022. The art and UI changed significantly between the two versions. Our full-game release in March of 2022 still needed work, and we spent the following year patching in fixes and features, cleaning up dialogue, adjusting artwork, and so on.

As first-time game devs, we learned some hard lessons about nearly every aspect of production throughout this process, from scope management to narrative and system design. Confronting our mistakes was humbling but also very educational. Notably, there were significant performance issues for consoles. Several pieces of dialogue felt too florid, overwritten, or extraneous, and were edited or removed to create a more streamlined experience for the player. We added a combat opt-out to bypass a feature that needed more time in the oven.

While there’s much more we hoped we could accomplish (clean up many of the portraits; add more animations across the game; add an mp3 player to the cellphone; so much), we’ve had to move on to other commitments. It’s likely for the best that we transition to a less intensive support schedule, as the game would probably become the ship of Theseus otherwise.

If there’s a particular piece of artwork or dialogue that you miss from older iterations, please know that we love this project dearly and have made these decisions in the interest of a more unified whole. We believe that the game is in a stronger place now as a result, and we have players to thank for reporting the bugs, typos, and feedback that helped guide us along the way.

While many games influenced the art, design, narrative, etc of NORCO, we owe our greatest debt to Hideo Kojima’s Snatcher. NORCO contains some small homages.

The UI design was inspired by Japanese PC-98 text adventure games like “Kiss of Murder” and DOS adventures like “Circuit’s Edge.”

The UI was meant to behave almost like a mechanical miniature or diorama, with shutters and other features that whir and spin out from the edges. The decision to use a vertical dialogue sidebar was inspired by Disco Elysium and Shadowrun Hong Kong.

Below is a very early iteration of the UI, when we made more of an effort to replicate the MSX/PC-98 aesthetic. Over time, we moved away from this look in favor of a more naturalistic color palette inspired by the region where the game takes place.

The following works served as reference and influence while writing the fictional story of “Dimes.”

• UNEASY ALCHEMY (Barbara Allen, 2003) - studies the stretch of heavily industrialized land between New Orleans and Baton Rouge often called “Cancer Alley.” Details the events that led to the relocation of the Diamond neighborhood in Norco. If you want to understand the dynamics and actors at play in South Louisiana’s fenceline struggles, it’s a good place to start.
• DIAMOND (Lerner, 2006) - A range of interviews from Diamond residents that includes first-hand accounts of the Shell Refinery explosion of 1988.
• MOSSVILLE: WHEN GREAT TREES FALL (Documentary film, 2019) - The Mossville buyout in Southwest Louisiana follows a similar pattern as Diamond. The main subject of the film, Stacey Ryan, remained in Mossville despite Sasol’s buyout pressure while a chemical complex began to grow up around him.
• PETROCHEMICAL AMERICA (Misrach & Orff, 2012) - Heavily and creatively illustrated, captures a lot of the social/physical/visual/political themes that define Louisiana’s River Parish region.

Below are some fictional works that helped to inspire or share common themes with the “Superduck” network – a type of cyborg internet featured in the game.

• DIAL F FOR FRANKENSTEIN (Arthur C Clarke, 1964) - a dialogue between a handful of characters as they observe the emergence of a networked artificial intelligence in real-time. It communicates and spreads through telephone wires, household electrical circuits, banking systems, and other infrastructure.
• THE GIG ECONOMY (Zero HP Lovecraft, 2019) - Genre-blurring crypto sci-fi that gives some of the themes present in the game much deeper treatment – an inscrutable gig work underworld that spirals ever deeper into the bizarre.
• PERSONA 5 (P-Studio/Atlas, 2015) - The Superduck app evolved out of a conversation regarding Persona 5’s “metaverse navigator” and the concept of malevolent apps in general.
• End Millennium (2015) - a Geography of Robots Twine experiment that was conceived as a series of vignettes about strange encounters on Craigslist. It was never finished, but some of the ideas got transferred over to NORCO. A demo of the first vignette is still up on Itch.io.

Here are a few sources of inspiration on the subject of faith and religion. Some characters in the game turn to their faith to find courage and acceptance. Others get lost in increasingly abstract mysticism and conspiracy.

• TEMPLARS IN ACADIANA (Wilbur Stiles, 2015) - Puts forward the heresy that Christ’s bloodline may have made its way to Louisiana via the Acadians. This theory helped to inspire the game’s “bloodline” narrative – the so-called “Da Vinci Code bullshit.”
• THE GNOSTIC RELIGION (Hans Jonas, 1958) - A broad discussion of the topic that addresses Gnostic concepts of spiritual alienation. Inspired some of the language used in Kenner John’s Apocryphon and other themes related to the Garretts.
• Much of the religious imagery in the game was directly inspired by characteristics of Greater New Orleans and South Louisiana in general – statues of the Madonna, beautiful historic Catholic churches, icons of the saints, etc. Catholicism is an integral part of the region’s landscape.

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