Get in the Car, Loser!is an enticing new RPG from Love Conquers All, the team that takes the name from the founder Christine Love, an acclaimed visual novel writer. Love’s latest creative endeavor is aptly defined as a lesbian road trip adventure, where players get to learn more of the protagonist’s struggles and meet a diverse cast of characters that make up the party of four traveling together. The game tacklesLGBTQ+ themesbut, fundamentally, it is a heroic venture to fight evil.
Game Rant spoke to Love about what it meant for her to work onGet in the Car, Loser!, and what her approach was with a very different genre — RPGs. Love revealed how challenging it was to adapt to brand-new systems, and how rewarding it was to make something that works well when it comes to telling an engaging story and making players get through tough encounters. Love also discussed the game’s DLC now available onPC, and what her future plans are. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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Q: What’s the story behind how Get in the Car, Loser! came to be?
A: So, I’ve been doing visual novels for a number of years now, and this is our first RPG. I’ve been working on visual novels with the same team and we wanted to branch out a little, try new things. I feel like we wanted to go different ways. I put out a tweet saying I was interested in collaborating with new people, and when I was at TCAF, a localcomicfestival in Toronto, the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, someone just approached me and said “I saw your tweet, that you want to collaborate, I’d love to do that sometime,” and showed their work. I was amazed enough by the scenes that I said “Absolutely, let’s do this.” About a year later we finally got started onGet in the Car, Loser!.
Q: How was it like for you to develop the game? What challenges did you have to face?
A: The biggest challenge was that none of us had RPG experience before this. The whole thing was really a big learning process. We’re learning a lot about how you designRPG systems, how do you balance a system, even stuff like the animation system involved. A lot of it was figuring out what we needed for this game. We took a lot of iterations. A lot of the ideas that were in the game didn’t feel the way we wanted the game to feel. It took a lot more refinement, and we took those ideas and built on them. I was actually surprised in terms of game balance how much of a finicky balancing act there was, like “Oh, wow, we’re just making a bunch of numbers go up and down.”
When we needed to add new mechanics and difficulties we had this feature called “double-clock” that came in about two years in that addsbonus challengeand bonus difficulty, and it’s all handcrafted around each enemy type. There were a lot of difficulties there. Even then, we were doing a lot of balance work up until the very final rounds of playtesting, and we got a few emails saying “Well, the game is still too easy,” and everyone who wanted a challenge was like “This is not enough.” Finally, around our last round of playtesting, one week before the game launched, we got the game to a point where it was hard enough. It was just a ton of stuff. Learning how all these RPG systems tie together, how you get challenged out of those, and how you ensure you don’t turn the player into an impossible state. Some of this stuff I had experience with in visual novels, but for the most part, it was completely new.
Q: Defining it as a lesbian road trip RPG makes it a very specific and unique experience. What was the message you wanted to convey with this game?
A: I don’t know if I have any particular message that I want to convey. This is the story of these characters. Ultimately, the main thing that I had in mind was simply that I wanted to tell the story of Sam, our protagonist, who is a youngqueer womanwho is way in over her head getting on this road trip to fight evil. It has a very heroic tone, it’s very goofy, and I wanted to convey a lot of rowdy energy. The big part of the road trip is the coming of age, self-discovery, learning what you’re about. Another part of road trips is that they’re very long and because they are spread out so much there is a lot of time to just talk, hang out, running through every possible conversation. We got this balance of really rowdy, heroic fight against evil, and also Sam just shooting a shit in the backseat for four hours at a time.
Q: LGBTQ+ representation is hard to come by in big-budget video games, and it is often left to indie developers. Was it important to you to make it the foundation of Get in the Car, Loser!?
A: Personally, I make games about queer characters because I’m queer. I want to see lesbians in games. When it comes to triple-A games trying to tellqueer stories, I think they are inherently limited by what kind of stories these big teams want to tell and appeal to - huge audiences, what sort of nuance you want to get into. As an indie developer, I can really dive into Sam’s experience as a lesbian transwoman. If I don’t have to hit a bunch of marketing bullet points, I don’t really care if this has a universal appeal. I think, fundamentally, a lot of people approach representation as a sort of checklist.
You have to check all these boxes to make sure that these certain demographics appear in the game, which ultimately makes sense for certain types of media. It makes sense for certain types of games. To me, what I’m personally more interested in are games that can actually tell you something about what it means to be a queer woman. Showing you thequeer experience. This is about this lesbian protagonist rather than really get into it in a much deeper way as opposed to checking off all these checkboxes. When we talk about representation issues, we often talk about “Can I see myself in this piece of media?”.
If thatrepresentationis really shallow, it’s just like this character is present, so you should be happy - that’s what people who approach representation that way see it as. I think there’s a lot more to it than that. I think that the issue of representation’s really touching on is that people want to see themselves in characters and that things that are relevant to them are being expressed. I think that’s what really matters. There’s under-representation, there’s also shallow representation, which doesn’t feel more satisfying to me. It doesn’t make me feel better to know that one character in this one scene is a translesbian. We’re not getting into interiority, we’re not getting into anything about her other than she is making the rest of the audience for like because “Oh, wow, we’ve got that checkbox.”
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Q: What would you say are the best things to come out of good LGBTQ+ representation?
A: I think, fundamentally, what’s good about seeing yourself in media is that you’re not alone, your struggles aren’t only yours, you’re not the only one going through whatever you’re going through. It gives you a basis for applying this to your own life. Even if there are things about it that don’t reflect you or that you see completely contrary to what you’re about, this is still all very useful and good to see. It helps you build your self because you see yourself in fiction.Get in the Caris a game about a protagonist going through her own identity crisisand building her own identity because she’s young, and that’s what happens when you go on long road trips.
I don’t think every media has to be about how this relates to your personal life, but all stories are about a personal relationship with the audience. That relationship doesn’t have to be one-to-one. You can still have disagreements, and it’s still an interesting story. I want to emphasize that this is secondary. I’m mainly interested in telling a compelling story that people think it’s fun and engaging, and it has that good heroicnarrative. I don’t think you need to be exactly represented by all these bullet points or feel like Sam is a fun person to spend a lot of time with. It’s gotta be a good story first in addition to what else you get from this narrative.
A good part of telling a great story is being honest, intellectually honest, emotionally honest. If you have a story set in a world where everyone is a straight white man, that’s simply not being true to reality, and you’re going to be missing out on a lot of truth. But also, if you’re approachingdiversityas a checklist and you have a single queer person in an otherwise straight group, again, you’re missing out on a huge part of the reality of being queer. That does make the story worse and it means that you are not necessarily being honest. Not that every story needs to be relevant to every single person and cover every possible angle, but it does make me a little wary.
Q: Considering what sort of enemies the characters have to face, was it hard for you to deal with heavy stuff and LGBTQ+ hate, story-wise?
A: We definitely do approach heavy stuff in a few places. It was a difficult balancing act because I fundamentally wanted this game to be fun and satisfying, and the enemies need to feel satisfying to defeat. It’s a game about fighting evil, and we needed to ask what does it mean to fight evil. That’s one of the big themes. If there was no characterization on the villains, if you were simply fighting the Black Hoods or whatever, robots, any number of mindlessvillains, I just don’t think it would be quite as satisfying. It’s not as satisfying to overcome those struggles. The balancing act was “How do we convey our villains as a threat? How do we convey the Machine Devil as legitimately scary, while also not making this overwhelming?”, and hopefully we threaded that needle.
Q: Speaking of the characters, how would you describe them? What sort of representation do they offer?
A: The game revolves around this party of four. There’s Sam, a young woman who’s gone deep into this adventure. There’s her friend, Grace, who stole a sword from her school and she’s leading this adventure, and she will be the new Hero of Legend. She has a genderqueer boyfriend, Valentin, who is the only person in the group who knows how to drive. Along the way, you rescue Angela, an angel who is supposed to do nothing in the difficult times that the game is set in, but she is now unsure of herself and she has to figure out what her place in the world is or could be, what should she do. It’s a road trip, so everyone gets to know each other better.Everyone is queer in some way. We didn’t have a checklist, so it’s not like we’re trying to hit specific notes. This is a group of people that felt real and felt fun to hang out with to me.
Q: “Disaster Lesbian Representation” is another great way to describe your work. Was any part of the story or how each relationship pans out inspired by your experiences or those of people you know?
A: Definitely. I poured a lot of myself into Sam. There are some friends in the form of Grace and Valentin. In general, my approach to writing fiction is simply to take parts of myself and use them for different characters, and then I ask myself “How would I approach this if I had their life experiences?”, and I work from there. When Sam has a lot of nervous anxiety or just struggling that’s definitely very personal, that’s definitely me pouring out stuff that I’ve been through into her. Obviously, it’sfantasy fiction, so I want to say there are no one-to-one similarities, but hopefully, the emotions are real.
Q: The game is inspired by JRPGs. Which ones were your go-to titles while working on Get in the Car, Loser!?
A: The biggest one wasFinal Fantasy 13. It was a constant touchpoint for a lot of stuff. A number of the mechanics are directly inspired by stuff in there. Combat is built around the mechanic of staggering and characters playing roles. We took those ideas and expanded on them, taking them in a different direction than they’ve gone to, thinking about what sorts of feeling are we going for with our battle systems. There’s a lot ofFinal Fantasy 13.
There’s this thing where a character is tied to a single button, and it just comes fromValkyrie Profile. There’s a number of other RPGs that were really influential. I tried to be fairly broad in what we were looking at, and nothing is directly taken from there without being recontextualized.Persona 5was a big influence, not for anything mechanical, but for its visual style. There’s just a lot that is presented in the UI and how the animations work for me. I just want more games that look like that, it has so much style.
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Q: How does progression work in the game?
A: Ourprogression systemdoes not include experience points, you don’t level up. The way everything works is that you get your battle abilities from items, and as you fight enemies you get money to buy more and better items. The reason why it works this way is that there is no picking fights, but rather what abilities you get from certain items. An item in a different character’s hands, like what classes they have, does different things. In most of the party’s hands, something will do damage, but you give it to Sam and it becomes a healing item.
A lot of the time, if you give Valentin an item it turns into a taunt, but if you give it to Sam it’ll do Ravage, if you give it to Grace it will do a lot of damage. We have that system going on, and the reason why it works that way is that I want to encourage players to constantly try new things. You can swap items really easily, you canchange your loadoutsreally easily. Nothing is irreplaceable and you constantly try to get more powerful stuff to replace the weaker item with those. Everything comes down to that.
Q: It’s almost like this system reflects Sam’s journey, discovering what you’re about, and creating your playstyle basically does that. Was this intentional?
A: Yeah, I guess that it’s true. Experimentation is good in real life and it’s good in video games, in battle systems too. It’s good to try new things. Definitely not an intentional statement, but I guess it’s just the truth.
Q: A handful of people described the battle system as a distraction from the dialogues and main story. Despite it defeating the purpose of the JRPG elements, did you think of adding a story mode with little to no combat?
A: I don’t think so. Fundamentally, the main thing while making an RPG is that, unlikevisual novels, this is also a story about fights and battles. It is a game in which fights are meaningful. The journey they are going on is one they are taking this fight to evil on this adventure. In addition to that, our progression system gives different people different abilities, and the characters grow stronger. If you attempt to divorce that from the story it just wouldn’t work. The writing is not paced such that it would be satisfying to have this without the fights. I think a lot of the dialogues would simply just feel wrong if you were doing this without the entire structure of the game.
I wrote this to match the structure. It would be paced weird. In general, my approach to game development is that I don’t think the games should have unnecessary parts. If something is in your game there should be a reason why and a reason to what the players' experience is going to be. That’s a story, and the story is everything that the player does while playing the game. I don’t think you’re able to just pick and choose what elements are part of that, or the whole thing would fall apart. If you took out the battles and the road stops it would just have a different feeling. All the backseat conversations were just not written with that in mind.
Q: Now that Get in the Car, Loser! has been released, what are your plans for the future?
A: Right now, it really depends on how the current DLC does, but I’ve got a couple more stories I’d really like to tell about Sam and the rest of the party. Hopefully, the DLC does well and we can afford to put out a few extra chapters about those. That’s what I’d like to work on. We are definitely enjoying a bit of time off now that most of the things have been resolved. Past that, I definitely, definitely want to keep doingRPGs. It was a really fun experience writing this one. I learned a lot, and there are a lot of new lessons that I’d like to apply to new things moving forward.
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