Review Fix Exclusive: Inside ‘3 Minutes to Midnight’

Review Fix chats with ‘3 Minutes to Midnight’ Developer Jan Serra, who discusses the inspiration and creation process behind the game.

Review Fix: How was this game born?

Jan Serra: It was born from the feeling of wanting to do something different, something funnier, and something that would leave a mark, in some way. After many years working exclusively in engineering, I wanted to do something more creative—something that “came from my head.” So, I wrote this story. And when I was happy with it, I hired a small team to see what it would take to make this story become a reality.

The beginnings were quite harsh. Without going into detail, many things didn’t work out the way I expected, and after a few months, it felt like it was better to throw in the towel. But… I never give up. I like to always keep going forward no matter what. So I decided to reboot the project and start from scratch. It was the right call because here we are, almost three years later, with this game that is soon about to become a reality. 

Review Fix: What was your role in the game?

Serra: I created the story and designed the game. Now I mostly direct the team and try to solve all the day-by-day issues we encounter. 

Review Fix: What was development like?

Serra: It’s been complicated. One wouldn’t think so from what you see when you play it—the huge amount of work that can be behind a point-and-click adventure game. We wanted to make something big and different. An interesting story full of detail, characters that are more than mere NPCs, puzzles that make sense and help you understand better the story and make you part of it, complex dialogue system, and more than ten thousand conditions to make this experience unique and repayable.

It’s easy to imagine that such an ambitious project—with a team that never made a whole game before—was going to be challenging. But we keep moving forward, and we keep advancing. There are problems on a daily basis but nothing our team doesn’t solve.

Review Fix: What makes this game special?

Serra: I can’t mention just one thing. Considering games of the same kind I’ve played and seen in the past, the art in our game is the most beautiful I have personally seen so far. The characters and scenes are drawn magnificently, and they perfectly reflect the personality we want them to have. 

We’ve been working on the puzzles for many months now, trying to make them original, fun, logical, and well designed. Most of the puzzles we designed will have multiple solutions. We’ve also been trying to keep the balance between not making given hints too obvious and neither too hard so that both experienced and not so experienced players would be able to enjoy them. 

Though there’s only one storyline, we have multiple endings, hidden Easter eggs, and secret stories that will keep you entertained for months. Also, every single character has a backstory (even the NPCs, and I think that’s something no one had ever done in this genre), that you might—or might not—discover, depending on your choices.

We wanted this point-and-click to really be repayable. Every time you play it, you’ll find many new things or different story paths.

Review Fix: What games influenced this one the most?

Serra: I’ve always really enjoyed playing point-and-click games (not only) in my childhood, mostly the ones from Lucas by Ron Gilbert like Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion. The story of 3 Minutes to Midnight indicates that I’m a huge fan of the sci-fi genre, especially TV shows such as The Twilight Zone, Doctor Who, The X-Files, etc. … Anyway, without spoiling anything, I think you know where I’m going with this. :-)

Review Fix: Any fun stories or wild moments during development?

Serra: Not really a fun story, but the best moment so far was when I saw Betty moving around the scene for the first time. It might not seem as a big deal now, but it definitely was at that time, it took us eight months to achieve that. In fact, I couldn’t even hold my laughter from how excited I was. I remember I thought to myself, “Hey, who knew we would end up making a game at all.”

Review Fix: What were the major lessons learned?

Serra: Many. Creating this game has been like an advanced degree of game design. But most of the things I’ve learned are related to the planning phase of the game. We encountered many obstacles at the beginning of the project that could have been easily avoided with a better planification in that aspect. I hope not to make the same mistakes again in the next projects—maybe new mistakes but not the same old ones. 

Review Fix: Do you think preserving older gameplay mechanics in new games is important?

Serra: I think it’s important to preserve what makes these games classics. But also, it is important to improve things, as long as it doesn’t break the “classic” experience and at the same time makes it easier to play for people who don’t like the genre or never played this kind of games. 

We can do so many things better nowadays than 30 years ago, and I think it’s our duty to try to get the best of both worlds and combine it. 

Review Fix: What’s your favorite memory as a gamer?

Serra: I know this might sound like a cliché, but when I replayed Monkey Island 2 as an adult, all those memories and fun moments and all the happiness you experienced in that time came back—and realizing it was something that you could still enjoy and laugh about as an adult. That’s what gives me the drive.

Review Fix: How do you want this game to be remembered?

I really want people who play 3 Minutes to Midnight to fall in love with our characters, same as they did back in the day with Guybrush and others. 

I want people to find out about all the backstories and various story lines and give them something to talk about for years. 

Review Fix: What’s next?

Serra: Even our future is quite uncertain, we started working on our second game. At this point, there isn’t much to comment. Only a couple of team members are working on it. As for the rest of the team, they still have work to do with 3 Minutes to Midnight. Maybe in a few months, we will be able to comment further and give some teasing about our next project.

Review Fix: Anything else you’d like to add?

Serra: Yeah, I would like to mention that behind all this there’s an awesome team of people that are working really hard on every aspect and detail of this game to make it one of the best games ever made. And as cheesy as it might sound, without them this dream wouldn’t be possible. I’m really proud of my team and it’s an honor to work with them day by day.