It’s an awesome week for Sega of Europe and the folks at Two Point Studios. Having shown off their latest upcoming game, Two Point Museum, the devs look set to invite players and fans into another charming world of Two Point business management. We’re excited for the game, but with it having just been announced this week, we had plenty of questions about what’s coming. Thankfully, Two Point Museum Executive Producer Jo Koehler and Design Director Ben Huskins were on hand to take our questions. Find out about the inspirations for Two Point Museum, lessons learned from previous games, feelings on post-launch content, and more below!
Shacknews: What made Museum theming the next big pick for a Two Point game? What about Museum management trappings attracted the team?
Ben Huskins: There are a few things that got us excited about Museum as a concept. For a start, we were immediately drawn to the idea of building up a collection of awe-inspiring artifacts – you can’t just buy everything in this game, you must put the effort into finding and collecting each exhibit.
This got us talking about expeditions and wanting to capture this feeling of exploration and discovery - finding fragments of old maps, sending your staff on an adventure and that sense of anticipation around what they might find.
Of course, all this leads back to the museum itself. As you build up your collection, you want to create an experience for visitors that will blow their minds (and ideally empty their wallets, this is a business sim after all).
We loved the opportunities for creative freedom in this game. Deciding how you want to layout your museum – Where will you put your most impressive exhibits? How will visitors move through the designed space? Where do you set up tours, and the all-important gift shops? We knew early on that we wanted to have a whole new set of building and customization tools.
Ultimately you are the curator, so we want you to be able to design a museum that’s unique and allows you to keep refining and perfecting it over time.
Shacknews: Were there any gimmicks or mechanics in the early concepts of Two Point Museum where the team was like “oh this has to be in there?” Are there any favorite new gimmicks or mechanics among the team so far?
Jo Koehler: When we started the whole process of deciding on our third title, we had a few different ideas that we really liked, but “Museum” was one that we kept coming back to and getting really excited about.
I think the idea of sending your Experts off into the Two Point world on Expeditions was one of the exciting features we knew we had to get into the game – we’ve iterated on this idea so many times, but we are really happy it’s delivering what we originally set out to achieve.
Shacknews: With this being your third game, do you feel some relief in knowing Two Point has established itself in this genre? Or is it just as nerve-wracking as ever to deliver your next big thing?
Koehler: I think the only sense of relief we’ve ever really had is that we are still being allowed to do this!
Every single time we make a game or a DLC, it matters so much to us. So much heart and soul go into what we’re making and it’s terrifying when we show it to the world! We hope the players are going to have fun and enjoy playing Two Point Museum. Making it as perfect as we can is so important to all of us! Definitely nerve-wracking!!!
Shacknews: Were there any hard lessons learned from Two Point Campus and its expansions that have been applied to make Two Point Museum a better game from the get-go?
Koehler: I think Campus was a difficult game to make for us - largely due to COVID and having the team all working remotely during lockdown. We are definitely a creative team that works better in an environment where we can easily look over each other's shoulders and chat about ideas face to face. Eventually with Campus, we brought gameplay and designers back into the office and it made such a difference. I just wish we’d be able to do that for the whole project.
With Two Point Museum and Campus before it, we always start out with a list of new things we want to achieve as we try to grow our games. We always think about what did and didn’t work and what we can do better next time! I don’t think any of us have ever made a game and not thought we could make this or that bit better – if only we had a bit more time!!!
Shacknews: Two Point has a dry and jovial sense of humor, but museums have definitely had their shares of questionable moral background when it comes to civilizations. Has the team thought much on this? How does it navigate humor on such a subject without causing harm in the process?
Huskins: All the artifacts within Two Point Museum have been created with a slightly off-kilter Two Point humor. Whilst some of the items in-game have a tongue in cheek reference to items found within the real world, we have been careful not to depict anything that relates specifically to real civilizations around the world.
Source: Sega
Shacknews: Has this game offered any opportunities that were talked about, but left on the table in previous games?
Huskins: We’ve really doubled down on creative freedom this time. There are so many new ways to customize your museums and experiment with different layouts such as a proper partition wall system (not like the one we had in Campus), and you’re not just limited to rectangular rooms anymore, you can section off areas and channel visitors through the museum in so many different ways. There is much more control over flooring, different wallpaper designs, a color-picker for items, one-way doors, and staff-only doors. You can genuinely spend hours noodling around with one small area and a handful of artifacts and end up with something completely unique - we're really excited to see what people’s museums end up looking like.
The other thing we often discussed in previous games was having reasons to keep coming back to a level. In Hospital and Campus, once people reached a 3-star rating they often moved on and rarely came back. There were one or two exceptions, such as Mitton Research & Teaching Hospital which a lot of people turned into one giant research lab for all their future research. We always liked this idea of collaboration between your institutions, so in Museum there are more objectives that encourage you to return to each of your museums, and more of your progression is shared across all of them. For example, all your museums can help explore the maps and unlock new expedition locations, allowing you to find new types of exhibits and other rewards. Likewise, analysis of exhibits adds to a shared pool of knowledge about each one. Within each museum, you’ll keep getting objectives and opportunities to boost your ratings, so there’s always a reason to keep expanding, improving staff and facilities, and refining your layout.
Shacknews: Campus proved such a fertile ground for expansion because you could add curriculum after curriculum to it with the props, classes, and staff expansions to run them. Do you feel Two Point Museum has a similar upside to it? Should we expect a similar array of post-launch content?
Koehler: We do love adding extra features and content to our games. We often look to the community to hear what kind of new and different things they’d like to see, and what quality of life improvements we can add.
I think when it comes to DLCs, our focus at the moment is just finishing off and polishing what we’ve already got planned for the main game. However as you explore further in the world of Two Point Museum and find new types of exhibits you’ll find new gameplay mechanics being introduced, so once we’ve finished the main game, the idea of adding new places to explore, different themes of exhibits to find, and new mechanics to master is really exciting area for us to investigate.
That covers this Two Point Museum interview, but be sure to check out our full coverage on the Two Point Museum topic for news, features, and updates!
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replyTJ Denzer posted a new article, Two Point Museum devs on the setting, lessons from Campus & post-launch plans
