Interview with the Yo soy Páramo developer

The world is ending, humanity is on the brink of extinction. If you want to see the end of the world, you’ll have to survive a little longer.

What image or feeling best sums up the experience of playing it?

I try to offer a humanist view of society. In the end, it’s a group of people who have been forced to live through the end of everything, who don’t understand why or what happened for everything to end, who can’t imagine what society or technological progress was like before the world became an unsurvivable wasteland.

With that historical weight, that thwarted responsibility, that tone, the player arrives and builds what will be humanity’s last settlement on Earth. They’ll have to make difficult decisions, look for strategies and learn by force, gain experience as a player, get to know the world to understand how to face it. That’s where the game is: survival and strategy at the limit.

What promise does the game make to the player from its first few minutes?

Discovery. It’s a game you have to learn, not through a long tutorial, but through the experience of getting further each time, stocking up, focusing your runs. But something new will always arrive, a challenge you’ll have to overcome if you want to last a little longer.

What does Yo soy Páramo have that you wouldn’t find in the same way in another survival game?

The world is ending, it’s getting worse, it’s the end of everything. I try to represent that idea: it’s present in people’s philosophies, it’s present at all times. You already begin in a hostile world of high temperatures, but it will get worse, and in the end you will die no matter what. How long will you be able to survive?

What would you most like someone to say after finishing their first game?

That it was a new experience. Above «I had fun» or «it surprised me», that would be the most satisfying answer for me.

What was the first idea, before its current systems existed?

It came from a song, lyrics I wrote that represented a world like this, an immense wasteland at the end of everything. I had been carrying it around for many years, conceiving its details in my head. I even tried to turn it into a game before, but it never became more than a secondary project in my life, without the time required to devote yourself to developing a video game.

But I got it out. I managed to make time for it, devote myself to this full-time, and that’s why it has come to light. A lot has happened since that first song.

Was there a moment when you thought «this is the game I want to make»?

I’m always working on some game, some smaller project, trying things, developing ideas. They’re all in my half-finished digital warehouse; the poor things only receive small doses of free time, not enough to get off the ground, but they help me keep up to date with new technologies and ways of developing.

With the latest advances in artificial intelligence, an enormous boost for building ideas was opening up, so the time had come. Based on where we were, what it meant in development time and those hours I had suddenly pulled out of thin air to truly dedicate myself to the studio, the time had come —glorious, by the way— to choose from my arsenal. And the wasteland was the one I chose. I have stayed faithful to it ever since.

What part of you is most present in the game?

The game is a personal reflection: everything is created obsessively by me, every detail, every philosophy. The lyrics of the songs you can find on old vinyl records in some lost camp tell stories that are sometimes entirely about the wasteland and its lore, but there are also personal lyrics that fit into this story.

It is the obsession I carry as a player: playing and seeing that every character is unique in its genre, that there are infinite objects to find, that the game always surprises you with new challenges and that violence is not always the basic mechanic. Here, the environment is alive. You are not the protagonist of the world: the world moves forward and you are the one who has to follow behind.

Here is the end of everything, the consequences of an unrestrained humanity. So fascinating and at the same time so desolate. The game is a complete personal work.

What decision have you defended even though it was harder to develop or explain?

Development with agents. That really was a challenge, but I bet everything on making it work. I have learned a lot and found the right dynamic; I had to add very clear directives not to take part in the creative development.

Programming has changed completely: now it is written in human language. You can define the details from the creative vision with understandable words, rather than code, which allowed me to delegate what has always stolen precious time from me so I could focus on the author’s vision. But of course, agentic intelligences are still in full development, and I have had to evolve with them.