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I had a whole draft of the story in short format written down before we started work on the game. I knew where the story started and where it'd end, and what were the important points we had to touch on the way. Many of the side characters were there, like Luke, Kota and Robert. Some were more or less planned but not yet implemented, like Khenbish (who then we called Zhu). There were even characters we haven't introduced yet (like Kota's brother and the hydra.)

The story was always about Asterion, with the side cast coming in to get the point across about creating a community and to introduce their own plots to break the monotony of what was a rather chill love story. They also provided levity, comic relief, and moments of honesty. The story as a whole would be very depressing without them.

Oscar was there too, though a bit different. In the original draft he showed up on the final stretch, when 95% of Asterion's character arc was completed. He was more like a cherry on top, and he'd arrive already having gone through a lot of the story arc we see in the game. You could say that Oscar arrived having already gone through his jump into full adulthood, while in the game we follow that process through Pedro's eyes.

Now, before I continue... While Oscar was introduced at the end of the first draft, chronologically he's one of the oldest characters I've had floating in my head. Originally Oscar and Pedro were the protagonists of a novel I was meaning to write someday — a detective story about an ex-police officer from the city coming to the hinterlands to investigate a suspicious death of a colonel, where he'd meet a young man who was born with horns.

Now, back to Minotaur Hotel. As the story progressed I decided to bring Oscar over from that idea to the Minotaur Hotel universe because it would be a very strong point in the story. That was a rather late decision, so introducing Oscar at the end made sense for the original draft. While translating it to the game, however, we saw that it was important to tweak with some things and that led to the conclusion that Oscar was too strong a concept to leave to the end of the story.

In choosing to bring Oscar into the story earlier (introduce him at the end of the first act and have him arrive at the end of the second) that gave us the opportunity to tell a story with it. It was actually important that we give him a solid story, and if we played our cards right we could construct it as an interlude to shake things up and keep the tension in the story moving.

We could also not give him that big of a story, of course, but in the end we went with it. This gave the chance to bring in the detective character too, who fit in like a glove once we gave him the backstory of descending from an ex-employee of the hotel.

All of this thinking happened over a few months, things weren't as perfectly structured as I'm making it sound like. However, to be more precise with the timeline of events... Back when we released the very first build of Minotaur Hotel I already had many of those ideas floating in my head, so much so that we were extremely deliberate with the decision of showing on-screen the passports you find before meeting Asterion. One of them is Brazilian, and that was already a way to foreshadow what we could do, maybe, if we felt like it was worth it later down the road.

Now, when it comes to the specifics of the Hinterlands itself like the plotlines and mysteries, that really only came much later. I figured it out as I went, actually. I actually do that a lot, lay a plan to follow but figure out the minor details as I go along, always trying to keep things thematically consistent.