It’s no accident that the three-act swamp noir adventure, Knee Deep, takes place in a tawdry tourist trap in North Florida or that two of the primary characters are journalists of one stripe or another.

The game, which launches its final act on March 8, comes by its mucky, muck-raking pedigree honestly thanks to Knee Deep’s lead writer and designer.

Born and raised in Florida, Wes Platt grew up in Orlando, worked at Walt Disney World, attended the University of South Florida (which, inexplicably, is on Florida’s *west coast*), and worked for more than a decade at The St. Petersburg Times.

Some favorite Florida memories include:

• Getting busted for using Dad’s Disney security badge to stop the Frontierland train
  
• Citrus fights with younger brother in the front yard
  
• Rescuing a raccoon (possibly rabid, but FREEDOM!!!) trapped in a neighbor’s cage
  
• Fearing the hoarder’s house on Fangorn Lane with all the junk and a broken-down school bus out front
  
• Playing hackey-sack and writing outlandish work journal entries in the Magic Kingdom tunnels
  

During his tenure at the newspaper, Platt wrote about:

• The Bayport Boomerang UFO over the Gulf coast
  
• The 1993 “storm of the century”
  
• An armadillo assassin
  
• A gun-toting county commissioner
  
• A cricket invasion
  
• A serial killer preying on elderly victims
  
• Teens who killed an old woman and her adult son out of boredom
  
• A man who smuggled himself into a flea market in a homemade box
  
• The senseless death of football star Jerome Brown and his nephew in a Brooksville car crash
  

Weird Florida kept a beat reporter busy, even back in the days before the prominence of Facebook, Twitter, or even an organized World Wide Web. In his spare time, he loved reading Dave Barry columns and the books of Carl Hiaasen. Newspapers weren’t going anywhere, were they?

“We thought everything was going to be more or less OK in the print journalism world until classified ad sales imploded,” Platt said. “But even then we had newsroom leaders saying we’d never have anything serious to worry about until readers could take a computer into the bathroom and get news that way.”

That never happened, so everyone lived happily ever after - in an alternate universe, perhaps. Instead, in 2003, Platt left the volatile newspaper business in favor of a far more stable career in video game development.

From 2006 to 2010, he worked with future Prologue Games founder Colin Dwan (and a team of 100+ talented artists, writers, sound designers, and programmers) on a post-apocalyptic MMORPG called Fallen Earth - the project that brought Platt to North Carolina.

After that indie MMO failed to set the world on fire, Platt returned to a far more stable career in print journalism at Durham’s Herald-Sun newspaper.

It wouldn’t be unreasonable for readers to envision a man jumping from one melting arctic ice floe to another, trying to avoid that one over there with the hungry polar bear.

In Summer 2014, Platt and Dwan reunited to work on Knee Deep. The game explores the dark side of celebrity, money-grubbing cults, the battle between old and new media, the perils of overdevelopment, and family struggles against a theatrical backdrop.

“I love my home state, no matter how baffling the headlines generated from it can be,” Platt said. “I miss the beaches, the rollercoasters, the reliable lack of snow, and the constant flow of crazy Florida Man before my eyes. Thank god for the internet.”