Our Origin Story

This whole idea started on a work call an out of work call (*edited for legal reasons) where we were supposed to be doing our actual job. Instead, I mentioned offhand to my work besties Rushi and Sina that I’d seen an open product manager role at the Pokemon Company. This spiralled into general chat about games we liked, and games we wanted to make. I then selfishly roped in my boyfriend Ferg, who works in the arts and has strong opinions about indie games, and suddenly we had four people, a whatsapp group chat, and absolutely no idea what we were doing.

Who are we?

Before we get any further, I feel like some introductions are necessary.

The four musketeers:

• Sina. My AI colleague, has never downloaded Steam, and has owned six rabbits over the course of his life.
• Rushi. My other colleague, is an engineer, and the only person on the team with any actual game making experience.
• Ferg. My boyfriend, has a jazz degree, plays more games than the rest of us combined, and has outturned duck feet.
• Jess. Me, the one writing this, and in charge of all social media presence as the only woman.

That’s all of us, none of us went to game school, only 2 of us know code, we are by any reasonable definition, absolute beginners.

The rules

From my brief google into indie game development, I found out very quickly that our first game could go very wrong, very fast. So before anyone got too attached to something we couldn’t make, we sat down and wrote our four guiding principles.

1. Easy to script addictive gameplay loop
2. Unique but simple artstyle
3. Known public IP in the public domain
4. Number go up

The rabbit hole

I love a good research, and so I eagerly went down lots of rabbit holes on public domain IP we could use. We considered Betty Boop, Winnie the Pooh, Davy Jones, pirates more broadly, the Three Musketeers (although there are now 4 of us thanks ferg for ruining this).

So we did what we know best, all bring our own individual ideas to the table and find a way to mesh them all together into one mega niche idea.

For years I have been obsessed with the weird medieval animals I had been collecting on my pinterest board for years, odd creatures drawn into the sidelines of medieval manuscripts (image attached for your enjoyment). Shoutout to @weirdmedievalguys on instagram who I have been following from day one.

Ferg brought to the table a love for table top board games, and used his useless knowledge of watching hour long videos on youtube of people playing niche games. Specifically, he suggested crokinole, a game created in the medieval times with a large fanbase. Crokinole hasn’t come into the mainstream games crowd, since boards cost £200, and are surprisingly large and heavy. If you don’t know how crokinole works, think of a mini shuffle board on a circle board, and do not fret, I will force him to write a post on it so keep your eyes peeled!

Rushi suggested using public IP for King Arthur and knights of the round table (shoutout to Rushi for being the only one to bring actual sensible ideas that linked to our rules). Get it, because the board is round, and knights of the round table? Yea ok we get it.

Lastly, we had kept balatro in mind when brainstorming, easy to play, indie, made by a small team, and extremely addictive and popular. We blatantly copied their addictive strategy and merged it with crokinole’s existing scoring system as our base.

So we had our first idea after 2 relatively short days of brainstorming. Round table, public domain King Arthur, medieval art, all those creatures i’d been collecting on pinterest. Rule 1 (easy gameplay loop), rule 3 (known IP), and rule 4 (number go up) ticked off very quickly.

Taking one for the team

That left rule 2, the art of the game. None of us describe ourselves as particularly creative in any sense, but everyone else seemed to care more about their jobs and were busy, so I volunteered.

Pixel art seemed to be the obvious fit, it integrates well with the engine, it has the retro feel, and more importantly, it’s finishable for a beginner. One of my longest standing hobbies is paint by numbers, and pixel art feels kind of similar?? So I immediately tried to create a horrible creature, and decided yea this is something i could do.

My first pixel art attempt, was not the worst i’ve ever seen.

So where do we start?

So this is where we are currently. 4 people, 4 rules, and a weirdly perfect collision of some of our favourite niches (sorry sina, maybe next time). As our idea came into fruition, we slowly had the realisation that maybe we could actually pull this off?

So if you like weird medieval creatures, have a love of crokinole, or are just secretly praying for our downfall, welcome to our club! :)

Follow along to see where we go next :)

— Jess

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Next time: what happens when four beginners open godot for the first time and try to draw a round table.