Can you believe it’s nearly December already?

It’s been two full months now since we returned from the ether, got ourselves back on Twitter, and relaunched our website. In our first blog post, we talked a bit about our big real-life move, Kinoko’s new name, and some of our short-term plans. We’re feeling pretty settled in our new home now, and I almost never slip up and say Kinoko’s old name any more. Our website’s coming along nicely. Web development is my biggest passion in life, so I don’t think I’ll ever be happy saying it’s ‘finished’, but I’m happy for today, at least. Chelsey’s put out a few comics and has more in the works, and for once we’re actually posting actively on Twitter! We’re feeling pretty pleased with ourselves!

But, we also mentioned in that first blog post that we have a much bigger project in the works, and that we’d talk about it when we’re ready. Well, I’m not feeling ready at all, but we’ve decided to go ahead and talk about it anyway!

We’re designing a game

That’s right, we’re designing a game! We’ve been talking about making a game for ages, and we’ve been thinking about the type of game we might make for a while. It probably goes without saying that any game we make is going to be centred around Kinoko, or at least take place in Kinoko’s universe, but that didn’t help us to narrow down our options. It’s our intention that Kinoko himself could work across a range of mediums and genres, after all!

Chelsey’s competent in both 2D and 3D art – the less said about my own competence, the better – so we could’ve gone down either route artistically. In the end, we decided to make a 2D game. From a technical perspective, it ought to mean less learning, and more doing, though there will no doubt be a lot of learning. We also knew that we’d be using the Unity engine. I’m a programmer, with a preexisting affinity for the C# language, so I’m fairly comfortable with Unity programming despite my lack of experience.

Having discussed it at length, we came to an agreement. Whilst we hope you can understand that everything we say around here is subject to change – we don’t pretend to be experts, who know what we’re doing much, or even any, of the time! – we’ve concluded that the right path ahead, for us, right now, at this moment in our careers, is to design a 2D platforming game, based on the adventures of Kinoko and his pals.

All we’re committing to right now is designing our game. Will we make it? I don’t want us to be making promises that we can’t deliver on, so I’ll just answer that with a ‘hopefully’. We’d certainly like to, but, you know, the point of this blog is to document both our successes and our failures. It’d be dishonest to only blog about our successes, because we’re just two humans, and not everything we do can ultimately go to plan!

What we are going to do is do the best darn job of a game design that we can, and take it as far as we can on the strength of our combined ability. We’re pretty optimistic about this. Chelsey’s going to be doing the art, and the animations, and I’m going to be doing the programming, and the writing. We’ll be tackling everything else together, picking up new skills in things like level design as we go. Hopefully, we’ll surprise ourselves, and produce something halfway decent! Alternatively, we might find that this game we’re designing is a total non-starter. If that happens, we’ll have to go back to the drawing board and start over. One way or another, we’re going to be giving this game design everything we’ve got. That’s the promise.

Prototyping the game

We won’t divulge too much more at this stage – we’re not all that clear on the direction we’re taking this game design in ourselves, just yet! Except for assets, which we’ll focus on in a future post, the only things that we really have to show off at the moment are screenshots of an extremely rough, and early, prototype which we’re building right now in Unity.

Our goal for this prototype is simple. We want to establish how the platforming is going to work, practically, and how the levels are going to feel to play. Chelsey’s sketched out a simple map, and I’m adding gravity and collision boxes everywhere so that we’ve got a space that Kinoko is free to run, jump, fly, and swim around in. Everything’s very rough, and we’re making sure that we don’t allow ourselves to get attached to anything. If something doesn’t feel right – even if we’ve spent a day (or a week) working on it – it’s out. If we don’t get the basics right, every single other aspect of the game will be a waste of time. No one wants to play a game that feels terrible, and we aren’t at all interested in putting out things that suck.

We’re looking to create a prototype level that is both easy to control, and fun to explore. Once we’ve taken care of the controlling part, we’ll take a look at the exploring part. We’re both super inspired by the types of game that you can get lost in, spending hours poking around in all the nooks and crannies you can find tucked out of view from the beaten path. Exploration is one of the key themes of our game design, so we’re super excited about this aspect – but we’ll have loads more to say about that when we get around to it!

Of course, whilst we’re looking forward to working hard on this project and producing something awesome, neither of us want it to take over our lives – not completely, anyway! We still have other, smaller projects on, and we plan to keep our website and social media updated with interesting things. Chelsey’s currently in the middle of sketching a load of characters for our followers on Twitter, and I’m about to take on a contract for some totally unrelated web development work. On top of all that, we’ve got Chelsey’s birthday and a trip to London on the horizon, so we’ll both be busy enough as it is in the short-term.

We’re still looking to keep the momentum going through December, though, so hopefully it won’t be long until our next update.

Until then, stay warm, and stay safe!