by Spooky (Creative Director) and PurpleSnow (Game Director)

Art Director J4M35

It’s been an exciting couple of weeks for us as our duo has grown to a trio with the addition of J4M35 as our Art Director. He brings with him a wealth of experience, talent, and a rare passion for bringing inspiration to life. He’s also managed to put up with the other two of us (so far), which is an impressive feat in and of itself!

We are positively champing at the bit to get started on visual explorations, and look forward to having some really exciting pieces to share! In the meantime, if you see him around, please be sure to give him a warm welcome!

In the realm of game development, we’ve entered into our hardening phase of ideation. This is an exciting place to be from a developer’s perspective, because these are the first moments where things begin to solidify for a game into a cohesive whole.

Often, games have a “blue sky” phase that follows an initial pitch or idea. This is the point where anything goes, and it wouldn’t be out of place to hear conversations like..

“We should have a dance mini-game that you play in order to control a Kaiju!”

“Absolutely! And what if the reason that the Kaiju are dancing is because they’re competing *to be the president*?”

AI interpretation of “Two Kaiju having a dance battle to determine who will be president.”

While it may sound ridiculous (sometimes it is!) this is a healthy part of the process, as it allows teams to explore the space of an idea. You might find yourself riffing off an unexpected bit of inspiration when you realize what it is about the game that excites other people. That passion can be genuinely infectious, and when that feeling happens - it’s an unmistakable spark - you know that you have something not that you want to build, but that you must build.

The hardening phase is when we test to find the boundaries of an idea. In short, this is “finding the no” - what are the aspects that feel like they don’t fit? “No” tells us a lot in game design, because it prompts the question of “why” and conversations that lead to shared understanding. This is when we realize things like “Maybe we don’t need a dancing Kaiju president,” because they don’t support the core of the player’s experience. Instead, we find the truths that resonate for all of us, and we look for ways to strengthen and embellish them.

This is, truly, finding the soul of a game - and for us, we’ve found our inspiration in evoking the feelings of adventure and discovery. We knew that we wanted to create a world that, on the surface, was bright and welcoming, zany and fun. We also wanted undercurrents to run beneath it - elements that suggest that events may not be as we perceive them to be.

The element that brought things together was our belief that this journey should be a conversation that is shared among players, rather than solely an experience that is dictated to them. This set off a lot of sparks - all of the different ways that we could build a world and a community out of a multifaceted jigsaw puzzle. Shortly thereafter, systems were starting to snap into place for how we could foster this sense of exploration.

Previously, we’d teased at the idea of having built your home on the back of a flying whale. That sense of mobility became a key idea - what if there was a need to travel, and somewhere that we were trying to reach? This already invites some speculation - are we moving towards something, or fleeing away? Why?

That thrust was enough to ground our activities in a dramatic purpose. Now our conversations on “town building” and “farming” (and similar topics) were reframed in the light of “How do these further exploration with our Sky Whale?”

From this came the notion of a world shattered into countless pieces, with tiny hints of the truth buried amongst them. Consider the following example:

This is a very simplified expression of having players start at similar origin points, but end up on different routes, discovering different things along the way. In reality, our number of permutations will be many orders of magnitude higher. There’s going to be a lot to see, and no one person can discover everything by themselves!

Exploration won’t be easy - there are going to be challenges in this world, and dangers. We wanted reasons for players to come together, not only to solve a mystery, but also to help one another move forward. In a very classical sense, we want players to be heroes in our world - we’re Darkbright, not Grimdark!

As for the state that we find the world in, and why we’re traveling through it… well, that sounds like a topic for a different time, doesn’t it?

We look forward to sharing more updates with you in the future! :)