blog post number one: scope

So. As lots of creatives do, we (obviously) love to procrastinate. But when there are no more dishes to wash, task-lists to organize and pretty surprised elementary school friends to call, you've got to find something else to do instead of working on your super important career-defining debut game. We on our part decided to hop into a time machine and start a blog like the cool kids. Maybe it will be a crisp and concise analysis of our beginnings as an indie studio and our thoughts on game development in general. Or – far less likely as we all know – a study on human behavior under self-imposed crippling stress and how failure shapes the social media endeavors of two people who never identified as social in the first place. Alright. Enough with the chit-chat, let’s hear some facts.

When we got together in 2021 to start the studio to rule them all, we had brilliant ideas, sure. (No worries. One day you’ll get that grappling hook autorunner taking place in 70’s GDR…) But all in all we just knew one thing: we wanted to keep the scope manageable. What happened then was us working on prototypes of games that didn’t keep the scope manageable at all. In our defense: How could we know that a hand-drawn action-platformer with convoluted lore, mechanically intertwined parallel dimensions and only seven distinct biomes would grow over our heads? It was a big surprise for everyone involved. The good thing that emerged from this though was the question of what the focus of our company should be. After some soul-searching (on pinterest) we came to the realization that we wanted to recreate the feeling we had as kids sitting side by side playing everything we could get into our tiny greedy hands. This may sound anachronistic, outdated, retro or like an ‘interesting niche’ (quote from somebody who really had to get to the train). But we thought: Yeah well, this state of lying in bed or lounging on the couch together until your fingers hurt and your eyes burn in constant denial of the fact that your body is already asleep and only kept conscious by potato chip grease and sticky goo from a plastic bottle – that’s the thing we want to manufacture. Something that bonds you emotionally while being physically and mentally present and taking time for each other. Where you can feel the energy of flow and focus in the same room. Our ambitions may be shooting for the moon, but we will definitely miss the stars. Wait… Well, you know what we mean.

Since we want to honor focus and playing together, we’ve opted to make a co-op game that relies mostly on these two aspects of game design. And rogue-lite mechanics. In a battle arena. So right now as we are prototyping again we’d have to think about all this in detail.

But that’s the issue of the blog posts to come.