Kandria

A bit of development history

Today I thought I'd share a bit about how Kandria came to be in terms of development. Like many other game projects, it started out quite differently. In fact, there's still some videos from when I first started working on it out there.

YouTubePlay overlay

I've been making games for a long time, but sometime in late 2018, after I had finished playing Celeste, I felt like I wanted to tackle a project "for real," and I felt like doing something akin to Celeste would be a lot of fun and not too hard to get started with.

And so I spent a couple of months replicating Celeste's basic movement mechanics. What I ended up with was pretty alright, though then things in my life took a sharp turn as I got very preoccupied with the Game Programming Lab that resulted in the Factory Reset game. The following summer was a great opportunity for me though, as it was the first summer in many many years that I was completely free.

After some weeks of slouching about doing nothing in praticular, I decided to get back into gear and force myself to continue working on the game, still called "Leaf" at that point. In order to keep myself to it I did daily two hour streams working on some particular aspect of the game engine. If you're interested, these streams are still online. It proved to be really productive and I hammered out a ton of basic systems for the game that are still in use today. Some of them have bitrotten a little bit by now, but that's beside the point.

Sometime during that time I decided that I wanted to distance myself from the Celeste formula and instead make the game more narrative heavy. This was partly because I felt bad aping a game so much, and partly because I hit a point where I needed to "just make some levels," which I had (and still don't) little idea on how to do well. Level design has never been my area of expertise. This is when the post-apocalyptic theme started materialising. I initially also planned to make a detective platformer, meaning you'd spend most of your time solving detective mysteries, interspersed with platforming segments to travel between regions.

Around this time I also decided to change the look from an 8x8 base tile size to a 16x16 tile size, to give myself a bit more control over the art, as 8x8 turned out to be very difficult to convey much effectively with. I also just wanted to further distance myself from Celeste, though that was a lesser point. The main character also got her first redesign here, and gained the "Stranger" name.

https://courier.tymoon.eu/api/courier/file/view?id=E7p%2Fz9u%2BGl6Rt8i1LQZeNQ%3D%3D

I knew I wanted to do something with androids and a post apocalypse, mostly because I just really liked those themes, but I didn't really have any concrete idea on the story or setting beyond that yet. I had ideas for some setpieces, but nothing that would form a coherent view.

Towards the end of Summer, I also got involved with the local meetup group Game Space, and from there with the Saturday hackathon Zürindies, which I ended up frequenting every week from then on. Zürindies helped me a lot to keep working on the game through the new university semester. It also made the project feel a lot more real, reinforcing my desire to take it seriously and keep at it.

At some point I decided that the design for the Stranger I had had really didn't fit the detective angle at all, so I went about another redesign and whipped up a ton of different designs.

https://courier.tymoon.eu/api/courier/file/view?id=CFFWCj%2FfDIatOpWEBPAm9A%3D%3D

The final design from that still remains today. I had to redo all the animations for the character, but I still think it was worth it. There hadn't been much thought behind the previous design.

The more I started to think about the detective angle though, the more it made me realise that that would require a tremendous amount of writing. Writing that I was already struggling really hard to come up with for the overall story at that point. After a lot of deliberation I decided that it probably wouldn't be a great idea to make a game that would be /that/ heavy on narrative if I couldn't get myself to just write stuff, so I decided to switch gears again.

This time inspired by Katana Zero and Nier I decided to go for a hack and slash angle. The main idea behind that was that it would lead to more immediately satisfying gameplay, as hack and slash is pretty easy to pick up and get into, and that it would be easier to generate content for it, as well as a better way to mix up the action between platforming challenges and combat.

And so since then the focus has been on this hybrid platformer hack and slash approach. Since I'm only now getting to sort of trying out the latter part of it, I can't yet for sure say whether it'll work out, but it's already looking a lot more promising than my previous approach ever did.

I'm still struggling a lot with the writing part of it all, and have been heavily considering finding and hiring a writer to help out with that. Still, I'm very reluctant on doing that, since I fear that I might be too particular about what I want and would either not be able to find anyone willing to invest in my ideas, or piss them off too much by being too easy to reject their own ideas. So far I've mostly been pushing this issue out as far as I can, and have been focusing on mechanics and engine problems instead, which are things I think I can solve on my own for the most part.

And that brings us pretty squarely to where we are today! Now that I've got a big university deadline done with I should have more time to focus on Kandria again, and I'm already feeling a lot less stressed already.

Here's to hoping for good progress!

Oh, and by the way, if you have any suggestions for media (literature, movies, games) that sorta fit into the themes I have going on in Kandria, I'd be very interested to hear about that, so do let me know, ok?