State of the Game: One Year Mark

Just over a year ago, it took us seconds to agree to make a game. David projected that we’d build it in a week. We left it mostly on the back burner for a few months, then decided to work miserably hard for two months to enter a festival that we missed by 0.7% of an upload.

We regrouped and kept going, quietly but steadily. The game’s artwork and animation are now about 60% complete, and the programming is close behind.

We’re also in the process of entering this year’s IndieCade, which fortunately welcomes in-progress games. We hope to have about 75% of the game completed at that point.

Following our sprint to enter the festival, we’ll finish up the game and prepare for an early summer release. It’s hard to imagine being done after working so long at this, but we’re eager to get it out there.

Thanks for following our adventure so far!

Last week, we got to take a little Brain&Brain field trip across the Bay to the Game Developers Conference. We spent hours at the IGF showcase, trying some brilliant games like Kentucky Route Zero and talking with other indie developers about what they’d made. All of them had written something of their own stories into the games they eagerly put in our hands.

That night, we watched a beautiful, thoughtful game called Journey sweep the GDC awards, rising above what the industry calls AAA games (the generic, big budget ones full of death and explosions).

We, too, feel the change stealing over the game industry. It’s a good time to be here.

Adventure games are not dead.

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Machinarium. Sword and Sworcery EP. Kentucky Route Zero. The Cave. These are some of the many adventure games that have been released over the past few years to critical and commercial acclaim. They have pushed the genre and the games industry forward, and have proved once and for all that adventure games are not dead.

We are part of that group of explorers, unearthing the remains of the long-rumored-to-be-dead adventure game genre without a manual telling us how to re-build it. At first we are archaeologists, digging for the pieces that teach and inspire us. But then we do something different: we assemble them in ways that please and surprise us, so that they make sense to who we are now, not who we were when we first encountered them long ago. Fragments lie to the side, left over from our construction, vestigial remains that we know not what to do with. They are the aspects of adventure games our nostalgia has allowed us to forget, the bits that those who decry the genre focus their sharp eyes on. What we are left with, then, is the story, the characters, the wit; the magic.

The adventure game genre we are helping to build needs not the distorted glasses of nostalgia, but the warmth that nostalgia imparts. Its promise is not in remembrance, but in the creation of new experiences that will be cherished alongside the old, mirror images of each other—one with forgotten flaws, and the other having learned from them.

At least, that’s our hope.