It’s been a little while since I posted an update.

Mostly because I needed time to think about our approach to the game. By late December 2014 I realised that after more than a year of working on the game I know pretty much what I wanted things to look like (or at least I knew what was fun to draw) but that I still did not know why in many cases I was unhappy with the results. Some of these were rather solid and beautiful but there was always something that did not work. So, I decided to put down my pencil and think about the game and some of the underlying ideas. It then occured to me that while I tried different visual (and conceptual) solutions in one place I did not try them in all places. One darling always survived (the mushroom-like bridges) and it took me basically 10 months to kill it.

The reason why I kept the functionality of the bridges intact was that it worked so well in the videos that I thought that they shouldn’t be changed. What I failed to see was that there could be plenty of similar solutions that would work just as well. The most important aspect here is that the environment should react to the characters, e.g. if a red character approaches a blue bridge that bridge will show a response telling the player that this character can not cross. As a result I scrapped the mushroom approach and replaced it with a weird caterpillar: Now the caterpillar reacts to the characters that run across its body. The colour-shape system that I have developed will stay however and it will be implemented via textures, spikes, and other strange extrusions to the caterpillar.

That next important change is that I decided to hire a writer for the story part of the game. I have already found a very capable one and I am excited to see what she will come up with…

Lastly, a few of the most recent concepts: A low-poly bonsai and a weird snaking caterpillar worm thing.