About wining a pre-production grant, starting a company, and re-designing a game-jam product

by Jonathan Giezendanner

A little while ago, we wrote, with a lot of help from Jonathan Fellay, a successful pre-production grant application. What does this mean for us, what is Early Coffee Games, and why Hermit - an underwater tale?

Tristan and I have been developing small games together for a while now, and have since long been discussing about the possibility of finding a project which we could further develop into a full-fledged video game.

About one and a half years ago as of time of writing of this blog-post, we joined the Global Game Jam 2019 in Geneva, and developed, in 48 hours a small game called Hermit the sluggish caterpillar of the sea.

The theme was “What home means to you”. We rapidly came up with the idea of a hermit crab which would use shells as a mean to defend himself from enemies coming in waves. The more enemies you defeat, the more points you get, until you get eventually touched by an enemy which finishes your round.

Shells can be used in an offensive way, where different shells have different effects such as launching them or rolling into enemies. The shells can as well be used in a defensive manner where the hermit burrows itself into the ground with the shell on top, effectively canceling enemies attacks. The game design, with its fixed frame and waves of enemies, was hevily inspired by the game Curses ‘N Chaos by Tribute games, an excellent one to two player game which we play a lot.

Fixed Frame

During the game jam, we met Pierrique Oggier, a musician who accepted to lend us his talent to create the sounds and music of the game. It is only once we added his hawaiian themed music that the game truly came to life.

The game well received on different platforms such as Newgrounds and Kongregate where players would compete for a high score, and later ported to Airconsole, and just recently received a good amount of attention on itch.

The relative success of the game (given its scope and development time) along with the very positive comments on the different platforms led us to think that further pursuing the development of the game would be an interesting idea, and we thus started to work on the idea of a full fletched game.

In March then came the only opportunity of 2020 to submit a grant application to Pro Helvetia.

Pro Helvetia Dossier

Why apply to this grant?

For us applying to a grant meant heaving the obligation to structure our different thoughts, develop a coherent global story for our game, research marketing strategies as well as identify a market gap, target player, and write a budget which would cover the different needs of pre-production (music, sounds, story-telling). Being our first time writing such a document, we had to force ourselves to delve into the these topics, at first glance maybe less interesting than programing and art (at least from our perspective), but actually primordial if the game is meant to be successful. Luckily Pro Helvetia is very active in helping the community and organized workshops and prepared materials in order to help the applicants in writing a successful grant application.

Evolution

The idea now is to transform this 48h game jam product into a full fletched experience enjoyable for the players. In order to achieve this we are designing the game with these concepts in mind: the game evolves over several levels, each composed of multiple waves until a final boss. Beating the boss unlocks new areas in an “Overworld”, where you can access new levels, access new types of shells and upgrade your stats or your shells’ stats. The overworld also acts as a way to keep track of the storyline between levels. The storyline is currently being developed in collaboration with Jonathan Fellay.

Overall, we want to keep the fours pillars of the game in mind:

  • Awesome moves
  • Shell (or resources) management
  • Squishiness
  • High risk, high reward

These will guide our decisions regarding playability, character movements, and new shells we implement. As an example, we realized that squishiness of the hermit when outside of a shell is very interesting, but at the same time the player needs to get a chance to survive. We thus implemented the possibility to have multiple jumps, a dash, and generally be very mobile, which compensates the fact that you are not able to attack once outside a shell. We also understand that playing the game with another person is rewarding, and awesome moves performed collaboratively is the way to go. You can thus for example launch a shell at your partner, who catches it mid-air and throws it to the enemy in a single awesome move.

What now?

All in all we are very excited to be working again on the game. The past month have been quite productive, and intense also on the admin side of things. After winning the grant, we had to create our own company, and we are proud to announce that we are now officially Early Coffee Games SNC.

Early Coffee Games

An update regarding our first milestone (implement basic enemy system and wave manager, basic shells) should be out here soon (deadline end of November, so very soon indeed).

Thanks a lot for reading.

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