Posted November 27, 2024 by Otter Arch Studios
I said I would do more of these, and wow it has been TWO YEARS since I wrote the last one. What am I doing.... I sincerely apologize....
Last time I shed some light on how I came up with names for characters and places. This time I will shed some light on how this game project began.
In 2014 I attended a furry convention with a friend. Now I personally am not a furry myself, but I do know some people who are (in the PG sense mind you, not the... other ways....) but it was an interesting experience. Upon talking to some people there, I did realize that we didn't really have anthropomorphic games anymore like we used to. What I mean by that is we once had a ton of games where a character could be Sonic the Hedgehog, Crash Bandicoot, Fox McCloud, Sly Cooper, and many many more, instead of your traditional humans. To this day (10 years later) I still haven't determined why that trend mostly died out. Either way, I figured I would tackle a video game centering around anthropomorphic characters like we once more commonly had up to the PS2 era.
A few months later I came up with a prototype for a platformer game featuring an unnamed sea otter. I picked an otter because I just happen to like otters so I came up with the idea of an otter who can pick up various different sea shells to use as different varying levels of attack. If you happened to go in the water, then it would play a bit more like Ecco the Dolphin than a traditional platformer (outside the sonar attack). This was code named Project Otter.
I showed this off at a local art festival where students (I was a student at the time) could show off any games they were working on to local on-goers. Unfortunately I did not get much feedback because there was way too much ambient noise and I was focused on what players were doing and saying as they played than interviewing them directly. If you interview people directly, they will be much nicer than if you just listen to them and take notes while they play a game as this will allow them to be more authentic.
This project was eventually scrapped due to lack of interest and many other life obligations and game development projects demanding my attention at the time. However in late 2015, a few months I got my first professional game programming job, I decided to revisit the concept of a game using an anthropomorphic sea otter again. I decided to go the route of an RPG instead of a platformer as at that time platformers were pretty saturated in the indie market. I also have worked on countless platformer games during my time as a high school and college student so something different felt like it would have been more fun and I did like RPGs. I also was playing Assassin's Creed Syndicate at the time (which isn't an RPG, but has RPG elements) and I thought the dual protagonist approach with Jacob and Evie Frye was a fun and interesting concept so I decided to tap into that. I came to idea of a Siberian husky as the otter's partner in crime simply because my very good friend really liked huskies.
Thus Project Ice Cube was born in early 2016, which is Animal Of Bering's codename internally. I decided on the environment to be around the Alaska and Siberian areas of the world, so I figured I should determine what kind of arctic animals could potentially populate this area. Since we already have our two protagonists based on animals that a really good friend and I like, I figured I would ask other friends of mine what arctic animals they would like. Interestingly, one of them picked snow leopard, which I later realized is not native to the Alaska/Siberia area by any means, so I worked the plot around Hyrag (our snow leopard character) being a foreign spy investigating the kingdom.
I drafted up some documents, worked out some "maths" for how combat and exp would work, then eventually began work on prototyping. I will talk about engine choice and some very early development in another blog. In short, once the project began, I just kept iterating when I had the time and energy to make progress, which is still going today! (but we are nearing the finish line at least).
That's it for our little history lesson here, I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Until next time!
-Kyle