“We’re actually the first class this program has had,” says Zethraeus. In addition to their own inexperience, the progenitors of Gone North had to find a creative way to circumvent the limits of their own education. “We stopped trying to constrain the players so much, and that’s why there are some amazing ways to speedrun our levels.” “We know the player can bypass our level design very easily, so when we noticed that players could ‘cheat’ our levels we kept it that way, because it’s a fun and interesting way to see how people utilize your game,” says Eriksson. “I wouldn’t recommend doing anything like it, basically.”īoth Sebastians recommend that developers in similar situations err on the side of too much player freedom when designing a first-person platformer. "When we noticed that players could ‘cheat’ our levels we kept it that way, because it’s a fun and interesting way to see how people utilize your game."“It’s been a real headache that’s made us scratch our heads for hours,” says Zethraeus. So that ended up being the main mechanic, and we took it forward and built a game around that.” “But one of our programmers had been playing around with a mechanic to proper yourself within this gravity-bending game which we noticed was simply fun to play with. “We had some initial ideas that were basically playing with gravity in the world - you would turn it upside down, and stuff like that - and then we realized this was basically impossible to do, with our knowledge of this engine,” says Sebastian Eriksson, a fellow designer who serves as CEO of Gone North. Gone North’s debut title can’t quite match the technical complexity of those games, despite the best intentions of its creators. The cartoonish copper-and-cobalt aesthetic was inspired by Disney’s animated sci-fi adventure films Atlantis: The Last Empire and Treasure Planet, but the act of leaping and swinging from rock to rock evokes muscle memories of games like Portal 2 and Quantum Conundrum. “We were proud of it at the time, but our eyes bleed now when we look at it.” Taking a leap and latching onto what works A Story About My Uncle outfits players with a preposterously useful plasma grappling beam and challenges them to traverse sprawling fields of rocky islands floating above an endless, deadly abyss. Zethraeus, who now serves as a designer and project manager at Gone North Games. "In ten weeks we actually learned the entire engine and made a prototype,” says A Story About My Uncle has been on sale for less than a week, but it's already garnered a remarkable number of positive Steam recommendations based on its high-flying movement and vibrant art design.
GUIDE A STORY ABOUT MY UNCLE FULL
Now some of those students have gone on to form their own studio, Gone North Games, and cut a deal with Goat Simulator developer-cum-publisher Coffee Stain Studios to polish and release that prototype as a full game while they’re still in school.
GUIDE A STORY ABOUT MY UNCLE FREE
The team published their prototype online as a free game and left it there for over a year while they took a break to focus on their education. The rough prototype they built, a puzzle-platformer called A Story About My Uncle, wound up winning a Game of the Year nomination at the student-focused Swedish Game Awards that year. They had less than three months to do it, and zero experience with the Unreal Development Kit. “It’s been a really fun challenge to take on, because everybody who hears ‘first-person platforming’ gets a frowny face,” says Zethraeus.īack in 2012 he was part of a group of game design students at Sweden’s Sodertorns University who were tasked with building a non-violent first-person game in the Unreal Engine.
Sebastian Zethraeus co-founded a company to make it happen. Some developers cringe at the prospect of shipping a first-person platformer.
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