Talking to people like you, payroll management and it’s just tough.Įvery process is like a totally new thing for us. So we kinda understand the development cycle but when you’re doing something by yourself there are so many more things you have to worry about. We’ve all worked together, and I’d say we’ve all got 8/9 years working in gaming. Grant: This is like our first game, so everything is just like new. Well, I would probably say the obvious answer is – Grant: That’s a.uh, that’s a complicated question. Q: What posed the biggest challenge during development? RELATED: Indie Developer Stonewheat and Sons Discuss What It Takes to Make an Indie Game Joel: It’s really cool at conventions, the sort of flip side of that, when two people are complete strangers start talking to each other while they’re playing, like “Okay, I’ll do this, you do this,” and just trying to figure out, “Oh we both have to hit this button at the same time.” If you don’t know what your partner wants to do like we’ve had people come to play the game who don’t know each other and they just kind of sit there silently. We’ve taken the game to a lot of conventions and seen people play and one thing that we’ve noticed is when people are new to the game they just kind of follow each other around. There’s coordination, and it’s harder in some ways because you actually have to coordinate whereas with yourself you just know what you want to do. In multiplayer it’s more about communication and I think that’s kind of where the original idea began. There are a bunch of cool little tricks you can figure out to do things more efficiently, or leave the kiwis somewhere. The hot-swap is more natural but you can’t take advantage of the two Kiwi’s quite as well but you can still move them both at the same time. It’s like your left and right hands and you’re moving your hands around at the same time trying to do stuff. Once you get used to it, it’s really interesting. We were thinking “What would that look like?” and we ended up sketching a kiwi bird wearing a radio headset. One was “Your game must contain a bird protagonist.” We were just kind of brainstorming ideas and we liked the idea of postal birds that couldn’t fly, had to work a desk job instead. There’s a theme of the event, which was “transmission,” and they were like “Interpret that however you want, whether by radio, or virus, or whatever.” Also, we picked some random modifiers that they had to help you narrow your game down. We had 48 hours to make a game, the four of us. We prototyped KeyWe during Global Game Jam 2018, I think it was. Joel: It just seemed like the obvious choice.

Q: Why did you decide on Kiwis as the game's mascot? RELATED: How Rare and Terry Pratchett Inspired KeyWe

With their numbers shrunk to three, the team feels the weight that comes with creating a game from scratch, not having the same resources as a bigger developer. Recently, Game Rant was able to sit down with Joel Davis and Grant Gessel from Stonewheat and Sons to discuss the game. This is the first game from the indie development team Stonewheat and Sons, who first prototyped the game at Global Game Jam 2018 with a team of only four developers.

Keywe initial release date