Hallå pals!
Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.
It was my birthday this Sunday! I had a chill day at home, playing some video games, read comics (The Gulf by Adam De Souza) and then we went to my favorite sushi place for dinner. We tried rice dough skewers, the texture was perfect!
Next Thursday is May 2nd - the release date of Surmount. Three years of intense work will become available for the world to see. Crazy!
3 years ago…
I made this concept sketch after me and Jasper decided to work on this climbing game together.
The sketch isn’t all that different from how the game turned out. The biggest difference is the cheerfulness of the final game. Originally I wanted to make a very artsy and contemplative experience. It still has aspects of that. But now it’s more like an alternative universe Nintendo-game.
Lots of people assume the game is a coop party game, or something in the vein of Overcooked. Which is sooomewhat true, but it’s not what makes the game special to me. What I love about the game is that the mountain is really tall, there are no enemies, the vibes are great and you just get to climb and climb and zone-out.
I hope the people who come to the game for the coop aspect of it will like the coop. And I hope somehow people will realize that it’s not just a short party game. When I have the game in front of me it all kinda makes sense, but when I have to talk about it I struggle to describe it.
Part of me wishes we had made the game EVEN WEIRDER or that we had made it a bit more normal so it would fit more neatly into some kind of genre. It’s hard to say who the game is for since climbing games are so new.
Mini Note
📝 Blog post - The quiet climbing game revolution
Here’s a collection of a bunch of climbing games I’ve been keeping track of. I think climbing might be on the way to become a thing/genre..? It’s odd cause it’s a “sport”, but I don’t really see it as one because it’s such a natural verb compared to “football.”
What makes a climbing game:
Focus on movement.
Fight against gravity.
Panel of the week
(from )
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Take care and have a creative week.
Happy birthday and congrats! Excited to see how it does!
Happy birthday! Mine is in 2 days :)
It's gonna be awesome to download Surmount from the eShop and finally play it!
Last night, I was a bit restless and decided to look around the eShop and I looked for Surmount in the list of upcoming games. The top of the list was a game called "Insurmountable" -- I kind of had to do a double take there. It's another climbing game but it couldn't be more different from Surmount.
I think games as a whole are still struggling with a significant narrative problem. You want something that is fun and engaging but how do you "funnel" all of that play and interactivity into something that is also meaningful and fulfilling? A game about climbing a mountain, I think, has turned out to be a great solution to this problem. Everyone understands the meaning of reaching the top of a mountain, how what we are really climbing is ourselves, deep down, and how the mountain and the game serve as metaphors for each other. The mechanics and interactivity all become a bit meaningful insofar as they relate to climbing the mountain. Every step of progress is evident as well as any step back.
To sum up my thesis: the mounting climbing game is a beautiful confluence of meaning and mechanics.
(Now that my coffee stained thesis has been turned in, I gotta pull of the lab coat and get some fresh air, as I'm nervously awaiting the year-long review process...)