After spending countless hours testing concepts and game mechanics, including researching what really made the games in the 90’s – I am excited to be announcing both my first main project, and also the expansion of the Pixelmoon Team!

. ~ * Project: Kariko * ~ .

Overview

Project Kariko is an action-adventure RPG that gives players an open-world sandbox to explore – where you’re free to create your own adventures.  Gather materials to build and place your own structures, harvest crops to eat and trade with the local villagers or venture down one of the many randomly generated dungeons in the hope of finding rare treasures!

Key Features

  • An open, procedural generated world to explore with randomly generated dungeons
  • Interact with and change your environment by collecting resources, mining and placing player structures
  • Intuitive crafting system to create weapons, tools and more
  • Grow and harvest your own crops and food
  • Day and night system

How we got there!

The prototype was pulled together using Gamemaker Studio, and drew inspiration from a number of my favourite games.  I grew up on a healthy diet of Zelda – A Link to the Past, Illusions of Time, Harvest Moon and Pokemon.  The combination of simple game mechanics, charming pixel art and genius design meant that even to this day, there are few games that have come close to matching the way these made me feel.

Further to this when you look into some of the major successes recently such as Minecraft, Terraria and even some of the older MMOs such as Star Wars – Galaxies, there were certain things that I felt were a key ingredient to the games success.  That component was the notion of ‘creating a base’.  What I mean by this is that these games gave players the opportunity to create something of their own within the game – it was the ability to impart some of their imagination.  I spent hours creating player made towns in Galaxies, and countless car journeys organising my crops in Harvest Moon.

As mentioned above, the other major development for Pixelmoon is the addition of Josh Foster!  The Californian will be leading development as we take the prototype and port it across to Unity.  Josh got in contact after a post looking for assistance with Unity, and we both shared a huge passion for games!  What’s more is that he learned C# purely for the love it and has great experience in multiplayer coding.

Expect to see some developments being posted soon 🙂