Maybe some of you are asking yourselves what exactly is “Sir Eatsalot” and how did we come up with the idea to create a game with a gluttonous knight.
Many moons ago I (Slawa) had the concept of the idea, while sitting in German lessons.
I drew two circles in my notebook and named the (let’s call it a) “human” Sir Eatsalot. I thought that was a neat pun.
Little did I know that this scribble was the base of a game and the foundation of our indie-studio.
At this point many thanks to my German teacher for his deadly boring class!
My study started and soon I was bored by the theory. I wanted to do something on my own. Inspired by the success of indie-game like Braid, Castle Crashers, Limbo and many more I thought: “Hey! I could never accomplish that on my own!”
Right, I realised that my programming skills aren’t up to scratch, since I started actual programming with the course of studies.
No alternatives than to learn and exercise.
While reading a lot of books and watching tutorials, I met Monika. I was impressed by her art skills and asked her if she’d be interested in developing a game together. A game where you control a pudgy knight called Sir Eatsalot, who is righteous but also gluttonous.
She thought the idea was cute, but it was obvious that the protagonist is not enough on his own.
So we started to think:
– what about the gameplay?
– which tools are we going to use?
– what’s going to be the target platform?
– which perspective? (2D, 2.5D or 3D)
– what kind of genre?
Especially the target platform gave us some headaches. Consoles were a no go, since we hadn’t any possibilities and no proven skills to tackle these beasts. Steam on the other hand gave us the opportunity with Greenlight, but we were intimidated and thought we couldn’t satisfy the requirements of the platform and the PC community.
So we looked at the iOS App Store. The wealth of hundreds of different apps and games slained us.
We were afraid; would we be able to keep up? The answer turned out to be quite easy: we didn’t have to.
For weeks we played different games and analysed them. We realized that a lot of them resemble.
It didn’t matter if it was an Endless-Runner or a Strategy-Game.
Similar functionality, similar structur. It gave us the impression that these games are kind of standardised.
We didn’t want out game to be a clone of another game. So we thought that the game should be different from the start. We wanted the game to be the odd one out, but in a lovely way. The concept shouldn’t also exceed our developing skills.
The result was something we called 2D Jump’n’Walk.
“Sir Eatsalot” should be the kind of game where you could just stop and examine the handcrafted environment. That’s why we put a lot of detail in the overall level design.
Beyond that we are implementing also a quest-system in order to motivate the player to revisit certain levels again. This allows us to create funny quests and gives us the opportunity to tell more about the world of Sir Eatsalot and its residents.
We know that “Sir Eatsalot” is not a revolution of the 2D Jump’n’Run-Genre. But we even don’t want it to be a revolution.
Our goal is to express our love to videogames and to gain experience to establish ourselves as developers.
The game with the pudgy knight is different than the dominant games on the App Store, and we think that’s a good thing.