Painted Peril placed second in The Very Big Indie Pitch at Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki. It's a roguelike game about unleashing the power of colours and discovering the ability to combine them into powerful spells, developed by a small Finnish team.
The Very Big Indie Pitch is a "speed-dating"-style pitching competition where developers have only five minutes to present their game to a panel of experts. They then move to the next table of experts, repeating this process four or five times. It's intense, fast, and a good way to practice quick-fire pitching! It's also a route for meeting the press, veteran developers and industry insiders, so The Very Big Indie Pitch is a valuable networking addition to the conference programme.
We host Big Indie Pitches alongside a number of events throughout the year, including all of the Pocket Gamer Connects events all around the world (where it gets the Very Big upgrade).
For some insight into what The Very Big Indie Pitch is like, here's developer Emil Ekroth of Message Photon to talk about Painted Peril. It impressed our judges, taking home 2nd place. In addition to the pitch, the game was showcased in the Pitching Zone area, where the event's attendees were able to play and enjoy it.
Tell us a little about yourself and your indie studio. Who's on the team, and what are their inspirations?
This project started about 1.5 years ago as a university course project at Chalmers University of Technology. We started out as a group of six students coming together to develop the first prototype of Painted Peril.
After around two months of development, we took the game to the Gotland Game Conference, where we won the Jury Spotlight Award.
After the conference and the university course ended, some of us continued to do some infrequent development on the project [alongside] our studies for another year. This continued until this summer when we, the two remaining developers, decided to take up the development of the game properly again to finish the project and see where it could take us in the future.
Painted Peril is a roguelike game that lets you mix your own spells using colour magic. Playing as Sylvia the squirrel, the player needs to navigate their way through a vast and varied cave system to make their way back up to Sylvia's treehouse.
At the core of our gameplay lies a combination of colour effects and spellcasting mechanics that let the player combine several different spells on the fly. Sylvia has the ability to steal colour from enemies. These colours serve as their own unique building blocks, each with its own effects, such as draining the enemy's health or setting them ablaze.
That's not all. The game also contains several different bottles that shape the player's spells. When you take colour from enemies, you collect it into a bottle, combining the effect of the colour with the behaviour of the bottle. Experimentation and tactical decision-making, therefore, become paramount as you decide which colours to mix and which spells to combine to best achieve success in each encounter.
How hard is it to survive as an indie developer?
Surviving as an indie developer is difficult and takes a lot of effort, but it is very fun. You have the freedom and obligation to do a bit of everything all of the time, which gives you a varied experience in different parts of game development, such as game design, system engineering, marketing and business administration.
Surviving as an indie developer is often about trying to make your limited budget stay intact, of course, but it is also about finding and keeping your drive when things are overwhelming.
How was your experience pitching as a part of the Very Big Indie Pitch?
Pitching at the Big Indie Pitch was an enlightening experience that allowed us to get more experience pitching our game. The speed pitching format forced us to prioritize pitching only the most important aspects of it.
It was both challenging and interesting to describe a rather complex game with several mechanics that influence each other in as few words as possible. It was also fun to discuss and answer the judges' questions.
One of the most important learning experiences from pitching at the Big Indie Pitch was to describe things as simply as possible while hinting that there is always more depth to the gameplay systems.
What are your hopes for this game in the future, and do you have any plans for any additional projects?
Currently, we are looking into different ways of publishing the game, both by seeking interested publishers and making a backup plan for self-publishing the game on Steam. Projects after that are still undecided.
Want to show off your exciting new game? We host Very Big Indie Pitch events throughout the year, so be sure to keep an eye out on our events page for an event near you. Applications for Pocket Gamer Connects London are now open and filling up fast!
