Developer Interview: Lil Gator Game

Back in 2017, Scott was working on the sequel to ZAK, a short sidescroller you can find on itch.io and Newgrounds (where it made the front page!). It was a really serious project with a lot of concrete jungle, underground sewer-type environments — not very uplifting to look at. So he started working on a game about silly little animals that made him happy instead.

Lil Gator Game is a Zelda homage on every level, all the way down. Also, we think Spike from My Little Pony is a cutie pie.

The light-hearted answer is 'cute kids for a cute game', but there's a less light-hearted answer too. Scott and I both have younger siblings and are very familiar with the struggle of maintaining a relationship with them, especially while work eats away at all your time and energy. This is a game about a kid with boundless energy learning that adults get tired, and that it's not the kid's fault.

Oh yeah. Spend two minutes in the demo, and it's pretty obvious we love Breath of the Wild to death. Scott is a huge Link's Awakening and Twilight Princess fan. My fave is Minish Cap. We're very invested in the "dialogue-focused games about animals with big eyes" subgenre too, a la ‘A Short Hike' and 'Night in the Woods'; both fantastic titles we highly recommend! We also regularly bring up all sorts of games we like while we're trying to communicate ideas to one another, "It's just like the UI in Game X, but I was imagining Game Y."

Robin and Scott got married this year, which involved Robin moving to Kentucky from the UK. That was an enormous thing that took up a lot of their energy for, like, six months? A year? Definitely the biggest challenge by far, haha. Other than that, just the usual imposter syndrome and burnout type stuff.

It has, actually. Not as much the gameplay, but certainly the aesthetic, the dialogue, the marketing… Kids worry about very different things than adults, and they have more limited access to tools and resources. We try to make the quest concepts, the props, and the player's toys all reflect that. I'll sometimes write a perfectly normal sentence and then read it back and go, "This character doesn't know half of these words." On a less savoury note, there's also the occasional weirdo comment on a post about the game. You know the kind I mean. Those kinds of comments hit way different when the characters are children. We're pretty set on an adult cast for whatever our next game is.

I love lil gator. I love the island. I love all the sounds and colours. Every time I boot up Unity, I get to see lil gator and make them waddle around and have a good time. I'm never bummed about going to work.

Have a rest, and then make another game! No time frame on that yet. We have agreed that we will NOT be internally discussing another game until we've cleaned our plate of THIS ONE first! Picture me furrowing my brow and wagging my finger at our whole team, myself included.

Truthfully, we just set it up because people asked for it. But yes, set up SOME sort of way for people to give you money. A Patreon with one or two tiers that say "thanks for the support!" or a Kofi you put in your tweet replies is an easy source of a lil passive income that can double as a pulse on your community. Just don't make the mistake of setting up a huge Patreon with a bunch of elaborate tiers before you have the following to make it worthwhile. Start small and build up!

We just wanted everything to be silly and fun. Every quest has a gag, every kid is figuring out who they are, [and] some of the toys are just a bit janky. Some of it is gameplay decisions that we justify in reverse, like of course a little kid moves fast and is invincible. But hey, making up the rules as you go along is a big part of being a kid too!

I actually drew us our own company profile pictures a while ago where everyone got to pick which animal they wanted to be. Can you guess who's who?

I used to love Ground. It's like tag, but the 'it' person keeps their eyes closed. They can tag you by touching you or yelling "GROUND" while you're on the ground. It was one of those games that naturally gatekept the big kids from the little kids because the little kids had neither the patience nor spatial awareness for it. Scott and Robin both say their favourite game was playing pretend!

You can wishlist Lil Gator Game on Steam right now! It will be out on PC and Switch before the end of 2022! You can catch updates about the game on Twitter! We get so many wonderful comments, and I read each and every one of them! Thanks everyone for the good vibes!