Interview With the Developers Behind Kombinera

Phil and I have been best friends since 6th grade. Phil ended up doing art at Graphite Lab, while I was on a totally different path (Biology degree, pre med). However, I still wanted to learn how to make games. So in my last semester at St. Louis University, I got Phil to do Brackey’s Game Jam with me. The theme was “Stronger Together” and the prototype of Kombinera came out of that. We wanted to keep working on it after the fact and Phil had shown it to his coworkers at Graphite Lab. Matt Raithel really enjoyed it and offered to pitch it to some publishers. Atari jumped on it! So then I was brought in to Graphite Lab and we started developing the game into what we see today.

It was great! Phil and I worked with a great team that helped to enact our vision. Though we had a vision from the start, our team did a great job bouncing ideas off each other and working collaboratively toward something that would work the best. Atari was very supportive of our vision and goals. We ended with a product that we are immensely proud of.

I don’t think it’s too different from any other form of game development, a lot of the same disciplines are used, it’s just a matter of how they’re applied and what you focus most of your energy on. The end goal is always the same, and that’s to make something that’s fun to play and that you can be proud of!

It was a great learning experience; I’ve worked on other games before, but this was the first original title that I’ve had the pleasure of working on. It’s much different being able to establish and execute your own vision as opposed to working for clients and trying to execute their vision for a game

The importance of communication, I learned, is key to bringing a vision to life. I saw all the ways we had great communication and achieved what we wanted in a good time frame. I also can look back at times where I had failed to communicate something well from the start and how that would slow us down at times. Being in a position of leadership on this game showed how much responsibility there rests on design leads and how much that can affect the overall development.

A lot of the design for Kombinera was born out of necessity due to it originally being created in a game jam. We wanted to keep things very simple so we could really focus on gameplay, though it still has its fair share of influences. I think one that will make sense to a lot of people is Thomas was Alone, another shape-based minimal puzzle platformer; other games that I’ve enjoyed in the past contributed to Kombinera’s DNA as well, Sound Shapes, LIMBO, and FEZ just to name a few.

For me, I crave mental challenges. I loved my college logic classes, I enjoy chess, and when I adapted that thinking to the structure of this game, out came Kombinera. I wanted something that challenged me to create, as much as it challenged others to beat.

The final product really stays true to the original vision of the game, but grew it to a much larger scale.

The vision stayed the same, the skill to produce it grew. Many of my levels from the original were either scrapped or redesigned to become a more cohesive whole.

We were looking for ways to add a little more personality and create ways for people to relate to the characters since they’re just simple shapes. We experimented with different ideas like adding faces to them and other things like that, but ultimately the emotes blended really well with the minimal aesthetic and helped bring the characters to life.

I spent a lot of time trying to make a perfect first 20 levels. I watched a lot of people play those levels, I changed them, replayed them, tweaked some more. Trying to give that balance of learning without smacking a tutorial in the player's face was hard but important. I think what we ended with really does well to demonstrate the game in a straightforward way without babying the player. Though levels in the end of the first chapter can be a sticking point for many players, once they see the solution, they realise how easy it can be and it greatly prepares them for the rest of the game.

Level 66 is the one I’m personally most proud of, I didn’t get to spend a lot of time designing levels, but that’s one that I made and ended up in the final release.

This is a very tough question. Level 30 is a design people will come to recognise because I was able to use that same structure in multiple unique ways that kept things fresh and challenged you to think differently. However levels 289 and 300 are probably two of my masterpieces.

Joystick will continue to pursue new ideas and keep creating; we’re beyond excited to have had Kombinera as our first project, but it’s far from the last!

Kombinera is a great first game. [We’re] beyond proud of it and we are excited to explore new ideas and creative dreams. Between the two of us, I’m sure this will not be the last time people play a Joystick game!