Eldelic Games studio shared the process behind "Inky Blinky Bob". The idea was born at a fair, with the goal of creating a streamable game. The result is a surreal nightmare where the player navigates a distorted world from a hot air balloon, fleeing from a giant demonic octopus.
The technical challenge of a flying octopus and an armed balloon 🐙
The biggest challenge was bringing Inky, the octopus, to life. Its size and proximity to the player required a high-detail model, discarding several iterations. The animation of its tentacles required manual work to achieve a weighted movement. Visual cohesion was achieved with a master shader in Unreal Engine 5, unifying the assets modified in Blender and Substance. The collision logic between the balloon and the creature was complex.
When your 6-month game decides to become a 5-hour odyssey ⏳
Their advice is to respect the project scope. What was planned for half a year extended to fourteen months. They started by adding content to islands that seemed empty, and suddenly, their short game had multiplied. They also learned that sometimes, forcing a vision into a prefabricated system can cost more time than writing the code from scratch.