Before I started on Kingdom of Kuru, I was developing a different game but having a real hard time as a one man team. My drawing skills were barely novice and my animation skills were terrible on a good day. The prices of assets added up quick too! But, I loved game development so I stuck with it.

The main character Lilu, a fun loving witch from a previous concept I was working on.

As my lease came to a close, the person I was going to rent a place with bailed. It was 14 days before I was pretty much homeless. I had no family nearby so I reached out to friends. There were no leads the first few days. Let’s just say panic was an understatement for what I was feeling. I decided to  reach out to John, a leasing agent I was on friendly terms with.

Well, instead of finding me a place, he offered me a room  in 3 bedroom townhome with him and his roommate.  It was hard going from renting an entire apartment to renting just a room… but we all got along well enough. Within a few weeks, it felt like a friendship that spanned years.

A couple months in, during a random conversation, John’s roommate, Brian mentioned he wanted to design for a video game. The clouds parted, a ray of light came through the window and angels sang! We got along, he was an artist, passionate and did I mention he was an ARTIST! As we spoke more, I learned we had similar interests in books, some games we’ve played and philosophies on life. So, we partnered up.

We began throwing ideas around. Some good, some bad, some hilariously terrible. It was a fun process. We didn’t really think anything of it at first – we were just excited. One day while Brian was out, I decided to play around with a game engine he had mentioned, Construct. When he got back, I already had a proof of concept for a platform game. I could see the wheels in his head turning and and he immediately began illustrating our first character.

We both loved Mario, Sonic, Donkey Kong and games of the like. We wanted our game to bring back the magic of these classics. But, at the same time we wanted to display diversity when it came to characters. Our ideas became more focused, but I had no experience writing a story with someone before. It started off a bit shaky. We agreed here, disagreed there, threw some ideas away, kept others. I suddenly understood the jokes about developers and designers being unable to understand each other. After a few days of brainstorming, our communication began to improve and resolving conflicts became easier. Synergy was forming and our story was coming together – The Kingdom of Kuru was born!