If a game’s team all begin at once, they must start off working with a vague and incomplete design. Problems can be resolved before release but this tends to involve artists and programmers redoing work. To streamline Kim’s development, I wanted to have as complete a design as possible in place before bringing other team members on board. I knew we’d still end up iterating – however much you plan ahead, you have to remain flexible, not all your ideas will work – but I set out to write the whole GDD (game design document) and I had the perfect downtime in which to do it.

In March, 2014, I was commuting to a studio in Brighton from London, a 90 minute journey each way on relatively empty trains since most people have the good sense to live outside London and travel in. I took my laptop and started to write and rewrite the document that would define every system in the game. Today it’s on its 22nd version and numbers a modest 26 pages (some GDDs exceed 100!) The Sussex countryside was a delightful distraction; Twitter didn’t help either...

Kipling's beloved Sussex

As systems came together, I created content to test them, for example, as I designed the means of transport Kim would use on his travels, I started working on the map made up of five biomes and 17 towns of different sizes. As I considered combat, I designed weapons and looked at how Kim’s stats would affect their performance. Today we have 22 spreadsheets containing data to control everything from what proportion of a level’s inhabitants will be Hindus to what you might find in any of 14 types of dwelling, were you to sneak inside.

The map in spreadsheet form

The map in game

The final piece of the design puzzle, which came later, was the conversations with the myriad characters of Kipling’s and our own creation. I’d read Kim twice and listened to the audiobook when I started my final and forensic pass but it never lost its lustre. This time I pasted the entire novel into a document (thank you Project Gutenberg!) and split it into discreet scenes. Then I trimmed and stitched these into dialogues involving 2 characters and a narrator. The best of what was cut became our 84 loading screen quotes. I added dialogues from Kipling’s Indian short stories and some of my own for gameplay scenarios not yet covered. We’ve exceeded 150 now and while I’ve tried to keep them from becoming too long, Kipling’s sublime prose has a habit of defying the scalpel!

On the campaign front, this week our total passed the halfway mark with a little over half our days remaining and we were very excited to be included in Kotaku’s list of most anticipated adventure games of 2016!