Rose: For someone who has never heard of your game, how would you describe it without using the usual genre labels?
Meander is an art game with a lot of creative freedom and a high potential for chaos. You draw with crochet stitches, create new brushes, add movement to your brushes, and decorate your art in your scrapbook. There are references if you need inspiration but no goals or pressure. No wrong answers. You decide what you want to do with all the options the game is giving you.
Rose: Where did the idea for this game come from?
I was trying to learn crochet and gave up on it after the third migraine. So, I thought I’d make a game about it. The initial idea for this game was a 3D crochet simulator. This turned out to be impossible for someone with all of one month of gamedev experience. The next iteration was the crochet garden. You would create doodles on the crochet screen and they would work as seeds and you grow them in a garden and there would be a market and upgrades aaaaand… that didn’t work. I had a massive creative block when working on the garden. After failing to draw a tree for two weeks, I scrapped the garden part, and that’s how the scrapbook was born. There needed to be a way to display and share what you were making. I didn’t stick to a single idea during the development process. Stuff changed and grew because of necessity, or player feedback, or just because I had a cool idea.
Rose: What makes your game different from other games in the same space?
Cozy sandboxes like Tiny Glade are the inspiration for Meander. I looked at Tiny Glade and wished there was a way to make my own assets in the game. So, Meander lets you draw your own brushes instead of working with the limited set that I could draw. Compared to other drawing games, Meander is a pure sandbox without any story or goals or puzzles. It’s a mosaic of “wouldn’t it be cool if…” ideas that give you more and more options to be creative. Like glittery yarn and gradients and custom brushes. And then there’s the whole animation thing. You can draw paths and make your brushes move along them. It adds so much chaos and fun to the game and I haven’t seen that in any other game.
Rose: Was there anything you had to cut that you still secretly wish you could put back?
Garden. I loved the idea of having plushies grow on trees. If I make an actual 3D crochet simulator, it might make sense to have this section there, but for Meander, it simply does not work.
Rose: What is something players probably won't realize took an absurd amount of work?
The brushes. My art skills are mediocre now. When this project started, they were mostly non-existent. And I could’ve had the brushes just be simple cartoon style, but realism of the stitches was a huge part of the appeal of the game to me, so I tried and tried and tried again until I got the look right. It’s going to take even more work as I add more stitches and clean up the existing ones before the game is ready.
Rose: What is the weirdest bug you've encountered that you almost wanted to keep?
Oh, I kept it. If you draw fast, the stitches fall apart. This is a side effect of the way drawing is handled in my game. In the prototype, every mouse click would place a single stitch. This was not a drawing game back then; it was a 2D crochet simulator. “But wouldn’t it be fun if you didn’t have to click so much and could just hold the mouse?” The game checks mouse position per frame and places the stitch down wherever your mouse is… 1 per frame. So if you move too fast between frames, it won’t extrapolate any in-between stitches from the recorded mouse positions and they’ll look spread out. For context, other drawing games deal with strokes instead of stitches. So, multiple mouse positions while you’re holding the mouse down would be considered as part of one stroke. The game doesn’t need to know every point you’ve been at to calculate the curve being drawn. This doesn’t work for Meander because of the spacing and rotation calculations needed for each stitch. Also, I just like it. It gives you more control over the spacing, it encourages slowing down, it fits with the crochet theme.
Rose: Is there a particular emotion you wanted players to walk away with from your game?
Joy. I hope people have fun with whatever they choose to make.
Rose: What's one piece of advice you wish you'd had before starting?
I wish I’d just started sooner. I avoided everything where success depended on some sort of popularity metric. I should’ve tried it anyway… but better late than never.
Rose: Five years from now, what do you hope people remember about this game?
People remembering this game in five years would already be an accomplishment beyond my hopes.
Rose: Why should someone reading/watching this go play your game today?
Because it’s fun and sometimes funny and you can make your own stuff in it and trying new things is good.
Rose: Finally, the question we ask every developer: After everything you’ve told us, can you officially confirm that your game is, in fact, probably a game? Why should we believe you?
It’s definitely probably a game. I made it and I say so. :p