We've seen some great recent indie games made using real-world craftmanship. Harold Halibut and The Midnight Walk both featured clay models and stopmotion animation. But apparently some people think such a painstaking approach is destined to fail.
The Swedish Indie developer Räfven Studios is currently making a game (also called Räfven) with models made from clay, foam and materials found in nature. One of their teams says that while attending a game conference, they were warned that their handcrafted process was too slow for them to be able to compete with other games.
Räfven is described as an atmospheric adventure that involves exploring forgotten places, solving environmental puzzles and distracting strange creatures to slip past them.
The pessimistic comment received by the game's developers has sparked a debate over on Reddit. Some agree that developing an indie game requires a certain amount of efficiency.
“At this rate, your development is going to take SO long, that your tech will be outdated and the market will have changed to a point where it might never see the light of day,” one person says.
However, others have pointed out that developers like Team Cherry spend a long time building games slowly.
Fortunately, the studio hasn't been put off. “There's something special about gathering materials and making them by hand, it gives the game a certain visual feeling which would take more time to replicate digitally,” the developer writes in the post. “I think there's a strength in taking inspiration directly from nature and turning it into a experience in a game format!”
This kind of game might remain relatively niche, but I'm glad there are studios that continue to take such an artistan approach to game design in these times when there's so much AI slop turning up. From the very brief footage available to see so far, Räfven looks beautifully atmospheric, and I look forward to seeing more.
What do you think? Is there a case for a slow game design movement?
You can wishlist Räfven on Steam. For more inspiration, see our other features on indie game developers.
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