Unreal Engine 5 has been customised to deliver a Ghibli-like painterly art style for upcoming indie game Crescent County

Creative director and Electric Saint co-founder Anna Hollinrake is a big fan of genre mashups and believes that is the case for many other people too.

You can really see it in her studio's upcoming debut game Crescent County, a kind of modern-day Kiki's Delivery Service where you play as young witch Lu making deliveries around the titular open world but on her motorbroom, a cross between a magic broomstick and a motorbike with all its different customisable mechanical parts.

Anna tells me, "It's often said that if you go far enough into the future, science would be indistinguishable from magic, which isn't necessarily the same in Crescent County, but I do like applying a slightly sciency lens."

She adds: "I'm trying to figure out how the magic leylines work, how people get their power from them, how they would interact with on a day-to-day level. I've always been really drawn to both fantasy and sci-fi, but I love slightly grimy down-to-earth sci-fi where a lot of time has been baked in."

Crescent County promises a colourful mashup

The motorboom concept has been a preoccupation of Anna's as far back as 2017 while working as a concept and environment artist at other studios, including as art lead at Mediatonic for Fall Guys.

She says, "It's a real mixture of all of the things that I love – this scrappy, punk, do-it-yourself world and subculture that takes inspiration from things like roller derby, to Ghibli-esque environments, with these big open landscapes of big puffy clouds that can probably come straight from Wind Waker."

The small-knit bootstrapped dev team, consisting of just herself and co-founder Pavle Mihajlovic, as well several freelancers, has achieved this vision with impressive results already thanks to Unreal Engine 5, notably having tools that easily allow the creation of open worlds like Crescent County's where you can make deliveries but also have races.

While Unreal Engine 5's big headline features tend to favour games targeting a photorealistic look, Crescent County crucially maintains the painterly aesthetic as if leaping straight from Anna's own illustrations, which requires a bit more engine customisation.

"Pavle slightly changed the way that Unreal renders things so that it renders in a more stylised manner," she explains. "We'd look at my illustrations and my concepts and the way that I will, for example, paint shadows on props, then take that and apply it to the in-game shaders. I don't like to shade with grey unsaturated colours, I'll always use something pale to add a real juicy saturation, for example. When light meets shadow there'll be quite a saturated band of colour, and other little things that make it look quite painterly. I think it's worked quite well so far."

While Crescent County was announced last year, Electric Saint has not been able to secure a publishing deal so far, which is the reason behind the decision to launch a Kickstarter campaign. (In a past interview Anna shared the challenges of starting a game studio.)

"Publishers don't necessarily want to go for new IP right now," says Anna, reflecting on the current dire straits of the games industry, with mass layoffs and funding drying up. "But the announcement went really well and we've got a bunch of wishlists, so we really think that there is a market for the game and there are people that clearly resonate with it," she adds.

Getting character design right

What likely also resonates strongly are the queer witches Lu meets, who you'll be able to befriend and date, with one emphasis on the Kickstarter campaign being that there will be kissing on the mouth. That may sound chaste in a post-Baldur's Gate 3 world, yet more substantial in indie games where intimacy in relationships is often left to the player's imagination.

So then, what makes a well-designed romanceable character that isn't just a walking thirst trap? "It feels kind of obvious to say it, but just treat them as regular people," she says. "They have fashion that's influenced by their interests and the things that they do. For example, Bo is a leyline technician, so although she's got a kind of harness that I suppose does exist for thirst reasons, it's so that she can go up and down leyline pylons. She wears a lot of active wear because she's quite sporty, her motorbroom, which is quiote dirtbike-inspired, also reflects that."

When it comes to designing characters in general, Hollinrake says it's also important to find archetypes so that someone isn't reduced to a single theme. "Lu is kind of like a klutz and a bit goofy, Bo is much more sporty, Aster is quite nerdy," she explains. "I'm currently working on a new character called Mara, who is pretty aloof and distant, so I'm trying to find ways to represent that as well in their character design."

Of course, the crucial part of making a good romanceable character comes down to the narrative, which the team had spent around 18 months developing in a writers room environment.

"You want to give them a big meaty flaw right in the middle of their character, which affects how they approach the world or informs their decision-making, some kind of trauma or anxiety," she concludes. "That is the thing that drives interesting characters because conflict and resolution will naturally come out of that. I don't know if you can fix them, but you can support them through it."

You can back Crescent County's Kickstarter campaign now, and try out the demo on Steam. Read our best game development software guide to get started yourself.