Why this indie dev built its own game engine to push pixel art further

Neverway's development could be described as the result of a game that allows more features to creep in, and is typical of the best indie games you'll play. As a farming life-sim RPG that's also a narrative-based psychological horror, it had more humble beginnings, originally as a Vampire Survivors clone, when it was also meant as a proof-of-concept for Murder, Coldblood Inc's own pixel art game engine created by co-founder Isadora Sophia.

"We had a vision for some things, like we knew we wanted to be horror, we wanted to have a narrative, and the farming mechanics were introduced to make the world feel alive somehow so that the story feels more real," she explains. "I think a lot of our approaches were like that, but always going through the vision that it's a horror narrative game."

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The DIY approach

While many indie devs have taken to third-party engines like Unity and Unreal Engine, which offer accessible tools such as visual scripting, Sophia comes from an architectural and coding background, having also previously worked as a software engineer at Microsoft before quitting to work on Neverway full-time.

"When I looked at Unity or those other alternatives that are always trying to make [the coding part] easy so you can focus on the game, I'm always having to reverse-engineer whatever they are doing so I can kind of do what we want," she explains. "That process is so tiring because they can just change and they can do things that I don't agree with because I'm usually very opinionated."

Murder is based on Microsoft's XNA free framework, which was used in many influential indie games, including Bastion, Fez and Celeste, the latter a game that Coldblood Inc's co-founder Pedro Medeiros was the pixel artist for. Although it's very much a code-based engine, it's also open-source as Sophia finds it important to spread her knowledge to others.

"When I was learning how to program, there were a lot of things, especially in games, that were kind of gatekept," she adds. "I always advocate for people having a little bit of background in coding because then there's a lot of knowledge you can reuse, and you can own it a little bit more."

Speed improvements

The benefit of developing an engine that's finely tuned to their needs is that it also allows them to work very fast, even though making a pixel art game also involves imposing a set of graphical limitations. "I try to avoid having limitations based on classic consoles, like this is more NES or Game Boy, but having arbitrary limitations like colour or resolution helps me to be more creative," Meideros explains.

Neverway's purposely limited colour palette was based on a mock-up from Medeiros that had been inspired by playing some of the best retro game consoles, with regular stints on Game Boy games on a Game Boy Color, where you had a choice of adding a basic palette to the existing game. "The idea was what if I, as a designer, chose the palette of the game, and then I could direct the mood of the game, and we also have a very strict resolution that applies to the UI and everything," he adds.

Rather than just emulating a pixel art aesthetic's limitations, Sophia suggests that this aesthetic choice allows them to fight the limitations, such as how the colour limitations actually enable Medeiros to draw more sprite animations faster. He also likens this to how pixel artists would have worked in the '90s. "When people were working on Super Nintendo, they didn't like pixel art, they hated pixel art, they were trying to push the detail as much as they could within those limitations," Medeiros explains.

Pixel art inspiration

Pixel art isn't the only aesthetic choice in Neverway as it also has a cute style that's typical of other top-down 2D games like Stardew Valley and classic Zelda games. But then pixel art can also veer towards a more mature art direction, such as Splatterhouse, Aliens 3, or Castlevania, the latter's assets also the inspiration behind Vampire Survivors. For Medeiros, the choice of a cute aesthetic isn't just to subvert it thematically, as your character's new life on a farm also involves becoming the immortal herald of a dead god, but also to amplify the horror.

"When I was young I was playing Final Fantasy Tactics, which has this very cute art, and there's this one scene where this dude just had a sword run through him and there's blood everywhere and I was very shocked," he recalls. "I really liked the contrast of all these cute tiny characters going through some really serious and hard stuff."

"I would say the cute aesthetics really amplify whatever is coming because when something is cute and kind of abstract, you project your ideas into it. I think the idea of something horrible happening is much stronger than whatever I can draw."

Neverway is coming to Nintendo Switch and PC in 2026 and you can wishlist it on Steam.