Everyone, welcome to our fourth development blog post!
Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo has been in development for a long time now. Today we’re looking into our development journey and how we landed on the idea of a time-loop journey helping souls in the land of the dead!
If you haven’t had a chance yet, you can read our previous blogs here, here and here!
The journey to the making of Kulebra’s journey.
We have a Bluesky account!
Before anything else, we’d like to let you know we have an official Bluesky account. It’s a good place to keep up to date with the game’s development! Give us a follow!
Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo’s Origins
As you may already know, our first game before Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo was an endless scroller for Android and iOS where you would avoid obstacles by zig-zagging in a journey through a land called Limbo. The game was called “Culebra.” Sounds familiar, yeah?
The environment would change depending on how far you got.
Originally, the main character was intended to be a living snake, but we just couldn’t get the tail right. It was pretty hard to achieve a long seamless tail in the game engine, it would look like blocks following each other. In order to get around this, we went through a lot of ideas and permutations, eventually ending up with the skeleton design which allowed us to separate the tail into parts without it looking weird. The rest of the theme was born around the solution to that one limitation!
I’d never imagine how far that one decision would take us.
After we finished the mobile game’s development, we completed our goal of having a smaller scale project out there, but we thought that the world and characters of this game had potential for much more than what we could do on our first steps into game development. We decided to take the concept and re-imagine it for an adventure game focused on helping souls move to the afterlife. That idea was closer to the games we felt helped us start our game dev journey. The games we loved, and still love, playing.
Our First Steps
The core gameplay and lore aspects of the game were set very early on. You’re a snake that wakes up in Limbo, tasked with helping other souls solve their lingering problems and allowing them to finally rest. The souls in Limbo are trapped in a time-loop, and you’ll need to account for their routine to find the breadcrumbs that’ll lead you to your goal of helping them move on from this, well, Limbo.
We originally started with a first-person visual novel perspective. You would interact with the environment and characters with a cursor.
Concept art for the first-person view version of the game.
We eventually decided to experiment with a 3rd-person perspective. We decided that having a tangible presence in Limbo is a very important part to make it feel alive, so to speak! We started with a little space as proof of concept, experimenting with different art styles as we put things together.
Our very first build!
The First Demo
After cleaning up the visuals, we decided to start working on a small prologue that would work as a sample of the game in our spare time. This prologue eventually became the first chapter of the game and the demo that’s currently available for play.
We started development in 2017 using our spare time. Throughout our work in the demo,we managed to settle on a structure for the game. Everything fell into place.
The journey to our first demo.
The demo ended up being a lot bigger than we expected. We were very happy with the result and the reception of it. After a complete demo, a successful Kickstarter campaign, and the support from our publishing partner, Fellow Traveller, we finally had what we needed to kick things into full gear!
Through working on the demo, we nailed what Kulebra was all about!
Game Development
Since 2022, we’ve been working on the full version of Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo. We’ve taken a “multiple passes” approach. We worked on a chapter draft from start to finish, and then we moved to the next one until we had a draft of the complete game. Then we returned at the start and started polishing each chapter again, making our way forward to the ending.
Chapter Development
We start with a draft of the chapter: A very simple version that has a lot of placeholders, but it’s playable from start to finish. On our second pass, we start adding colors and music and work on adjusting gameplay and story elements. We do the same on our third pass, but at this point we make sure we reach a “complete” look: No more placeholder assets.
A visual representation of our “passes” approach.
We might make some additional passes to some areas that can be tweaked here and there, but at this point we’re mostly set. This method goes for all aspects of the game: story, gameplay, art, dialogue, music, all of it!|
The final version is always smaller in size. Nice and compact is better!
Characters
Using this method with the characters, we start with one still black and white image as part of the draft phase. Later we refine the design and add animations to it, though they remain in black and white. Once we have all the animations we need, we proceed to color them to finish it.
Draft, black and white, and final.
Development Report
We report on our progress on our Kickstarter page every month on how the game’s development is going. Our backers trust us to complete the game, so it’s important for us to let them know that we’re fulfilling our promise! If you’re curious about seeing them, you can see all our development posts here!
And we’re still going! The latest one was in December!
And more to go!
Thanks for reading our piece on the development process of Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo! We hope it was informative on top of being fun. Personally speaking, looking through old versions of the game makes me realize just how much we’ve put into this game.
There’s still more for us to do, but we’re very excited to reach the end of the road! Thank you for joining us in the journey to the release of the game, and we’ll be seeing you on our next blog post. Bye!
A silly sketch we found in our old files: Kulebra being used as a weapon.