My initial plan for this game was to make an experience for what it would be like to be a “monster.” But when I thought about it I realised that what defines a monster is not the creature itself but our reaction to it. That led me in a somewhat relentless and melancholic direction.

A troll’s life

My inspiration for the style of this game was the early home computer games of the 80s like Frak.

I painted the sprites in the Gimp directly onto the canvas. This was somewhat laborious. I’ll look for a better pixel editor if I decide to create any pixel animations in the future.

The only useful feature of the Gimp I used was in producing the flash effect for the lumberjack selfie.

Other than that it was all pixel by pixel painting. I’d like to have got a few more frames into the troll walk cycle to give the animations a little more bounce, but I started late and was already running short of time.

I think in depicting the troll’s death I was unconsciously influenced by the pictures of the death of Cecil the lion. I think that helped to capture the mood I was going for:

With the music I lucked out. I tried several of the tools in an attempt to create a sombre backing track. On my very first try with Otomata, as I was testing the ability to capture a wav, I got exactly the feeling I was after by pure chance. (I was unable to recreate it over several subsequent attempts.) So I edited the capture I had into a loop and went with that.