jozerphine

We started concepting for the game in person, when we could laugh and brainstorm with abandon. After we moved further apart, we did a lot of concepting by passing sketches and movie clips back and forth, explaining how we thought games would work. A lot of our games started out with an alligator sketch from the SmallBus and a silly design sketch from Pillow Fight like this one.

We'd pass ideas back and forth until creative had enough to animate, and then dev would build around the art!

All four of us vibe really well, so the whole game was making each other laugh. I wrote Majima's dating sim in one day, and we built it without showing Lindsay the script, so she could experience the whole thing as a complete game.

We also wanted the whole game to feel funny, all over! So I asked 2 Mello to include musical jokes (slide whistles, some deliberate off notes and weird rhythms), and we included some programming goofs as well. My fave was probably the sliding block helper box. Conrad pitched it, then made it move really, really, really slowly. I laugh every time I see it!

Later Alligator is our first Nintendo game, but not our last!

The easy way is to find a publisher who's published to Nintendo Switch before. The harder way is to self-publish--you can pitch your game directly to their team by contacting these folks. You need a really tight pitch deck; we came back multiple times with ours!

After that, it's just hard work doing the port. We build on Unity, which makes it "easier", but we still had to do a lot of controller changes, memory access changes, and the art compression was totally different from PC.