Solo Developer on Creating a Black-and-White Adventure Game About a Clockwork Toy
Jamie Rowan joined us to talk about Lelu, a monochromatic action-adventure game, and discussed its core mechanics, the inspirations behind it, and various aspects of its technical development.
Introduction
My name is Jamie, and I'm a Solo Developer from the UK currently living in northern Sweden. Lelu began a long time ago when I was prototyping ideas for a small-scale Metroidvania, where the character would unlock basic things like movement directions.
This culminated in one of my first releases, "Clockwork Kingdom," which, as you can see from these screenshots, shares some DNA with what would eventually become Lelu.
A few years and many, many other game ideas, prototypes, and failures later, I decided to revamp this game and make it into a full-scale Steam release. Almost everything got entirely changed, but the base concept remained the same: "a monochromatic adventure exploration game about a toy factory." I added combat, a much larger world, new items, and a higher-fidelity art style, which now uses a combination of 3D art and traditional pixel art.
Core Mechanics
Many of the core mechanics of Lelu are very reminiscent of the 2D The Legend of Zelda games I grew up playing. One of the main mechanics (which is also my favorite) is the timed "parry/reflect" action, which you learn very early on in the game. This evolved from playtesting with various people. Originally, the player could swing their wrench and reflect anything without giving timing or positioning much thought.
Someone suggested using the "charge" as part of the parry, so now players must hold, charge, and release at the right time to reflect projectiles. This ended up making much more use of the wrench item, while also being much more satisfying for players to perform.
Influences and Technical Development
The main inspirations are quite on the nose for a game like Lelu: The Legend of Zelda and Metroid. But I tried to add my own spin to both of those franchises. Visually, I've always liked minimalism, whether that's in games, art, or general life. Minit was a big inspiration for how to make black-and-white pixel art look good.
Return of the Obra Dinn was another inspiration for how to make 3D models look good with a monochromatic color palette. Using only 2 colors is a great limitation for a solo developer, as it allowed me to make assets relatively quickly, but a lot of thought and time had to go into shading and making sure that all the assets are readable.
My general process when developing is to prototype lots of mechanics and actions quickly with a few basic assets and see what sticks or what is fun to play with. With Lelu, I had quite a lot of working items that ended up getting scrapped, as I wanted a small roster of items that all had multiple uses.
One example of this was a "drill," which allowed players to go into one side of a wall and out of the other, but this didn't have much practical use outside of "preset" drill areas and wasn't useful in combat, so I ended up scrapping it. The main tools I use for Lelu are:
- GameMaker for the engine.
- Aseprite for sprite creation and textures.
- Blender for 3D modeling.
- LDtk for level design.
I had to develop a custom parser to get LDtk to work with GameMaker, but once that was done, it was incredibly fast to work with as a level design tool – I would highly recommend anyone who's building a large, interconnected world to look at using LDtk.
This is Lelu in Blender. As you can see, the models are very simple. I use Blender's native Rigify to animate the models.
Marketing
I haven't done too much "marketing" in a traditional sense. Mainly, I've been posting on Reddit, X, and Bluesky, while developing a small community on Discord for those who want to see more behind-the-scenes stuff and keep up with the latest updates to the Steam demo and final release.
Conclusion
I may add some additional content after launch (we'll have to see). The community reception has been great so far. I've had some wonderful playtesters who have helped me endlessly with fixing things and improving the game to be the best version of itself, so I can't thank them enough. A few things I've learned through developing have been:
- Get localization support early! It's awful to put that in later.
- Always prototype before designing detailed assets – Fun is better than Fashion.
- Monochromatic games are like Marmite – some love it, some don't – I've accepted that it won't be for everyone, but I love the way it looks.
