Kombinera Interview

Artura asked some questions

- Artura Dawn

Recently, I had the pleasure of being reached out by game developers over at Joystick to review their debut game: Kombinera. After finishing the review, I was lucky enough to be able to interview them about their struggles with developing Kombinera, and even asked how the game was originally pitched. Here are all of the questions, and their answers!

Questions answered by: Lead Level Design, Jacob Lear (He/Him) Lead Artist, Philip Snowbarger (He/Him)

GAMEON: How was the idea of Kombinera pitched originally?

JACOB LEAR: Phil and I have been best friends since 6th grade. Phil ended up doing art at Graphite Lab, while I was on a totally different path (Biology degree, pre med). However, I still wanted to learn how to make games. So in my last semester at St. Louis University, I got Phil to do Brackey's Game Jam with me. The theme was "Stronger Together" and the prototype of Kombinera came out of that. We wanted to keep working on it after the fact and Phil had shown it to his coworkers at Graphite Lab. Matt Raithel really enjoyed it and offered to pitch it to some publishers. Atari jumped on it! So then I was brought in to Graphite Lab and we started developing the game into what we see today.

GAMEON: What was the development process like?

JACOB LEAR: It was great! Phil and I worked with a great team that helped to enact our vision. Though we had a vision from the start, our team did a great job bouncing ideas off each other and working collaboratively toward something that would work the best. Atari was very supportive of our vision and goals. We ended with a product that we are immensely proud of.

GAMEON: Considering retro-like games are never spoken of in the development aspect, how different does it feel from more traditional game development?