PET PROJECT

Speaking on behalf of BlueTwelve’s founders, Martin-Raget explains that Stray was only a few “visual scenes” when Annapurna Interactive came on board – though even at that early stage, the two had a strong idea of what the game was going to be. “The art direction was quite clear in their minds, and they had a few prototypes of the cat being able to jump on air-con [units].” The backpack and B-12 were also in place when it was still known as HK Project. Funding was confirmed in April 2017, while by the end of that year (two years after the idea had first been dreamed up) the team had grown to five. If anything, the scope of the game has narrowed since then, he says: “When Viv and Koola started, they were extremely enthusiastic about all the features that they could develop, but they realised that for a lot of things to be polished enough for them to be interesting enough would take a lot of time and effort. So we [focused] more on the things that we felt were most important.”