Dreams and schemes

As the late, great Terry Pratchett once wrote, “Only presumptuous fools plan. The wise man steers.” Videogames rarely match a creator’s original vision entirely: radical shifts of approach during development are not uncommon, often causing unforeseen delays. Someone may come up with a brilliant idea that changes everything, or a combination of circumstances may force a developer to adapt.

In the case of Ruben Farrus, creative lead on Mini Maker: Make A Thing, the first seed of an idea suddenly sprouted as he was leaving for GDC to pitch an entirely different game – one that has since been canned. By the time he returned from the event, his team had assembled a prototype: “It was really, really bare bones,” he tells us. “But already, I saw a spark.”

The Past Within, the 16th entry in the Rusty Lake series, sparked to life as a singleplayer game. But something about its room-within-a-room conceit made it an awkward fit for solo play, so the studio started again from scratch, transforming it into a co-operative twoplayer game. The result is one of the series’ most distinctive adventures to date. Inua – A Story In Ice And Time, meanwhile, took inspiration from Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition to find the Northwest Passage, before its developer chose to explore this remote part of the world across three different time periods.

Sometimes, of course, it’s simply a matter of a game’s scope growing beyond the original plan. That’s certainly the case for Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course, an expansion that’s more than you’d expect from a piece of DLC. This new Inkwell Isle is roughly the size of the first two islands in the original, offering nearly a dozen new bosses, with secrets, weapons and charms besides – and, of course, a new playable protagonist. As Studio MDHR steers this long-gestating add-on towards its June 2022 release, the decision to wait until now to talk about it feels like a wise move indeed.