At WX, Wakefield over 60 games will be demoing, along with 400+ developers, game industry publishers, investors and platforms in attendance for GaMaYo 27! Join us on the 26th of November for a day full of demos, networking, roundtables and more.

This event is brought to you by Game Republic along with their Official Partners Red Kite Games, Double Eleven and Xsolla, and Strategic Partner Steel City Interactive with event sponsors Plus Accounting and Kudos Games Services.

Today we are looking at ‘The Joe Chronicles’ which is confirmed to be at the event, from Antivenin Games!

The Joe Chronicles by Antivenin Games

 

What would be your description of your game?

How did development start? (Were there any key inspirations or ideas that drove you?)

The Joe Chronicles really started with two questions: “Why do we still need fairy tales?” and “What actually makes someone a hero?”. I’ve always believed fairy tales are much more than stories about happily ever after. They’re stories that teach, warn and sometimes tell uncomfortable truths. They give us a safe place to imagine what we would do when things go wrong, and, particularly when we’re young, help us discover what we’re capable of. Magic isn’t really about believing in what’s real; it’s about believing in what could be. I wanted to make a game about the idea that being a good person really, really isn’t that difficult. Joe is lazy, unambitious and about as far from the traditional image of a fairy-tale hero as you can get, but he’s actually exactly the right person for the job. He doesn’t help people because he’s destined to save the world or because he expects a reward. He just recognises that when you have the opportunity to help someone, you can choose to do it.

The game grew from there into the idea of a fairy-tale world where the endings have been rewritten so the villains win. Joe might not look like the hero those stories are supposed to have, but that’s the point. You don’t need to be chosen, extraordinary or fearless to be heroic. Fairy tales have been showing us that for centuries: ordinary people can face frightening things, make a choice about who they’re going to be, and discover that they’re capable of far more than they realised.

Tell us about the team behind the game!

The team is myself, Annie/Antivenin Games, and I was a solo-developer for the first 3 years on this project. I now work with Maximalist as my co-developer on this project.

What kind of experiences do you hope to bring players?

First and foremost, I want people to have fun. I want The Joe Chronicles to feel like going on a great adventure: exploring somewhere strange and beautiful, finding things you weren’t supposed to find, meeting ridiculous characters, laughing at jokes you probably shouldn’t laugh at, and occasionally stopping to wonder what on earth just happened. More than anything, I hope players come away from Joe feeling a little more hopeful. Not because everything magically works out or everyone gets a perfect happily ever after, but because things can get better. Because people can help each other. Because doing the right thing doesn’t always require some enormous act of courage or sacrifice; sometimes it’s just choosing to be kind when you could have chosen otherwise.

If someone finishes The Joe Chronicles having had an absolute blast, and somewhere along the way it made them feel something they weren’t expecting, then we’ve done exactly what we set out to do.

In 10 words or less, highlight the appeal of the game!

Fairy tales went wrong. The wrong hero must fix them.

Any links to access/wishlist the game?

https://linktr.ee/antiveningames We will have a Steam page launched in the new year, and the newest demo will be playable at Gamayo.