Pimander : Creator’s Commentary

An overview of genres that come together in Pimander

Gameplay Genres

• Action-Adventure
• Roleplaying
• Beat ‘Em Up

Art Style

• Graphic Novel
• Early 2000s

Story

• Science Fiction Fantasy

Genre-wise when I came up with Pimander I wanted to blend a few of my favourite things to create something I’d never played before. I’m sure a lot of it is subconscious and even I don’t know the full list of influences!

Should someone ask for a list, I’d clumsily respond “Well I like Dune and Street Fighter and Hellsing and and and…” Really it’s a few too many things to sensibly communicate so I just like to present it and ask what other people see in it and they give me their own story, which is perfect. I always like to hear other peoples’ stories.

However, the biggest influence on Pimander’s art style has been TopCow.

An overview of gameplay elements in Pimander

Gameplay Elements

• Storytelling
• Brawling Puzzles
• – No guns
• – No blood

Storytelling is notoriously difficult in a videogame because you never know what the other characters are up to. You get to be in the skin of your one character and that’s kind of it. Something I enjoy is when I get to play a story from the perspective of different characters, like in Resident Evil 2. Other playable characters reveal a fuller picture and allow for twists, which is what I’ve done with Pimander.

One of my favourite genres was the side-scrolling Beat ‘Em Up, especially the arcade machine variety like Alien vs Predator and Knights of the Round. I guess I could mention Double Dragon and Golden Axe because… I should, right? So anyway, the fighting systems were simpler than the 1-on-1 Beat ‘Em Ups such as Street Fighter and Art of Fighting in favour of a rolling, brawling style of a few moves and a lot of enemies. I’m also a 2D shooter fan and some of the battle movement in Pimander is reminiscent of the weaving style of say, R-Type or even Turrican.

I may, may have made scoring highly in Pimander quite hardcore because the Seeds of Chaos stage gets quite insane if you want to defeat Pandemonium five times for his bonus points without running out of time… but having said that, it’s a breeze to get through with a bad score if you just want to advance to the next stage. So you know, with greater risk comes greater reward.

Obviously the biggest difference with the old 2D games is that this is in 3D. There’s a certain “essence” that frequently fails to make the jump, that I hope I’ve captured in Pimander. For a start I have proper videogame physics, which is to say, not-like-real-life physics! Characters can leap really insanely high, fall any distance, and zoom about really fast. The real world has definitely been left at the door.

© 2014-2019 Tilveran.