Ahoy everyone,

It’s been a few months since we last posted, so we thought it was about time for another dev log. Our previous one, the first dev log, was focused more on transparency to you all; why we’ve been quiet the last few months, needing to focus our efforts more on development more than social media, and more. So if you’re curious about all of that, make sure to check out our previous dev log.

So I thought it would be fun to talk a bit about how Seahorse Saga came to be, and give you all some backstory to the development. Initial ideas for the game came about back in late 2014, written in a journal between classes in high school! The Paper Mario series and Mario & Luigi series have always been favorites of mine, and I wanted to make a game inspired by them. So I went to college for video game design, where I made many friends through different classes. 

A few years later, I learned that I could create a team and pitch a game to work on for my senior project. I approached a few friends and gave an early pitch to get them interested in the idea. At this point, while I had a bunch of character ideas, the only one I knew for sure was our titular seahorse protagonist: Tyro! But before we even officially pitched the game, we actually solidified a second character…When I initially ran the idea by our executive producer TJ, he proposed a pirate walrus as a party member. Yeah, Walfread was actually the second character we came up with for the game! After getting a small team together, we pitched the game… and got approved! 

Pre-production on the game began with our senior year in late 2018, and our plan was to build a proof of concept before the end of college a couple of semesters later. Between semesters we were able to recruit more team members to our project, and increase our productivity! We were even selected to bring our game to PAX East 2019, as part of our college’s booth. While our early build back then wasn’t the best, getting positive feedback and excitement towards our game from various people, especially kids, really motivated our entire team and gave us newfound passion towards it! 

We realized then that bringing our game to events is exciting, and it became our goal to make it out to more as we continued progress on the game. Since graduating in Spring 2019, passion continued to be strong for this project, and it evolved. No longer were we working on a project for school…Seahorse Saga became a passion project that we wanted to see completed and turned into a full game!

Ever since graduating, our team has worked hard on Seahorse Saga in our free time, as a passion project. Of course, this isn’t something we get to put all of our time into. People on the team have full-time jobs, only getting to work on this when they’re free. So naturally, we have some slower periods when everyone is busy. While motivation has had its ups and downs over the years, the passion for Seahorse Saga is still strong within the team. We’ve brought the game to even more events over the years, including Boston Festival of Indie Games 2020, PAX East 2020 once again as part of our college’s booth, and Too Many Games 2021! Each time we bring the game to an event and get to meet more of you, it reignites passion and excitement towards working on our undersea adventure. And these definitely help us get out of slumps! I’m genuinely excited to share what we have with you all in the future, and eventually return to more events! Thank you all for reading and keeping up with our game! Hopefully we’ll have an update for you soon!

-Tris ⭐

Project Owner & Design Lead