"Neverway's development could be described as the result of a game that allows more features to creep in, and is typical of the best indie games you'll play. As a farming life-sim RPG that's also a narrative-based psychological horror, it had more humble beginnings, originally as a Vampire Survivors clone, when it was also meant as a proof-of-concept for Murder, Coldblood Inc's own pixel art game engine created by co-founder Isadora Sophia."
""We had a vision for some things, like we knew we wanted to be horror, we wanted to have a narrative, and the farming mechanics were introduced to make the world feel alive somehow so that the story feels more real," she explains. "I think a lot of our approaches were like that, but always going through the vision that it's a horror narrative game.""
""When I looked at Unity or those other alternatives that are always trying to make [the coding part] easy so you can focus on the game, I'm always having to reverse-engineer whatever they are doing so I can kind of do what we want," she explains. "That process is so tiring because they can just change and they can do things that I don't agree with because I'm usually very opinionated.""
Neverway combines farming life-sim RPG mechanics with narrative-based psychological horror, evolving from an initial Vampire Survivors-style proof-of-concept. Farming systems were added to make the world feel alive and to ground the horror narrative. Coldblood Inc developed Neverway using Murder, an in-house pixel-art engine built on Microsoft's XNA framework, reflecting a DIY technical approach rather than using Unity or Unreal. Isadora Sophia brings architectural and coding experience and left Microsoft to work on Neverway full-time. The team preferred custom tooling because mainstream engines can behave opaquely and require reverse-engineering to achieve specific, opinionated design goals. Pedro Medeiros contributed pixel-art experience informed by prior work on Celeste.
Read at Creative Bloq
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