Announcing our first game: The Protagonish!

Finally, we can announce the first game from College Fun Games, The Protagonish!

It's a classic point-and-click style adventure game with a twist: you don't control the adventurer! Instead, you get to guide or hinder the 'main' character's quest by choosing humorous dialogue from four typical 'non-playing characters' (NPCs) from the village. With multiple endings and real choices to protect the peace and quiet, you will decide how the adventurer's quest ends, and the consequences for each character.

With beautiful hand-drawn characters and animations by the amazing Elena Grossi, and deep and engrossing backgrounds from the peerless Lucy Gillespie, we've created a cosy and wholesome medieval-fantasy world to explore. There’s a full score performed on real Celtic instruments, and a full cast from stars of Edinburgh stand-up and stage including:

Asher Learmouth as The Adventurer,
Natasha Mott as The Shopkeeper,
Richard Werner as The Monk, and
Vincent Guy as The Beastie.

This project started as a learning experience of making a game together, with a group of people that had never made a game before! Developing an art style, writing and recording dialogue, programming puzzles, as well as marketing and releasing a game were all new skills. The aim was to showcase the level of quality and humour we want to have in our future titles, in a short and fun story. Indeed, we are already planning out our first full-length title, to be announced next year.

It's been a fun challenge to try and have real puzzles that can connect without a central character, and with different playable actors in each location. Honestly, it ended up being a lot more complex to design the game than it would have been for a traditional point-and-click, and designing logic for things like inventories and 'pixel-hunting' quests became too difficult across disparate characters. Hence we decided to keep it to just a dialogue choice system, a bit like a interactive fiction game, but with puzzles that challenge how you used those options, and have big consequences for other characters.

The Protagonish is a short game, probably only 15 minutes of game-play (depending on your choices!), but a perfect length for a quick play, especially with children. Besides, who has the time for 3 hour play sessions these days?! But we are planning to actually charge money for it (controversy!). It seems strange for such a short game, when there are so many free games out there with longer play-time, but we've invested real money in the best things - people. Real, experienced artists, musicians and voice talent, paid real money, not working 'for exposure' (and no AI used to 'create' anything!). I think that makes the short experience worth a few quid. I've talked previously about how important a real voice recording session was for bringing the game to life, but we even commissioned the amazing calligraphy artist WelshPixie to draw 'The Protagonish' title (with real ink and paper!) to make it 324% more amazing than just some generic font!

We are aiming to release as soon as this September 2024, on Steam and itch.io. We hope to support Windows, Mac, Linux and in-browser play, and already have a demo of the first scene working on all these platforms. We'd also love to have this on Switch (and a German translation has started!), but that's going to have to wait for later in the year!

For more updates, sign-up for our newsletter, follow us on Mastodon, Steam and itch.io, and keep checking back here for more dev-logs as we put more and more of the pieces together! We are already booked to show The Protagonish at several UK indie game expos this year, as well as some local Edinburgh events with broad family appeal, so stay tuned...

So excited to share all this and we can't wait for you to play The Protagonish for yourselves!