The Making of Making The Leap: Pt 1 (Beginning)

Hi, I'm Keenardo, and today I'm writing about the things that led me to creating my game Making The Leap, not only here on Itch, but also the original version made in Dreams in 2021. I do spoil some elements of the game here, so I do recommend playing the game real quick. It's short (about 3 minutes).

Back in March of 2021, I had just released my very first game in Dreams, a top-down action brawler titled Neon Vendetta. It was an ambitious debut that had been incredibly challenging to complete, and when it was played and enjoyed by way more people than I expected, it was incredibly thrilling. However, along with many people playing came the discovery of new bugs I hadn't found, and learning the hard (and in retrospect obvious) lesson that the game was far too difficult for many players. So Neon Vendetta was, in my eyes, an extremely successful debut, but one that was successful enough to really highlight its failures. And as a brand-new gamedev, of course I beat myself up about it.

Weeks later, Media Molecule, the studio that created Dreams, announced that they were partnering with Autistica, a UK-based autism research charity, to host the Autistica Play Jam, a game jam centered around autism awareness and the theme 'Anxiety Breakthroughs'. Having family on the spectrum, and having struggled with anxiety myself, my interest in participating was immediate, and struggling with mixed emotions following my debut game, I felt like I had to make something new to work past it.

So I began to consider what I might do, and thought about what other games had dealt with mental health in interesting and moving ways. My first thought was Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, which I found incredibly powerful, but knew was not the right vibe of inspiration to pull from for this project. First and foremost, this project had to be gentle.

Next, I began to think about Celeste. There's a moment at the beginning of that game where you are running across a collapsing bridge, and as you try to jump to safety, it's immediately apparent that you are not going to make it. It's at this moment the game pauses, and tutorializes that after jumping, you also have access to a mid-air dash, and once you use that dash to land safely, the game informs you that 'you can do this.' I love this moment, and to me it always felt like a way of saying 'your baseline effort might not be enough to do what you need to, but if you give it just a little bit more, a little bit more than you think you can, you can do this.'

This was definitely along the lines I wanted to explore. Doing a platformer felt like a good fit, and I definitely wanted to utilize a thematic game mechanic, but what could I use that could be unique and meaningful? It wasn't long before I considered:

'What if you only got better by trying and failing?'

My emotional response was immediate. It wasn't just a game mechanic I knew I could create, it was a truth I needed personally.

The rest of the game really spooled out from there. Simple, monochrome graphics. Minimal sound. Making only one jump. Guiding the player character through the process as opposed to 'experiencing it ourselves', allowing us to not 'own' the failure but support the character through theirs. The writing came together quickly. The game was made in a week.

It turned out that I was not the only one that resonated with the concepts within Making The Leap. It's done very well on Dreams, and continues to. Its continued success there, along with the confidence I've gained from building games in Dreams, is why I finally made the decision to make the leap to building a game for PC.

I've wanted to make computer games since I was a kid. But I always told myself I wasn't smart enough, that it was too hard, that I couldn't make anything good and that if I did, no one would care, that I would FAIL. Like so many, I was incredibly failure-averse and frankly still am. But I taught myself one of life's most important lessons via game design, and I couldn't think of a better project to bring my childhood dream to fruition. This one's for everyone, including (maybe most of all) the 8-year old Keenardo that's still in there.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you'll check out and enjoy the game.