Our very own first-born baby game, named “Hoomanz”, is in the making! For some time now actually, but we finally decided to share the journey with you by posting regularly some BTS and insights about Hoomanz and more! This’ll make a nice little casual blog series – a blend of some dev talk, art and general banter. Since the game is basically a heavily stylized version of an alternate Earth, having its own universe, we’ll start this episode with the Big Bang – the beginning of all creation; the idea.

But first let me take a selfie … What is Hoomanz?!

Hoomanz is a very casual isometric action-stealth adventure game. Your goal is to scare those pesky little Hoomanz, who are causing havoc with their technology, out of your forest playing as Shoo – the main character of this story. Shoo is a cute little huggable monster in the light, so cute that when Hoomanz spot it, they run to it for a big squishy hug! But when Shoo is in the dark it turns into a scary menacing creature and uses that to its advantage to scare the Hoomanz. This mechanic of playing with the light and dark is key in the game and we play around it quite substantially, like for example, Shoo visually changes a lot and generally you feel more safe in the dark. There might be more mechanics or little tweaks added to Shoo if it’s in the dark, but we’re yet to decide on that. We still want to mainly keep the game very casual and simple, so it’s a bit challenging to find a good balance (and resist the urges to stack great new ideas into the game).

*Hoomanz prototype visual and gameplay (will change)*

Ok, so where were we? Oh, right, The Big Bang! 1, 2, 3 aaand Our whole universe was in a hot, dense state. Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started, wait… that’s a different Big Bang. Uhm, ah! I found my thread again – The idea behind Hoomanz. It all started with our internal little secret project called “Area 51”. There wasn’t that one spark, the light bulb over someone’s head that lit up and said: “HOOMANZ!”. We knew we wanted to create our own game, we had created multiple games and experiences already, but they were all for clients. We wanted a baby of our own, a platform to just go nuts with our ideas, our own creative freedom. So we finally allocated the right resources and hired a game designer to work only on this. Antoine, Baptiste and the entire creative team did a massively great job giving structure to our ideation, showing us what’s a good tangible idea and what’s basically a 💩idea, translating our efforts into an actionable direction and putting together what Hoomanz is on its way to become. Antoine has since moved on to another chapter in his life and we wish him the utmost happiness and success. We onboarded Nico to take the reins and we couldn’t be happier!

Area 51 was a dump of 11 game ideas – each Koffeecup head was tasked to come up with a game idea and create their own mini-pitch that they had to present to the whole team. They had to meet these 4 main criteria, sorted by priority:

Credibility - for our peers and clients to see us as an established game studio.
Experience - broaden our expertise in some important areas where we lacked, e.g. developing with Unreal Engine and choosing a new platform (Nintendo Switch).
Creative outlet - a lot of our staff had been non-stop working on VR and immersive projects for clients. It was important for us to give them a new outlet to touch on different things and let their creativity have a completely new outlet.
Profitability - We didn’t want to put pressure on the team regarding profitability but it was something we had to weigh in, be it revenue from the game itself or the value it provides by attracting new clientele.

We would then evaluate each individual idea based on parameters that had their own weight. Look at this swanky spreadsheet:

It came close to “M0D_B0T”, which was about a back and forth between tinkering your mech bot and combat against other bots. The player would choose how to distribute the energy through the bot with different electric cable management and different mods/weapons.

But we decided that “Scareathon”, what came to become “Hoomanz”, was more in-line with Koffeecup. The initial concept was a tad bit different from what we have today: “Gotta scare them all! You are playing as a little mischievous monster, the aim is to go around the town and scare people so much that they pass out.”

Not really that different, right? Well let us show you the early versions of Shoo:

We had a decent evolution of the title name of the game as well . Starting with the abovementioned “Area 51” and “Scareathon”, continuing to “Leave Them Behind”, “Shoo!” and finally landing on “Hoomanz”.

But we’ll get you the deets of all the concepts, arts and their evolution in another episode. It was great looking back at where and how it all started, and finally sharing it with all of you! It’s great seeing how we’ve progressed over the past couple of months and there’s still a long road ahead us before Gamescom 24 Hope you peeps will enjoy the journey with us ❤️

Stay tooned for the next episode!