In the past, when I’ve been daydreaming during bus rides or while showering or doing work, I often thought about games I wanted to make someday. And when I thought about games I wanted to make, I’d always come back to a yet-to-be-realized pet project called Chitin.

A mock-up of a title logo I made using a free google sheets theme. If the game is ever realized, it probably won’t look anything like this.

The idea behind Chitin drew from a few different interests of mine from over the past few years, but I can definitively point to two games, Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries and Vangers as being primary inspirations. 

Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries is a game that’s very near a dear to me, first playing it on my dad’s laptop nearly a decade ago. The game oozes charm and I could talk about it all day, but I would like to focus on the game’s defining mechanic: the unique mech movement. You accelerate and steer your mech with WASD while aiming independently with the mouse, effectively run & gun once you get the hang of it.

On top of that, due to the size of these war machines, they take time to respond to your movement commands, especially with larger mechs. Wrangling your mech has this wonderful clunkiness to it that adds a great sense of weight to the vehicle and makes mastery incredibly satisfying. Every move is a commitment, every action requires forethought, it’s a very deliberate and strategic experience.

Vangers is an incredibly bizarre game. It’s a car-based open world RPG(?) made by Russians in the 90s and set on a “chain” of alien worlds inhabited by aliens who were once humans and are now bugs. The main inspiration I wanted to draw from Vangers is the sheer strangeness of the worlds and their inhabitants. My first few hours of Vangers was the most bizarre and unmooring experience I’ve had in a game. These worlds feel truly alien in a way I’ve scarcely seen in other games, and I would like to be able to incorporate that alien feeling into my games.

The general premise of Chitin is that in the far future, the Terran Union unleashes a bioweapon on the mining colony of Halcera as a consequence for insubordination, and this bioweapon resulted in the surviving Halcerans developing insectoid mutations. The player now has to lead a Halceran rebellion against the Terran Union, fielding new biomechs constructed from insectoid materials.

I wanted to bring back the classic Mechwarrior combat, which I feel has become almost extinct among mech games, while also immersing the players within an environment that feels as alien and unusual as the control scheme. I’ve always felt like the idea had promise, but in previous iterations felt underbaked. I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that this was just rehashing Mechwarrior 4 with a new coat of paint, without really bringing anything new to the table. This feeling, combined with mounting schoolwork, resulted in me mentally shelving the idea.

The game pitch project gave me an opportunity to unearth the idea, as I figured it would be easier to build off of this idea that I’d already put time into instead of creating one from scratch. The closest available keyphrase to that version of my idea was Leap, Liberate, which I claimed. Liberate was already a core narrative and gameplay element, but Leap? Some mechs in the mechwarrior franchise feature jump jets, but these are typically seen as more of a gimmick than a core element of the gameplay.

So I began to think, what if we made it a core gameplay element? Suddenly everything fell into place: compared to better-equipped Union forces, the player’s biomechs would be lighter, allowing them to leap great heights and traverse harsh terrain. As a backwater mining world, the surface of Halcera would be made up of winding mountains and canyons. This would encourage the player to use the planet’s terrain to their advantage in order to defeat superior forces.

Had I not been forced to turn this concept into a core aspect of the game’s design, I would have never put the dots together to create what is, in my eyes, a really fun core gameplay dynamic. I wanted to design an unusual experience, but was too afraid to branch out and stray from my inspirations. This is a lesson for me to experiment more during the initial design phase, embrace peripheral or even entirely new systems and see where they take me.