Animal Well

gamedeveloper.com:

There's something both unnatural and irresistible about Animal Well. The surreal title hangs in the void like the lure of a patient anglerfish, pulling you in with the promise of fantastical adventure before turning the world on its head.

In the dense, pixel art labyrinth that spilled from the mind of sole developer Billy Basso there is beauty and danger in equal measure. Environments pulsate and glow with an otherworldly verve, bursting into life as players attempt to unlock the secrets of the unfamiliar puzzle box they now inhabit. But there are terrors lurking in the dark. Creatures of unknown intent wondering how best to deal with the interloper fumbling through their forsaken domain.

When I first locked eyes on the indie title during the recent PS Indies showcase, I was taken by how much detail and flavor had been crammed into its pixel art world. There's no doubting the versatility of the aesthetic at this point, but Animal Well's combination of lucid animation and fizzing visuals delivers something that feels raw and evocative. 

Drunk on that beguiling, heady cocktail, I caught up with Basso to learn how he's using an engine made entirely from scratch to breathe life into his freakish, enthralling, and slightly terrifying adventure.

Game Developer: How did you develop and hone your animation techniques to make the denizens of Animal Well so brilliantly unsettling?

Billy Basso: The animation techniques in Animal Well were sort of developed alongside the game's engine. I have every sprite in the game on one giant sprite sheet, and very early on, I was manually defining them all by entering the UV coordinates straight into C++ code. So animations at that point were very basic, and sprite strips were just drawn directly