Perfect Tides, her first game

gamedeveloper.com:

The transition from one artistic medium to another is always a challenge. But after ten years writing and drawing the prolific webcomic Octopus Pie, it was a challenge that artist Meredith Gran welcomed. 

This past February on Steam, she released Perfect Tides, a point-and-click adventure game that charmingly combines with Gran's signature visual style and sense of humor to deliver a nostalgic but bittersweet look at teenage life in the year 2000.  

Gran's transition from webcomic creator to adventure game developer taught her many unusual lessons about game design and game-making tools in her quest to make Perfect Tides. Making the game also helped her reflect on her teenage years, a time she hadn't explored in her very personal webcomic.

Here's how her journey from one medium to another played out—it's a particularly insightful look at an alternate pathway for beginning game developers, with practical steps all creators can learn from.

Game Developer: I’ve read that while comics are your preferred artistic medium, you’d been wanting to make a video game for a long time. What made you feel “ready” to begin work on Perfect Tides?

I’d just wrapped up my webcomic Octopus Pie, which I’d used for years to document 20-something life in New York, almost as fast as I was experiencing it. I could write a story or draw a comic page with details as fresh as the day it was posted. What my work lacked, in exchange for that timeliness, was any sort of deep reflection into the past.

I was in a transitional state – pregnant and settling into a new city – when the comic ended. I knew I needed to live a little more of my 30s before stories worth writing would reveal themselves. In the meantime, my teen years were almost completely untouched. 

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