The Big Indie Interviews: Message Photon on their award-winning roguelike Painted Peril

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Painted Peril placed second in The Very Big Indie Pitch at Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki. It's a roguelike game about unleashing the power of colours and discovering the ability to combine them into powerful spells, developed by a small Finnish team.

The Very Big Indie Pitch is a "speed-dating"-style pitching competition where developers have only five minutes to present their game to a panel of experts. They then move to the next table of experts, repeating this process four or five times. It's intense, fast, and a good way to practice quick-fire pitching! It's also a route for meeting the press, veteran developers and industry insiders, so The Very Big Indie Pitch is a valuable networking addition to the conference programme.

We host Big Indie Pitches alongside a number of events throughout the year, including all of the Pocket Gamer Connects events all around the world (where it gets the Very Big upgrade).

For some insight into what The Very Big Indie Pitch is like, here's developer Emil Ekroth of Message Photon to talk about Painted Peril. It impressed our judges. In addition to the pitch, the game was showcased in the Pitching Zone area, where the event's attendees were able to play and enjoy it. 

This project started about 1.5 years ago as a university course project at Chalmers University of Technology. We started out as a group of six students coming together to develop the first prototype of Painted Peril.

After around two months of development, we took the game to the Gotland Game Conference, where we won the Jury Spotlight Award.

After the conference and the university course ended, some of us continued to do some infrequent development on the project [alongside] our studies for another year. This continued until this summer when we, the two remaining developers, decided to take up the development of the game properly again to finish the project and see where it could take us in the future. 

Painted Peril is a roguelike game that lets you mix your own