Chonky Chickens: Conceptualising SokoFarm

While some games have great and inspiring starts, for such a happy game SokoFarm began sadly with the premature end of something else; a game we’d worked on for over a year. Changes within our games publisher meant we found ourselves with a virtually completed project which was no longer wanted, a game that because of its licence wasn’t something we could just finish and publish ourselves. This is a very common occurrence in game development, something not really discussed that often but it does happen to most game developers at some point. After a series of very polite eMail, we found ourselves suddenly back to square one wondering what to do next. While we didn’t really know what we wanted to do, we were very clear about what we didn’t want – the cancelled game had been a horror title, dark and creepy, and after working on it for over a year we were all ready for something different, something lighter, brighter and considerably more upbeat. We also didn’t want to do anything on mobile; so whatever it was would be a PC/Console game.

While bouncing various concepts around, the idea of doing another Sokoban kept popping up. We already had history with Sokoban having developed one almost 20 years ago for the GBA and another as our first mobile game. It’s a fun genre and one we enjoyed working on; just what we were looking for after a dark horror game. Browsing through the big book of game ideas every developer has, we also had an interesting Sokoban concept to hand from a pitch we did a few years ago, something that did interesting things with the genre that could easily be used for a new game.

The idea as written had the player rolling massive spherical animals to patches of long grass to feed them. This as you can likely guess was based around the brand it was intended for – but we really liked the idea of rolling big round animals, it was cute and visually funny. While it would be nice to suggest we immediately came up with the concept of Chonky Chickens being rolled back to their nests, we did go round in circles on this for a while. Yes, birds and their nests seem obvious now, we were still quite fixated initially on the original idea; it was only when we asked why the player would want to move any animal around in this fashion that we came up with Chonky Chickens in need of a push.

Once we’d figured out the game’s theme and direction, the main idea’s and look of the game really dropped into place quite quickly, a lot of these early thoughts ended up making their way into the finished game in one form or another intact. While simplistic, the original 2D concept sketches are reasonably close to how the game would end up, with some of the game’s final styling points already present in these early mock-ups.

Another very early idea was to have the game feature multiple bird/nest types that the player would need to work with. The different birds would need the player to roll them to specific nests, and various animals would act as obstacles for the player to work around. Originally, these different types of animal obstacles, some of which moved independently of the player were to be a bigger part of the game, this would later prove to be unworkable as they complicated the levels to the point where the game became unplayable, so the cows, sheep and pigs didn’t make it to the finished game. Again, like the mock-ups, these bird designs were very close to the look of the finished game, we did however scale things back to only having three different types of bird, anything more simply overwhelmed the games level design.

Now that we had a basic concept, a workable design and an art direction, it was time to start development and get on with the process of bringing the game to life.