by day, and you’re zooming around this rural island that you’ve just moved to with your new friends by night.
WHERE DID THE GAME IDEA START IN THE FIRST PLACE? I’M NOT SURE I’D HAVE EVER COME UP WITH ‘WITCHY DELIVEROO’ AS A GAME IDEA IF YOU’D GIVEN ME UNTIL THE HEAT DEATH OF THE UNIVERSE. It originated in my art. You can kind of see me getting to that point back in 2016 on my ArtStation. I had a very intense period of or 2016. It was something that was very driven by things like Studio Ghibli and the backgrounds that Kazuo Oga did in a lot of I also was really inspired by going on a trip
to Barcelona and seeing the buildings there. My background as an environmental artist really led me to spending a lot of time just looking at how regular people live. I love the and fantasy. I was drawing a lot of these very bright, very warm places that had a little bit of I started drawing a lot of Vespas after trips to Spain and Italy. I was just kind of obsessed with motorbikes and Honda’s Super Cubs. I also just love Café Racers and anything that could feel deeply personal. That someone could kind of self-express through their vehicle.
It’s rooted in a little bit of the mundane day-to- day. I love putting the fantasy in the mundane. It’s also just cool and tactile. Like mechanisms really, really appealing.
AS A TOKUSATSU GUY, I LOVE WHEN SOMETHING IS CRUNCHY AND TOYETIC LIKE THAT TOO. All of that just started to really coalesce. I was also very much exploring what it is to be a queer person, and the artistic areas that tended to pop up regularly in that, and I just found modern witches really compelling, so I was drawing them a lot. I’d happened upon something that resonated really strongly with me.
Then the idea for the game took a long time was always like there, but for a while back in 2019 I said the project was called Crescent City Racers. It was more focused on being in the city, but one of my friends was like, ‘it’s not that fun turning corners in the city’.
YOU’VE SAID THAT CRESCENT COUNTY WAS DIRECTLY INSPIRED BY YOUR TIME IN THE ISLE OF WIGHT. COULD YOU ELABORATE ON HOW A BIT?
I moved out to the Isle of Wight to work on Magic Duels, and I just immediately found my people. It was a very formative time, because myself out as a person. The Isle of Wight is bigger than people
realize. I think, like six miles across and four miles high, maybe. But there’s also this concept of ‘Island Time’ where anything that takes more than 10 minutes to get to is way too far away.
When you live on an island, there are people that you’ll bump into and hang out with for basically everything. They become your people. The familiarity you get with the quirkier parts of a location, really, really inspired me. A good magical realist spin on that felt really
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