Escaping a religious cult clashes with cosy 80s pixel art nostalgia in Quantum Witch

Although plenty of indie devs do use 3D game engines like Unreal Engine and Unity to make 2D games, for NikkiJay, the solo developer of Quantum Witch, the workarounds were too much.

"You've got to do weird stuff with 3D camera objects to try and make a 2D game, and I don't have time for this – just give me an orthographic projection and let me put my sprites on the screen," she tells me. "It just turned out faster creating something with a very simple platforming physics engine, and I could make really targeted specific adjustments I needed to make rather than trying to bend Unity to my will."

Starting out as a point-and-click JavaScript prototype made for friends, until she was encouraged there would be a bigger audience for it, Quantum Witch is made using MonoGame, a game engine also used for indie hits Celeste, while Stardew Valley eventually migrated to the engine to ensure its long-term support. (Read our guide to the best game development software.)

Learning the tech

MonoGame was also a perfect fit for making pixel art, which is NikkiJay's preferred aesthetic. "Computers and video games were a big part of the escapism for me in my childhood, so being able to work with that style is just a really nice warm fuzzy feeling," she explains, which also isn't too different from her own dabbling in the teletext art scene, practising with teletext portraits of celebrities.

Having learned programming a number of languages since she was eight, NikkiJay says she gave herself four weeks to learn C++ in MonoGame, but also created a very handy tool for her story-driven game.

"I came up with a scripting language which allows me to write all scenes and interactions in the game as if they were a screenplay," she explains. "So when a character walks to a point on screen and says something and another character turns and reacts and sets their animation, I'm literally writing in English the character's name and their actions and then what they've got to say, which really accelerated development."

One change from her initial prototype was the decision to ditch the point-and-click aspect of classic adventure games in favour of a side-scrolling platformer. But rather than platforming challenges, the focus is on different small intertwined plotlines that you have to make decisions about, which is how she came about coining it as a 'plotformer'.

Another difference from the classic point-and-click adventure mould is that all choices are valid in the game, even ones that may lead to your character's death – it also affects what ending you'll get, of which there are quite a few to incentivise replaying. This is because NikkiJay didn't want to have puzzles that would have players getting stuck and descending into "moon logic".

The key theme of Quantum Witch is also about personal freedom and agency, as the game is based on her own experiences of growing up in the restrictive environment of a religious cult where personal agency was absent.

While quite a serious topic – it's why NikkiJay doesn't provide her real name and why she cannot name the cult for legal reasons – the depiction of these themes are a lot more light-hearted in the game, where your protagonist Ren, a twenty-something sheperdess encounters an organisation called the Lampshade Society who all wear the same dress, and naturally insist that they are not a cult.

"I like to turn things into a parody of themselves, which is my way of coping with a lot of what happened," she explains. "I take the situations and the characters and kind of just put the saturation to max and highlight the bits which are obviously ridiculous. It’s dark humour, but I try to keep it light as well enough for people who have been through similar things to not be triggered by it, but also be able to see that, 'hey, this group reminds me of the group I was in'."

It's a similar approach for how she has designed the game's characters, which she says are basically different aspects of herself, though there's also a few familiar video game parodies you'll encounter early on.

"Ren is my more childish and silly side, her wife Tyra is there as hair and muscles, and she's very skeptical of things. Then the skeleton who can see through time – the most ridiculous character I could think of, who's also the game's hint system – that's just me when I'm drunk, dancing, and going around saying I can see through time!"

As a game being released to coincide with Pride month, NikkiJay also believes Quantum Witch is different from other LGBT-themed games because the characters are based on herself without any stereotypes.

"It’s common that when a queer character is in a video game, it's everything they are and it's all they can talk about and every sentence has to be coloured by it," she concludes.

NikkiJay adds: "Here, there's just this queer collective that lives in a place called Hus, they're getting on with their farming and fixing gates and accidentally discovering portals to the multiverse. It's not about oppression for their queerness, it really is about choice and being allowed to be your own person by being able to make your own choices."

Quantum Witch releases on PC on 24 June. You can play the demo on Steam now.