SKEW

Behind The Scenes

Due to the pandemic, The Last Worker was a very difficult game to make, with everyone working remotely and mostly from home scattered across the UK, Taiwan and Los Angeles - not to mention our V.O., which we'd record as far as Iceland and Adelaide.

"The game took several years to make. and often times felt like a slog," says Jörg. "I needed something simple, quick and fun to work on - something purely gameplay driven - and that's when the Playdate came on the map."

He convinced his game dev hero and old friend Frédérick Raynal, creator of Alone in the Dark and the Dreamcast gem Toy Commander, to develop this crank-powered spin-off with him. "At the time there was no evidence that realtime 3D games would even be possible on Playdate. So naturally I had to approach the man who propelled games into the third dimension. I had to lure him back, a bit like Rambo."

“When you are an old game programmer,” Frédérick says, “You knew a time when there were no rules, a time when you had to make miracles with very undefined techniques. When I saw the Playdate and understood how it is made (both electronically and the spirit behind it), I was so excited. Give me just a bitmap surface and some processing features to draw inside it and I’ll be happy to create games in my very own way. At the beginning, as it was not easy to get an actual Playdate, so I decided to double the fun by making a ‘Fakedate’, principally to start investigating the (utterly motivating) constraints of the screen. The Playdate is something unique and you feel unique when you work on it.”

Skew became the first realtime 3D game on the system and a launch title for Catalog, the Playdate's store.

Despite the Playdate's small user base, Skew ended up selling more copies than The Last Worker on consoles, PC and VR. Go figure.