I’m a month late on this, but since we don’t appear to have written about Kenshi for about six years, I figured this was worth highlighting. Chris Hunt and Natalie Mikkelson of Lo-Fi Games recently put out a video chatting about Kenshi 2, their approach to design and, uh, their shared hatred for fondue. It’s a lovely, unadorned look at game development, with Hunt and Mikkelson talking through how they basically learned to do everything on the fly, from Kenshi’s beginnings to Lo-Fi Games’s current size of 30 people.
Hunt describes Kenshi as about “a sort of philosophical idealism that you can overcome anything if you keep working hard, and improving, and training. And that’s how I would love the world to be.”
As for Kenshi 2, Hunt shares some bits and pieces we’ve already heard. The map will be around twice the size, but the game will be set in the same area as Kenshi, just 1000 years before. “The same location, but very different,” says Hunt. “Different civilisations, different factions. You’ll get a preview of the old empire and how things were.”
“The whole point of travelling is that you go somewhere with a different culture,” Hunt continues. “Different rules of survival, different dangers. It makes you want to travel. See what’s out there”.
They’re later asked if the hundreds of hours Kenshi’s players frequently spend with the game surprised them.
“I feel like my work now is more geared towards people playing it for that long”, says Mikkelson. “So you’re trying to make things not repeatable. So I find, for Kenshi 2, we’re more aware now of people spending that amount of time, so we can try and adapt to it. So that people can play it that long, and it doesn’t repeat and stuff.”
“Yeah, I mean, I designed the game to be addictive like that,” says Hunt. “But addictive in a good way. You can have evil addiction and good addiction. Evil is like, a typical free-to-play, ‘maximise engagement’ type of mentality from the designer. My type of addiction is, you’re addicted because you’re having fun. You’re encountering problems and challenges. And even when you’re away from the game, you’re thinking of this challenge. Maybe you’re at work and you’re thinking ‘how am I gonna get my guy back from those slavers?”
Which I found a little funny in a sort of “no, this is the healthy crack, you cretin,” way, but then again Kenshi is very cheap on Steam at the moment.
As for why they’re not showing much work-in-progress for Kenshi 2, Hunt says that keeping things quiet for as long as possible just makes development easier. “Once a game goes into the public eye, you get pressure, certain obligations and potential problems”. This way, they can change things, make mistakes, go back on things. “Things aren’t always made in the order that looks best for marketing,” Hunt says, adding that a lot of the game is basic models right now, since that gives them the flexibility to change things.
“If we’ve said too much, that weakens our impact,” says Mikkelson. “At the end of the day, we want to make more games. We need to do things properly and be patient, so that we succeed. Kenshi is a game about exploration and discovery. At least with my work, I don’t want to say anything about it, because it ruins the whole player’s experience of discovering that for themselves.”
“Even once we’re fully showing the game, a lot of our best stuff, we’ll be holding it back,” says Hunt. “There’s a lot of stuff I consider spoilers that maybe a normal company wouldn’t.”
They’re also asked at one point to choose between Kenshi’s robot companion Agnu and Fondue. As in, melted cheese dip. Just as a concept. They are not fans. “I really like cheese but…” says Mikkelson. “Yeah, it shouldn’t be liquid” adds Hunt.
