24/04/2026 : The birth of a lobster
This is a story I've told to some privately, or behind closed doors but... I should tell it publicly. This is about the start of knight lobster, and how it came to be... A tale of dreams and impulsiveness.
So, this begins a long time ago. I had an idea for a story, centered on dreams, featuring a character going through various lands. This is the idea of Dream Eye. At first, I wanted it to be a game. Yup ! It was a very different beast, its very first iteration featuring completely different locales. I remember there being a pink polygonal beach, a giant anthill... not much else. Eventually, it changed into something close to the 5 lands of the current dream eye. Then, in june of 2023, in the all new rebirth of the revolutionary girl utena forums, I decide it could be a fun thing to do a sort of collaborative comic in which i take suggestions from readers, à la MSPA. Whiile thinking what the comic could be about... I get the idea to have it be based on that idea of a game with five lands. A few adjustments here and there, and bam, it's going, everyone loves it, its still going, i'm rich and famous, blablabla, this is a blogpost about a lobster, not a cat.
Somewhat concurrent of that (actually like a year earlier if memory serves), I'm trying to make a game. In godot... Now, Godot is really good, it's a great engine and you can do great things, but despite at that point being a woman in stem, i was in biology and was absolutely not knowledgeable into how to code anything complex besides html/css (which is not a programming language). So it failed quite bad...
Then like a year later, in july or august of 2023, i'm staying at a friend's. I make a dream that kind of started everything. At that point dream eye was going, but that dream is super interesting, and i'd lay on it for a bit. In that dream, a lobster was in a small village. I believe there was an ordinance against specific animals, including lobsters, set by the evil monarch next door.
So there's this lobster sneaking around a village. It doesn't speak because it's, well, a fucking lobster. It goes inside houses to eat food laying around, gaining stat points like that. It can also pick up a range of weapons and use them. Keep in mind that this lobster is lobster sized. At one point, a woman finds it and gives it some food then sets it on the path to the evil monarch. So then I wake up. Wow ! what a dream. It was very gameified, which isn't usually the case for my dreams. I sit on the idea for a while. It seems simple enough to do in RPG Maker, of which i recently got a copy of. And so i try to think what the game could be about.
My first draft was of a kingdom with a tower in the centre. That tower was that of the evil king, which you needed to defeat. On the way, you'd meet other characters, mostly animals, all also knight. I don't know when the idea of knights came along... (actually, a lie, but more on that later). So you go around, make allies and stuff, you climb the tower, defeat the evil king, and then a sort of giant UFO arrives because this was all a ploy by some sort of meta corporation to make stories because that's what it does, so you end up having to go beyond your narrative role of knight and beat it up. A good idea, but not really a KPWU idea, and i don't think i could have done it justice.
Eventually that last part gets removed. The corporation being external to the setting doesn't really fit, making it seem as if the main antagonist was something not from the setting, which otherwise would be idyllic. The story morphs, as all ideas do. One tower becomes eight, with the idea that levels and stat don't cary between each tower, with each tower being home to a legendary beast, and a ninth one appearing. Well so it goes, I don't like that idea though. Uhm... and then, it's like september and october, and i tell myself "lobster, knight, tower, big, let's go." and I start making the game.
The initial idea is that there's this evil sealed in the tower, and concurrent to setting up the FPLE plugin in RMMV, I make the intro cutscene which is still in use. The main idea is that the setting, story, and themes of the game will get clarified as the game progresses. Indeed, at that point i had even put a lock on myself to not think about future areas. I wanted this to be a somewhat improvisational game, which is an idea that stayed for very long in development, but which i allowed myself to not do recently. Yay !
Oh and, the knights. I think it came from a joke. See, I never played shovel knight. I have some knowledge of it, but I thought every character was knight something. A friend is telling me about the story, and about shovel knight's mother or something, and I make the joke that her name is mum knight. Which it's not !! And so that's how I got the idea of everything being a knight. Which... Teehee ! Didn't even happen in Knight lobster. There are a few knights, but even in area 1 there's a few NPCs who aren't knights. Maybe I should change that, and maybe I could even go back and add knightly elements to every enemy, or something. Who knows ! Many things to be done.
24/02/2026 : Wow ! A blog ?! (main inspirations and stuff)
hi. This is KPWU, the developper of Knight Lobster. I want to start making regularish blogposts about the development of this game... so i'll try. bear with me !
I wanted to do this first one to speak about the big inspirations behind knight lobster (and my creative process in general) and the philosophy of this goddamn piece of shit i call a game.
Years ago, by chance, one way or another, I stumbled on a little game called Mu Cartographer. It was on 100% sale at the time, so i played it, and i think it like, fundamentally changed something about me. The game is somewhat basic : You are presented with a 3d map, similar to a mountain range. Over the screen, you see controls and vials, which are all unlabeled. As you tinker with those, you start to understand what they do. You start to piece together the goal of the game, and its story via travel logs left by characters. In the end, the unfamiliar and unparseable world of the game becomes understandable, familiar, even comfortable. This feeling is one I find very interesting, and aim to the best of my abilities to reach in Knight Lobster, but also in most of my creative works in general.
So you know La Mulana. Probably... If you don't, you should immediately play the og freeware version. It's a metroidvania in which you explore a giant set of ruins. The game is known for its very cryptic and difficult, sometimes unclear puzzles... Yeah. Yeah this is a big influence. Yeah I will include some of that in Knight Lobster. Yep. A big part of La Mulana is the very interconnected world. Comprised of a bit more than 20 areas, quite a few puzzles require you to think about how they fit together, and the general structures of the ruins. A lot of the game can also be done non-sequentially : you could for exemple clear the first area in last. (Un)fortunately, Knight Lobster is desperately linear. It's a goddamn fucking tower, not a sprawling set of ruins. The last big point about La Mulana is its sheer hostility towards the player. Not as in thousands of enemies, but rather... like, you need to buy the save system. The map system is complicated to even access. It's one of these games, and I love it, and I will try to replicate that. Worry not, for there will be a manual, but be-fucking-ware.
Shin Megami Tensei is pretty big. You know it, you know persona, that's SMT baby. I played SMT 1 when I was in highschool, and then again in uni, and then again now, and it's a game I like a lot. The atmosphere is incredible, just the perfect blend of too real and dream-like. The exploration also really gets me in a very comfortable rhythm... And it's a big inspiration to me in general, especially the cathedral, which is very much my favourite dungeon in any game ever. But a game that is more relevant to Knight Lobster is probably Shin MEgami Tensei 4 (and 4 apocalypse.) These two games are probably among the games I played the most ever. The thing that I really, really love about them is the combat. It's fast paced, fluid, strategic, and unforgiving. SMT4A especially pulls this off incredibly well, with it's gimmicky but very thought out and strategic bosses.
I Really Like David Lynch. Somehow I only discovered his filmography like, a year or so ago. It's criminal, I know ! I knew who he was and some of the things he did, but it's only recently that I watched his films (and twin peaks), and it's... It's like I Get It. I understand it. Inland Empire is one of my favourite movies ever... What really strikes me as interesting is the way he kind of... refuses to conform to viewer expectations. A lot of his works revolve around central questions, but their answer is never the focus of the work, instead focusing more on how these questions affect the lives of people. This can be seen in Twin Peaks (in which he originally never intended to reveal who killed Laura Palmer), but also in Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire... The sheer absurdity of his works is also one I really really like. Just some all around bullshit (in the most endearing way possible). I too, want to make some fucking bullshit. Rest in peace Mr Lynch.
You've heard of LSD dream emulator. Who hasn't heard of LSD dream emulator. The poster child of wierd japanese games. What were they one duuude what did they smooooke. But the work of Osamu Sato I find more interesting is Eastern Mind : the Lost souls of Tong Nou. Its a point and click adventure game about an island that steals souls, and so you, soulless, set out to that island to recover their soul. And in doing that, you die a lot. Not because the game is hard, but because when dying you will be reincarnated into nine different beings, all with their own story and goal to complete. Multiple puzzles require you to either know info from other lives, or items from other lives. In total, it makes for a very fun game that makes you feel really smart. A huge par of it is also the worldbuilding. The world building is all centred around the number 5 : there are five elements, five lands, ten (5x2) playable characters... And it makes for a very rewarding and cohesive worldbuilding. You can bet your ass that almost all the things I make are influenced by that now...
So... What of Knight Lobster ? I said I'd talk about the philosophy of that game, no ? That's now. Knight Lobster is a game I want to be hostile. I want it to be unexplained, vague yet too precise. It's a game of perceptions as well : a key thing in this game is the fact that what you see on the game screen is not what the characters see or a rendition of it, but rather they interpretation of the world around them, after being taken by their numerous biases. I wonder what reality is like... But, well, that's all I'll say on that matter.
A thing you may have seen in the works I talked about above is also hostility towards the player. Incomprehension not as a medium, but as a goal in and of itself. If you've played the demo, you've very likely seen that. I want this game to be complex, but to let players discover that complexity, to let them get submerged wholly by it. It's an exercise in interpretation, confrontation with reality. There is no ultimate knowledge... And even mine is not complete. Why would I know the perfect themes and conclusion of the story I wrote ? What gives me that right and privilege ?