Skin Deep will be released April 30, 2025. That’s 2 days from now!!!!!!!!!

Reviews of the game are now out:

• Eurogamer - ⁴⁄₅ - “Skin Deep, though, is a perfect genre piece. It’s immersive and it simulates.”
• PC Gamer - ⁸⁸⁄₁₀₀ - “Skin Deep is peak improv problem-solving unmarred by the dour dystopias this genre is built on.”
• Gamespot - ⁸⁄₁₀ - “It checks all the boxes of a great immersive sim, where each level is a puzzle box and you hold any number of figurative keys to unlocking it. And, yes, you can flush the toilets.”

Wishlist Skin Deep here!

To view all posts in this series, click here.

Sketches

While making Quadrilateral Cowboy, I had some loose thoughts about some sort of first-person game that takes place in spaceships. For fun I used to draw a sketch every Monday, and some of these sketches would eventually lead to Skin Deep.

These were very rough concepts/jokes – so just to set expectations, please don’t expect these ideas to be in the final game.

I find it helpful to get ideas out, either in written notes or a small sketch, during the process of figuring out the shape of something.

Maximum FPS

Jan 19, 2015 | I love games that have unexpected verbs. Toot…

Arm sling operative

Nov 23, 2015 | Simulating injuries in games is always fascinating!!

Physicality

Dec 14, 2015 | For playability and production reasons, games often treat the player as a smooth capsule that glides around the world. I love the idea of the player body being cumbersome and uncooperative.

Inventory bag

Jan 4, 2016 | So that’s where FPS characters lug around all those bullets…

Medical kit

Jan 18, 2016 | “Space painkillers” lol

Space pumice

Feb 22, 2016 | “Space pumice scouring stick | professional use only”

Tools of the trade

May 15, 2017 | I believe the lance was from the movie Thief.

Pockets

May 22, 2017 | I was trying to imagine how much bags a person would need to strap to themselves to lug around all their first-person action game objects.

Hull door

May 29, 2017 | The little light is my spare bicycle light (lol)

Turret

Jun 5, 2017 | I was riffing on the portable turrets in Half-life 1 & Team Fortress 2, and came up with this little barrel thing.

Et al

I find conceptual sketches to be a good starting point. I think it’s a helpful step to take things out of your brain and start figuring out how something would physically appear/move/open/use/etc.

Once things start being built in the game engine, things have a habit of changing dramatically (at least in my workflow). A sketch is a sketch, while a playable video game has very different needs/requirements/demands/etc. An idea can exist as a perfect gem in your mind or on paper, and finding ways to translate and interpret its juice into the actual game is always a fascinating process.

Someone… please make a game where I can press [F] to toot.