I’ve been thinking for a long time about what we’d really love to do at chilon.net. Not just work on for money, but work on for joy and self-fulfilment.

Our company developed a reputation in the front-end and full-stack development space for writing extremely high quality React/Angular and Node code at a rate much faster than most companies and developers are capable of. In a space with so much demand it’s inevitable that the level of talent that most companies were able to hire dropped, and as the talent of the developers around you drops the work becomes less inspirational and less fun. The challenges mostly came from having to deal with bad code made by other developers and bureaucratic hassles and less about the joy of coding. When we helped companies hire we were astounded at the mismatch between the claims made by the agents of the applicants and their technical ability. One recent memorable application for a React/Redux role said “This developer writes code at a speed four times greater than most are capable of due to their high level of experience and react knowledge”. This developer couldn’t even explain how the reduce function worked, this function being the cornerstone of the Redux pattern! They were still better than the majority of the applicants and were hired anyway and in four months they managed to write 200 lines of code. facepalm.

Just yesterday we had to get the most beloved chilon.net cat, Shyan, put down. After a long battle with cancer it got to the point where she couldn’t walk anymore and we knew it was time. Our wonderful vet visited the house and she died on my wife’s lap. This brush with death made us realise that now was the time to stop delaying our dreams, to stop chasing money and to start doing something we could be proud of and that we’d enjoy working on every day.

A plan I’ve been developing in the back of my mind for a very long time suddenly surged to the forefront and I knew that it was the only thing I wanted to do, the only thing I should do.

So for the next five months we’re going to be working on our new game in C#/MonoGame with the aim to demo it to a game publisher in June.

We’ve adored the game Celeste, the joy of fluidly moving about the world, the constant introduction of mechanics. Then we also love the intense strategic combat of Street Fighter V. Recently we’ve also been playing the game Fight’n’rage. These three games have felt like the idea we’ve been floating around deconstructed into three different games.

Our goal is to take the platforming challenge and joy of movement of Celeste and fuse it with the joy of punching someone in the face you find in a beat’em’up, and to fuse these mechanics into a fully rounded experience. Most importantly we want to capture how Celeste turns every level into a rhythym based puzzle by making each level an enigma that must be solved. Solved via running around and punching things and people!

We’ll be posting regularly on our progress on this game and inviting people to alpha test it in June.