Dissension – A Pixel Art Adventure about a Medieval Spy and her Mare named Pumpkin
During one of my regular searches for horsie game development updates on Twitter, I came across a lovely looking adventure game: Dissension tells the story of an Imperial spy sent onto a dangerous undercover mission. On its Itch page, Dissension promises
A thrilling story, heavily focused on characters and character development
A gloomy and corrupted medieval city to explore
Simple yet charming mini-games and puzzles, adding to the narrative
At the side of protagonist Eiren, we find her “(not so) faithful mare Pumpkin”. Naturally, I reached out to the developer Disguised Games to get a bit more information about how this cute indie game will tackle its horse content:
The Mane Quest: On a scale of 1 to 10, how important would you say horses are in Dissension?
Jay from Disguised Games: It’s a tough one. Probably somewhere around the middle on how often horses will be featured, but definitely a 10 on how important a relationship with her horse will be for our protagonist.
TMQ: Horses are often used as transport vehicles in games, but rarely as actual characters: how does your game tackle that? Can you tell us a little bit about the horse character?
DG: We started from that common perspective as well. A character needs to move around and there aren’t many options for that in a medieval setting. But as we further developed our story, it started to feel like a waste not to have any meaningful interactions with the horse. So we decided to make an actual developing friendship between those two and never regretted that we did.
Creating a conflict with the horse was easy for us: our main character, Eiren, is a spy who comes from an island nation. She is used to getting around by boat and is therefore wary of horses and not keen on riding one.
The horse, Pumpkin, is not thrilled to leave her home and to travel with that suspicious person and can probably sense the spy's feelings towards her. She definitely is her own character and unfortunately for our protagonist, sometimes things will have to go Pumpkin’s way.
But as the story progresses and our hero finds her way, their relationship may develop into a strong friendship.
TMQ: I see you have a demo available: is that demo a good representation of what horse-loving players can expect from the game? (or does the horse get vastly more/less important later on...?)
DG: The demo is very short and mainly sets up the story, but we tried to give a gentle hint at what is to come.
We’re now working on the enhanced demo for Steam which will have more important interactions with Pumpkin and other characters (quite a few new levels to explore as well!)
TMQ: What's your approach to creating horse animations for the game? Can you share anything about the process of translating a horse's movement into pixel art?
DG: Our artist learned a lot about horse anatomy and movement from videos and photos. The galloping horse is a beautiful sight, and he did his best to show it in our animations.
The idea of meaningful interactions with a horse companion and some conflict between a main character and their mount sounds absolutely wonderful to me. I’ve often wondered how a horse companion bond could look in an indie game with limited scope, and it sounds like Disguised Games is tackling this dynamic with a lot of heart.
I will definitely keep my eye on this one, and if you’re hungry for cute horse narratives like me, I suggest you show your love to this project by giving it a follow on Twitter, or joining the studio’s Discord Server.
If you want to get a first look at it right away, you can download the demo on Itch and let us know what you think!