At H-bomb we’re all back at our jobs and preparing for the holidays. Fortunately, we’ve got all these games to play and rate whenever we have free time.

The idea for XenoSerf.

We absolutely feel this is a more original game than any we’ve done before, and we’re not entirely sure where the idea for the game came from. You could say there’s elements from Stronghold or Crusader Kings that the game parodies, but we don’t really feel these games have ever been references for us. A more likely source for the concept is just us daydreaming/doodling in History class years ago.

The concept emerged pretty quickly : You are a peasant, raising animals for your lord, who then uses the animals as his personal army. But if you’re sneaky and smart, you can raise your own army of farm animals without your lord knowing — and then overthrow his evil rule. But you’ll have a hard time with that without enlisting help from the other peasants.

We came up with the concept as a group. It appealed to everyone immediately during our initial brainstorming session. We all wanted originality, humor, and generally to create a weird and fun world for you to discover.

Then when Matthieu, our artist, initially created concept art for the other farmers that you must, for lack of a better word, seduce, the first one he drew was a redneck alien wearing a trucker hat that looked a bit like it had walked out of a Calvin & Hobbes sunday strip. That’s how many elements that were much more associated with rural America than feudal Europe made it… into space, where we’d decided from the start the game had to take place.

We’ve thoroughly enjoyed creating our farming-themed japanese dating sim wargame in space, and we’re very proud of what went right.

There will be a post-mortem soon! The game is not as finished as we’d have liked it to be, so we still have to analyze why, and what issues we need to correct for future jams.

The team that made XenoSerf!

– Haru is our game designer and wrote dialog for the game. He loves all games, especially if Batman’s involved somehow. Twitter

– Paul is our programmer. He likes Bastion, and thinks it should top everyone’s lists about everything ever. Twitter

– Matthieu is our artist and animator. He likes JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, whatever the media. Twitter

– Oded Welgreen composed the music for XenoSerf! He is on Twitter and Soundcloud, and we invite you to play his cute and hilarious Github Game-off entry Super Fantasy Queue.

– Max is our sound designer, and is on Twitter. He’s also composed the music for our previous jam entries, available on Soundcloud.

– Nico is our background artist and did the game’s gorgeous world map. He says he’s not a gamer, but we know better, because he will murder you at Motorstorm Apocalypse. Twitter

– Ben wrote dialog for the game. He likes to show you his pokemans, whether you want him to or not. Twitter