Chico and the Magic Orchards launched 3 years ago this day! With thousands of players across multiple platforms, it has reached more people than I ever imagined at the start. I wanted to take some time to reflect on the game that finally kicked my lifelong game development dreams in gear.
Conceptualizing
As you may know, Chico started life as a game jam entry. This was in mid-2021, when I was deep in development of The Song of Asirra, a game which was sprawling, overscoped, and altogether too much for me to handle. The jam presented an opportunity to do something quick and fun, give myself a palette cleanser and a distraction. That jam, Retrograde Jam 2 was themed to create a “lost classic” for a retro console of your choosing, and I chose the original Game Boy for reasons of simplicity and personal nostalgia.
I clearly remember walking around town, daydreaming ideas. Both the concept for the game (chipmunk rolls walnut to solve puzzles) and the name Chico (a pun on his chubby cheeks) came to me then. I also remember doing the original pixel art for Chico himself on my laptop in a waiting room somewhere, maybe while getting my car serviced.
Time to Wait
After the jam ended, I released that early version of Chico (still playable for free!) and thought that would be the end of it, like it had been with many jam projects before. Although the game won 1st place in the jam, and I got many comments asking me to turn it into a full game, I had to return to work on The Song of Asirra and so Chico went back to sleep. Then something interesting happened, on Christmas of 2021 I launched a huge demo of The Song of Asirra, the culmination of years of hard work, to essentially crickets.
There were a lot of reasons the demo failed to reach an audience, many just related to my inexperience with marketing and doing a product launch, but I also found myself unhappy with the quality of the game. Despite my hard work it was inconsistent in its art style, had performance issues, the script was uneven, etc. I came to believe this was a product of my ambitions for the game outgrowing my abilities, and a large dose of scope creep as the years went on and I added feature after feature.
I could have let the disillusionment from that kill my momentum in game dev, but instead I decided to pick Chico back up. The art complexity was fixed, being limited to Game Boy resolutions and colors. The scope of the game could be restrained to a short experience. It felt like something I could do, and get the whole experience of creating and shipping a game under my belt, before returning to more complex projects.
And it was!
Everything I hoped would happen with developing Chico and the Magic Orchards is exactly what happened. Over the course of the next 8 months, I went from a game jam prototype into a full game. I didn’t let the scope get out of control, and I was able to ship a real finished product onto Steam and itch.io.
Going through this entire process really brought my game development skills to a new level. Not fully professional but definitely a step above the hobbyist level where I was. As I watched streamers and other content creators play the game, I started to realize its shortcomings and I was able to correct a number of them through patches.
Deluxe and Nintendo Switch
Immediately after launching the game, I began cooking up plans for a free content update. I would rework the entire game to support full color, which meant revisiting every single art asset I had created. Additionally I would add new levels, with a more open-ended exploratory style. This took a few additional months, and I eventually launched it as Chico and the Magic Orchards DX. I am really happy with that content, and glad that I took the time to push it beyond where it was at the initial launch.
Later in 2023, something unbelievable happened, which is that Nintendo finally decided the game was worthy of a Nintendo Switch release. I got my hands on a dev kit, did the minor amount of work needed for porting (my engine of choice, Game Maker, already handles most of the hard parts well), and got to experience the thrill of a release day one more time for Chico DX, this time on console. This moment was quite literally the fulfillment of a childhood dream, and is so far my most proud moment as a game developer.
Reception on Nintendo Switch was great as well, the cutesy mascot action-puzzle style is a perfect fit for Nintendo platforms, owing to my childhood spent being inspired by Nintendo’s own work.
Onwards to Rebound
Since the launch of the Nintendo Switch version of the game in December 2023, I’ve spent the intervening 1.5 years split between two projects. The first is a return to The Song of Asirra, restarted from scratch with a new design philosophy inspired by my experience with Chico. The other is a sequel/spin-off to Chico and the Magic Orchards called Chico’s Rebound. Since Chico’s Rebound is a smaller game than The Song of Asirra, it has neared completion sooner and is now my sole focus until I manage to ship it.
I am still aiming to ship it in 2025, and you can wishlist it on Steam now! While it isn’t the exact same type of gameplay as the original Chico, it keeps a lot of that game’s DNA, and I’m really excited to expand the universe of the little chipmunk who started my game development career!
Conclusion and Birthday Sale!
I didn’t have any particular message or meaning from revisiting the history of Chico and the Magic Orchards here, but it has been fun to walk down memory lane and celebrate this game that will forever hold so much meaning to me!
I am so grateful to everyone who has supported me in the past and who support me today, making games brings me great joy and I hope that those games can bring joy to others as well!
To celebrate the game’s third birthday, Chico and the Magic Orchards DX is on sale for 33% off (or as close to that as I could get) on all platforms and all regions for the next week! So go on to wherever you buy your games and search for Chico, and have a nutty time! Thanks for reading
