The coolest thing about going to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco — well, aside from the weather; seriously folks, California is not all sunshine! — is stumbling upon games I probably never would have heard of otherwise, playing them, and then immediately getting to speak with the passionate devs behind them.
That was my experience at The MIX, an after-hours mixer event put on in collaboration with Kinda Funny, that brings a whole bunch of devs together with media for a buffet of hands-on demos.
A Captain Among Devs
In that crowd of devs, one stood out for his commitment to embodying his game’s bit. Jonah Wallerstein is the lead dev behind Captain Corgi: Planetary Problem Solver, an indie game about an anthropomorphic dog who pilots a sailboat through space, looking for people (well, animals) to help. During The Mix, Wallerstein wore a captain’s hat that matched the one worn by the corgi on his key art. It’s only fair Wallerstein gets to wear a captain’s hat since he’s largely working solo, handling the game’s art, writing, code, and more.
I played a 30-minute demo of the game and had a good time piloting my sailboat to a planet to mingle with the local animals. I instantly saw a strong Frog Detective influence, the hit indie trilogy created by Worm Club. That team was tiny, with both games primarily created by just two people. And Wallerstein cites both Frog Detective’s vibe and small team size as inspirations.
“My previous game was a fighting sports game. It was very different and I felt like I wanted to write a game with a story,” Wallerstein says. “So I was looking at other small story games, [the kind of thing] that you can do with a very small team.”Wallerstein admired the way Frog Detective was able to do both.. “That’s a great game, and I was like, okay, that seems like something that’s achievable for a small team.”
A Modern Twist On Familiar Fairy Tales
He started with the talking animals — with Corgi and his first mate, Lem — but says he wanted to inject some fairy tale storytelling. I saw that in the first village I visited, where Corgi had to figure out how to rescue a young woman from a wolf pretending to be her grandmother. But in this telling of Red Riding Hood, it turns out the girl and the wolf have become friends and she’s actually pretty mad when you attempt to intervene. This upsets the wolf, and he locks himself inside a cupboard. He’ll stay there crying until you find the ingredients to bake him a pie.
Wallerstein says that, in the final game, this sequence will have a Cooking Mama-style minigame. The first time I traveled to Red Riding Hood’s cottage, there was a section inspired by Temple Run, too.
Captain Corgi looked a little flat, graphically — closer to ’90s Veggie Tales than the stylized look of Frog Detective — but it made up for that with plenty of personality. There’s a nerdy lion called Lionel Neckmane who wears a fedora and is a dead ringer for plenty of gamer dudes I’ve known over the years. Corgi and Lem’s banter was fun, too, and I’m excited to see more of the interplanetary travel.
Though it may be a little limited in this first entry. Wallerstein says that we’ll mostly be hanging out on the planet I saw in the demo but, if the game does well, he plans to build out the galaxy in sequels.
Captain Corgi: Planetary Problem Solver is aiming for a 2025 release on Steam, where it’s currently available to wishlist.
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