Welcome back to another edition of IndieXP, our series of indie developer interviews where we try to spotlight as many creative minds and interesting projects as we can! Today’s interview highlights a team with a solid portfolio under their belt: Helltown gave you a low-poly, retro-style look at the terrors of a small town, turn-based RPG Born of Bread followed the colorful adventures of a flour golem (yup, really!), and their latest project, Caput Mortum, is a horror game with a one-armed protagonist and a unique control scheme. That’s right – we sat down for a chat with WildArts Studio. Enjoy!
First things first: could you please introduce yourself for our readers?
Hi! My name is Gabriel, I'm the art director at WildArts Studio, a small game company based in Canada that my partner, Nicolas, and I started back in 2021. We're currently a team of two, and we've released three games so far: Born of Bread, Helltown, and now Caput Mortum!
Your recently-released horror game Caput Mortum is described as being inspired by "retro 3D dungeon crawlers and survival horror games". Which specific titles do you feel shaped and influenced the development of the game the most, either from an artistic or mechanical standpoint?
Early 2000s titles like King's Field 4 and Shadow Tower Abyss were a big source of inspiration for the game's art direction and overall tone. I was also very inspired by Amnesia and Penumbra when it comes to game flow and monster encounters. It was important for me to harken back to that era of horror, both aesthetically and mechanically!
As a game developer, what does creative freedom mean to you, and how much importance do you place on it during the overall development process?
To me, it means letting yourself be enthralled by ideas and possibilities, while being consciousof your limitations. Since we're just a team of two with limited time and funds, it's important to work with these constraints in mind in order to make sure we can complete the game's development. Despite these limitations, creative freedom is one of the best aspects of being an indie game developer: we get to make things we find genuinely cool and meaningful!
Did you ever have to abandon a certain idea (or ideas) during development because it either didn’t fit into the schedule, the budget, or you realized it wasn’t beneficial to the game for some other reason?
Thankfully, no! In fact, I ended up adding more stuff following my partner's suggestions and feedback. Caput Mortum was meant to have a very short developmentcycle, since our ongoing strategy as a studio is to focus on smaller, very polished productions.
As a follow-up to the above, is there something you’re proud to have kept?
Since nothing was cut, I'll tell you what addition I like best: the secret ending and secret weapon! Nicolas suggested these ideas, and I think they add a really cool reason to do a second playthrough.
Can you tell us a bit about Caput Mortum's unique controls? How did the idea come about, and how difficult was it to design puzzles and encounters that would ultimately make sense within the framework of this control scheme?
The idea for Caput Mortum came following my first time playing King's Field 4. I loved the vibes and decided to try it. The controls for the King's Field series are notoriously clunky compared to today's standards, and it reminded me of how much scarier games were when I was little and unfamiliar with a controller. I figured making a horror game with odd controls would not only make the experience much more tense, but would also force the player to take in the environments instead of breezing past everything. However, I also wanted to make sure you could gradually get used to the controls in order to avoid a purely frustrating experience. The idea for moving the hand with the right joystick came from wondering what it would be used for now that the camera's controls were assigned elsewhere. Designing puzzles around the controls was pretty fun and not too challenging, actually. Using your hand in-game makes it easy to draw parallels to real-world actions, so it came fairly naturally!
Have you ever found yourself pressured or influenced by gamers’ expectations in terms of what a game should be like/what elements it should have, etc.? How do you balance your own vision and ideas with these expectations?
Since we have a very small following, we've been lucky only to get supportive messages! I think it also helps to clearly define what the game is on the storefront. For instance, in the first paragraph of the game's description, we say that the game is short, and we keep the inspirations vague. I think that if we explicitly named games like King's Field 4 or Amnesia, which are both way bigger than what we can afford to make at the moment, players might expect certain things that we couldn't or didn't want to do in Caput Mortum.
A fun theoretical question: if you had access to unlimited resources, what would you do differently from a creative/artistic standpoint?
I think we would have gone a lot further with the hand mechanic, and made more areas and puzzles. There's still a lot of untapped potential left in quirky controls like that, and I hope we managed to inspire other devs to try their hand at it! (pun intended)
Finally, could you tell our readers where they can follow you and your work if they’d like to stay up to date with any future developments?
You can follow us on Bluesky @wildartsdevs.bsky.social or on Twitter @wildartsdevs, where you'll also find a link to our Discord server!
