The game itself certainly sounds whimsical and unique, if the Steam description is any indication:

Having played the demo at MAGFest I can certainly say that the game is fun to look at, listen to, and play. Afterwards, I got in touch with Ryan Brolley, the president and co-founder of alchemedium, to ask him a few questions about A Tofu Tail.

ZN: Your studio’s first game, A Tofu Tail, is heavily influenced by Japanese folklore. Why did you pick Japanese folklore in particular for this game?

From the beginning we knew that we wanted to have strongly unique and interesting characters; but after throwing a few ideas around for an antagonist and basic story, we were not generating anything that was at all remarkable or interesting… Our best concept up to the time was a fireball-looking wizard guy who turns you into a cube - none of us grew at all attached to the idea.

While reading some old Japanese folklore and ancient Shinto texts, I stumbled upon one folktale in particular that tells of fox spirits with many tails, called the Kitsune, playing tricks on humans in the woods, bending the world to their will. And its favorite food is tofu. And BAM. Things started to fall into place!

Our antagonist became the trickster Kitsune foxes, manipulating the world around the player with their illusions, creating these mazes and puzzles to test the mettle of the protagonist. Our protagonist would be a person turned into a cube of tofu - a Kitsune’s favorite food - trying to gain back their true human form. And like tofu, the player would be absorbing the properties of things around them to change their color based on the element orbs acquired.

ZN: How did you first get the idea for a rolling block puzzle game involving tofu and a curse?

As a team, we sat down and discussed where we want to be and how to get there. We had previously attempted an adventure game – and that first attempt taught us a lot - mainly that we had no idea what we were doing! Our first obvious goal was to learn the basics.

Spending a few weeks throwing ideas around for some basic games, we settled on one that seemed simple enough to learn game programming, art and music asset creation, and game design. The idea was to create procedurally generated mazes, with its core objective to navigate an avatar through a color-constrained maze by collecting pickups to change color. The basic algorithm for generating these mazes was simple, letting us focus on learning.

And boy, was it a learning experience…

ZN: On alchemedium’s website you say that none of the team had any experience in making games before, so in what ways has making A Tofu Tail been a learning experience?

You learn the hard skills and techniques one would expect to learn while making a game - game engines, drawing techniques, coding practices, etc - but there was one very important lesson that sits on top for this project:

Scope creep is a real monster to keep in check!

We had set out to make a simple and quick puzzle game, and ended up making a whole world for Mr. Tofu and fifteen characters, seven different realms, 100 puzzle levels, and 16 full-fledged music tracks. We definitely let things get out of hand. But - no regrets! We have learned so many priceless lessons in doing so, and think we created something with a lot of depth and charm, as well.

While game development is definitely hard - it can also be amazingly rewarding!

ZN: Why did you decide to use a hand-drawn art style for this game?

We had no spare cash to invest in hiring an artist, and working full time jobs left us with less time to invest ourselves in learning new skills. I’ve been free-hand drawing and sketching for years just as a hobby, so utilizing that pre-existing skill seemed to be a given.

ZN: What’s your favorite thing about this game?

ZN: Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about A Tofu Tail?

You can get updates (with demos, soundtrack downloads, etc) by joining the mailing list, follow @alchemedium on Twitter, as well as pre-order A Tofu Tail on the game’s website.

You can vote for A Tofu Tail on Steam Greenlight here.