On the 6th of June, Kleanup Games released Chromadi on Steam & Mobile.
Scrolling the endless feed of new releases on Steam is often discouraging. Filled with low quality titles and games your grandma wouldn’t be thrilled about. But as you and I both know, good video games do release, pretty often actually! And after 30 minutes of digging I found one! Chromadi!
Its colourful spritework and the promise of an addicting arcade style loop sucked me in immediately. Games like Downwell and Switch ’N’ Shoot are some of my favourite time wasters.
After a few rounds, I reached out to the team to ask for an interview. Kleanup was very enthusiastic to talk more about themselves and the game they have made!
Some commentary by me will be sprinkled in but you’ll mostly be hearing from the five members of the Kleanup Crew being:
Kleanup ( Studio Director )
DarkGray ( Audio Director )
Navya ( Art Director )
Nandini ( Level Design )
Harish ( Programmer )
How did the team meet?
The way the team came together was very organic. I started the studio almost 3 years ago, and during that time I was prototyping Chromadi. DarkGray was my roommate then and he was experimenting with his music. We had always wanted to work together on a game for a long time. We had gone to the same college too. DarkGray made a track for Chromadi’s prototype then which surprisingly is still the title track for the game.
Nandini, our level designer, was my school mate since 5th grade and we had been friends since. She is now my wife. She was working in fashion before this started, and when this began she was our first playtester and she fell in love with it. Later, she quit her job and joined us on this journey.
I met Navya through Fiverr, a freelancing platform for a game years before this even started. We stayed in touch since I really loved her work and I reconnected with her asking if this was something she would like to work on, and she did.
Harish and myself worked in the same company before this, and after I had started I reached out to him and asked him if he would be interested to work on Chromadi, and luckily he said yes.
I am the lucky one. Best team ever.
Hearing that the team had all met Kleanup previously is like something out of a movie. Getting the all-star cast together for jam is inspirational!
Where did the idea of Chromadi come from? Any key inspirations?
Chromadi’s idea didn’t come from any particular game or wanting to do anything specific in the beginning. I was prototyping some early ideas and nothing seemed to be fun enough. I was learning to program too around the same time, I just wanted to work on something small which I could wrap over a weekend and share it with a few friends.
Being a designer first, I was always quite confused about remembering the Colour Wheel. That seemed like a good starting point for me to gamify that so that I could remember it. I know how simple it is to remember but I think I am too dumb to remember it without a game making me to. So yeah, that’s how Chromadi started basically.
I like this approach, learning something while doing another. Applying knowledge over and over again is the best way to learn it and it sounds like Kleanup found a unique way to achieve that.
Was there any scrapped ideas?
Oh, plenty of ideas were scrapped. So many game modes, a lot of enemy types, so many. There were a lot of ideas which we were super excited about but realised after testing it, that it broke the basic rule which I had, keeping it simple. Maybe we will bring it back in some time, I would love to! Let’s see!
I’ll be keeping my pulse on new updates!
As a team, what feature or facet of the game are you most proud of?
I think the team is really proud of what we have achieved together. Most importantly, the proudest thing for us is successfully shipping our first title together, and also shipping it on mobile and PC simultaneously. That’s super crazy. Personally, I am proud of seeing it through and hopefully sticking the landing with all the content we have shipped. I think the team should be proud of everything they have personally contributed to Chromadi too, DarkGray’s incredible OST, Navya’s beautiful artworks, Nandini’s amazing levels and Harish’s super code holding all of this together.
The art and sound are both striking and it’s clear the code is well tied together. On launch day I hit a pretty significant bug that the team likely would not have hit themselves in normal testing, I reported it swiftly. Hours later, it was fixed for everyone in the first official update! Navigating your own code and finding bugs shows a strong understanding of that code. Keep it up gang!
Was there any unexpected challenges or road-bumps?
Yes, there were a lot. Since it is our first title together, there were a lot of things for us to learn and improve. Most importantly on the marketing and the publishing side of things. Even now, having self published the title, we are still working hard to improve the reach and visibility of the game. There were quite a few on the game side of things too, but we always came out of it stronger and with a better game, mostly because of all of us actively testing and just being smart and okay with scrapping features out.
Cutting back scope-creep is a hard learned lesson and it sounds like the team took it well. As for marketing, I found this game while actively searching Steam’s new releases. Lets hope the target audience finds this gem!
Outside of working for Kleanup Games, what do you do?
I personally enjoy and love playing Video Games. It’s been over a year since I played any. I am excited to get back and go through my backlog now. We were also married during the production of the game, so never had the time to enjoy our life post marriage apart from work, so definitely looking forward to that now.
DarkGray enjoys and loves movies. So I think that’s where you will find him after this. You can find Navya getting back to her comics and figuring out a day for her to pack her suitcase and travel. Harish, you would find him playing Elden Ring with probably the hardest mods installed.
Married during production! That’s a crazy busy life period! Proud of the team for being themselves outside of their work.
What are your favourite video games?
This is always the hardest question.I think currently, my favourite would be Disco Elysium (Extremely sorry about not mentioning other favourites, not a fair question, super hard). Harish’s would be Sekiro, DarkGray’s would be Hollow Knight, Nandini’s would be Stardew Valley and Navya’s probably would be Chromadi <3
Disco Elysium is sitting on my to-play list…. Maybe I will attend to it soon.
What was your experience with Steam Next Fest like?
We were a bit unlucky with our Next Fest participation. Our page was stuck in review for almost 10 days prior to the fest and it only went through after the fest began. I was unable to get the game removed from the fest too. I can’t participate in the upcoming ones either. I guess I needed this learning experience to make sure not to repeat the same mistake again.
That is upsetting. Next Fest is a celebrated event for game enthusiasts and it is upsetting to hear that not everyone gets to participate in the way they would like to. It sounds like if Next Fest is important to a developer, they need to plan around it weeks in advance. You can actually check the dates of upcoming steam events HERE
What words of wisdom would you give to aspiring artists in your fields?
Kleanup : If it was possible for me to do this, I think anyone from anywhere can.
Nandini : Just chase the fun, the results will follow.
DarkGray : Borrow inspirations from anywhere you possibly can find. Be ready to experiment.
Navya : Never give up. Keep at it and you will see the tremendous results it can produce.
Harish : Hard work never fails you.
Solid words! I particularly like “Be ready to experiment”. Getting into creative juices is important and sometimes people hesitate to do so.
Of the five of you, who has the highest score? Do you mind if I beat it?
Harish always. He’s the one who has the highest score in any of the games we play. Do I mind if you beat it? Absolutely not, please beat his score. It would make us all happy.
I’m on it!
If you were to start again from scratch, would you stick with Unity?
Tough question to answer, I think Unity is the engine which gave me the confidence to make this, it was a comfortable engine for a beginner like myself and a ton of people’s plugins to use at your disposal. So yeah, I think we would stick with Unity if we have to do this all over again. Although, we are definitely thinking of moving to Godot for our next one.
This is the sort of answer I expected especially after what Unity tried a few years ago with pay-per-install.
Godot has been quickly rising for sometime now, taking its place as the game engine for the people.
I appreciate the time Kleanup and the crew took to answer these questions!
See you in the next one,
Jackson Murphy
Thank you <3
Nice blog! interesting insight into game dev from a small studio.