Orc mindfulness simulatorDon’t Kill Them Allwears its roguelike inspirations on its sleeve. In particular, Fika’s upcoming turn-based strategyindie gametakes heavy inspiration from 2022’sCult of the Lamb.
The bond between the two titles is most evident inDon’t Kill Them All’s Kickstarter campaign, whichCult of the Lambdeveloper Massive Monster backed. Getting that support forDon’t Kill Them Allfrom their spiritual sibling was an important goal for Fika, the studio’s co-founder Antoine Grégoire-Slight told Game Rant in a recent interview. Grégoire-Slight spoke on howCult of the Lambis woven intoDon’t Kill Them All’s DNA, and why getting to work with the team behind it on a small collaboration for the Kickstarter campaign meant so much.
Cult of the Orc
Speaking specifically about howCult of the LambinspiredDon’t Kill Them All, Grégoire-Slight explained,
Cult of the Lamb is an inspiration for the game because it’s split into two phases. There’s the build your own cult aspect and then going on raids and exploring dungeons with the roguelike phase. It was also a loop that we felt really compelled to play and wanted to have a game that can have the thrill of building your own things and going to explore dangerous environments.
This general design heavily informed the core gameplay loop inDon’t Kill Them All. Orcs will spend their mornings engaging in hobbies, passions, and mindfulness exercises before going out on an afternoon raid. At camp, the player can use resources gathered on raids to construct new means of improving the emotional well-being of the orcs, which in turn makes them better, more versatile raiders to join the player’s orc life coach out on the field.
In the afternoon, a small war band will explore procedurally generated environments, gather resources, recruit new orcs, and carry out side quests. Those resources go back to the camp, and the orcs from yesterday’s war band rest and recuperate during the next raid. The moods orcs are in when they head out–ranging fromtheInside Outmain fiveof anger, happiness, sadness, disgust, and fear to feelings like confusion and shame–have impacts on the orcs' abilities in combat.
The inspiration taken fromCult of the Lambis clear in that gameplay loop, but the two games seriously diverge in their execution of that loop. WhereCult of the Lambis about gaining worshippers,Don’t Kill Them Allis about learning that bloodlust isn’t the whole of being an orc. Some orcs are painters, or fishers, or magicians, and there’s even a Lamb Orc, in theory at least.
We have created our version of the Lamb that we have posted on social media–we had quite a lot of fun doing that. We have done that as well with other game studios, and we will continue to do that on social media. We’ll decide later on if we put some of those skins in the game or not…We just want to make sure that it fits with the characters and the environment that you are exploring in the game. This is mostly for fun, but we had fun with that collaboration.
Check out theDon’t Kick Them AllKickstarter, ending June 6.
Stretch Goals Are More than Money to Fika
Kickstarters for games have a bit of a checkered reputation. For every hit likeSea of Stars,there areplenty of promising Kickstarter campaigns that get canceled. Already having secured the funding to finish their campaign successfully,Don’t Kill Them Allcleared the financial hurdle they sought to vault with Kickstarter’s help, but that’s far from the only purpose a Kickstarter campaign has. Fika figured out a way to maximize the second primary goal of Kickstarters: to generate attention and interest in a game.
Where stretch goals tend to be focused on reaching certain thresholds of money raised after the campaign ends,Don’t Kill Them Allincludes plenty of stretch goals focused instead on community engagement. Getting backed byCult of the Lamb’s team was one of the first goals achieved by the campaign, with other goals including numbers of Steam wishlists, Discord members, followers on social media platforms, and players sharing their passions with the team at Fika.
We encourage them to create fantastic fan arts and also share their passion with us because we are taking a lot of inspiration and creating this game, but we are still two years from the release. I don’t know, maybe some of those passions that are shared with us will be inspiration for creating passions in the game for orcs. Those two goals of 100 backers that post art and 100 backers sharing some sort of passion would be really incredible to get.
It remains to be seen how the remaining stretch goals forDon’t Kill Them All go, but still, as far as Fika’s first Kickstarter goes, Grégoire-Slight is happy with the result.Ship of Fools, the previous title from Fika, wasn’t Kickstarted. Grégoire-Slight explained that the process of developing a Kickstarter was a new challenge for the company, but it was something very educational.
Launching a Kickstarter means developing eye-catching graphics, a presentation video, deciding rewards, finding fulfillment partners, and coming up with potential features to unlock through the innovative use of stretch goals Fika employed. Fika was doing all of this at a relatively early stage of development given the game is targeting a 2026 release.
It was a great, great experience. We learned a lot. Now we are pretty happy that the campaign has been funded, so we can say that we have reached our objective, and now we are trying to extend that campaign as much as possible in terms of reaching different achievements and increasing funding that we can get for the game…It’s not too late to pledge and help us in making this project as great as possible.
With backers like the team fromCult of the Lambgiving Fika their support, the campaign only has to stick the landing and start development. No decision has been made aboutany possible Early Access releasesforDon’t Kill Them All, but a backer-exclusive closed beta is on the cards targeting next year.
