Katja’s Abyss: Tactics is Kiefer Nemeth’s biggest project to date
The Queer Games Bundle is a collection of nearly 600 items by LGBTQ+ creators and teams, nearly 400 of which are independent video games, all sold for just $60. I’m talking with creators from the bundle about their games and their making habits. Visit the bundle and consider buying it.
Kiefer Nemeth’s polished, complex game Katja’s Abyss: Tactics merges the titular tactics with the grid-based deduction of classic Minesweeper. And your character plays in the service of charismatic leader Katja, who shows up to boss you around a bit while you stumble (I stumble) around the game grid.
How long have you been making games?
I’ve been making games since I was in high school. Around 2012, a friend of mine and I were developing into sentient beings and realized that we could actually make the things we always talked about. We found a free game engine online and started slowly learning the realities of game development. That led to me pursuing a degree in game design, and it’s been my dream career ever since. Katja’s Abyss: Tactics was, and still is, the biggest, most finished game I ever made, and that led into my first real job in the industry at Funomena. That studio poofed, though, and because I’m stubborn, I’m probably going back to solo development.
What tools do you like to use?
The game engine I discovered in 2012 was the OHRRPGCE, an engine made by James Paige in DOS around 1998 to make Final Fantasy-esque RPGs. It’s small and extremely limited, but I know it better than any other tool. The most famous game in it is probably Franken by Splendidland, which came out last month. I’ve worked in Unity and a few other engines, but the simplicity and familiarity of the OHRRPGCE keeps me coming back to it. It’s the engine I can finish things in, and though it may not be flashy, a finished game is 100% better than a shelved project.
“She had a really stern face and was aggressively holding a shovel, so she intimidated me into making her the leader.”
What themes or genres do you like to explore?
I really like games that involve strategy. I have a weird draw towards tactics games like Fire Emblem, and I keep finding myself wanting to make them. I think there’s something about the thoughtfulness of it that’s attractive to me. As for themes, I often I feel like my games aren’t… gay enough. Games are an artform, and I often think that I should be expressing myself and my Queer experiences, in the games that I make. Whenever I sit down and try to express myself, though, I just can’t think of how. This bundle helps a lot, for that reason. It’s hard to know what a Queer game can be without any examples.
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of making games?
The early parts of making a game are always the most fun. Brainstorming and designing and coming up with awesome ideas is so cool. And then you get to the bug-fixing part and it’s like pulling teeth. As a solo-dev, I’ve had to become a sort of jack-of-all-trades, so I’m not the best programmer. I just try to be adequate. I tend to really screw myself over by writing some ugly, uncommented code that is way too clever for its own good. Then I have to fight the urge to start a new project.
Is there a game that has affected you recently?
Pretty recently, I played Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic for the first time. I’m like 20 years late to the party, but holy hell, did I get obsessed with it. You can feel how old it is, so much it hurts, and yet it still became one of my favorite games for its narrative aspects. I’m not even sure what about the game gets me so good, it could be old nostalgia for Star Wars, the voice acting, or just plain good writing. Ultimately, I think I’m just a sucker for stories with unlikely bands of heroes and antiheroes working together and hiding from the cops.
Katya’s Abyss: Tactics is a sophisticated Minesweeper-like game. Have you made anything on this scale before?
Katja’s Abyss: Tactics is definitely my biggest undertaking. I’d rarely finished any game before it, and never to a degree that I felt satisfied with. That was sort of my goal with Katja, to prove to myself that I could see a project through. So that any time I doubt myself, I have something to point to and remind myself I can do it. I didn’t expect it to be the coolest game of all time, but it’d be a game, and that was enough.
What is it like to implement the Minesweeper mechanic? That’s such an iconic gameplay at this point.
It felt really natural, actually. I was playing a lot of Minesweeper on my phone in 2020, and I thought, this sucks. Minesweeper would be cooler if there were little dudes walking around in the empty space trying not to blow up. So I made it happen. Minesweeper is such a simple game that implementing it was no problem. And the game design practically wrote itself: energy drops on the floor correlating directly with the number of adjacent mines, and you use that energy to make new units. The risk/reward balanced itself: bigger clusters offered more energy but exploded way bigger. The hard part was designing interesting units and enemies that made a fun tactics game. After all, Katja’s Abyss isn’t just Minesweeper. Both halves of the game, minesweeping and tactics, had to be independently fun, or the game got old pretty quickly. I discovered that the hard way.
“Games are an artform, and I often think that I should be expressing myself and my Queer experiences, in the games that I make.”
How did you decide on the chunky pixel-art look of the game?
The art style is actually a limitation of the engine. Its default resolution is only 320x200 pixels, and Katja’s Abyss is only slightly larger than that. The environment art is made up of 20x20 pixel tiles, so the characters had to fit those dimensions as well. The art is probably the best part of the game, though, thanks to the talented pixel artists from the OHRRPGCE community.
Katja is powerful. Why did you develop her as the leader?
Katja’s Abyss actually didn’t have Katja for a while of development. She showed up around the time I decided to make a campaign for the game that was more than just infinite, randomly-generated levels. Before that point, the game lacked character. Literally, I suppose. I think some joke was made about it not having enough anime girls, so I drew a portrait of Katja. She really stuck with me, though, so I ended up naming the game after her. She had a really stern face and was aggressively holding a shovel, so she intimidated me into making her the leader. And do not be fooled, although the player is labeled as the “captain”, it’s clear who’s really in charge.
There’s so much going on in this game, from the campaign mode to the sandbox. What’s your favorite part?
My favorite part has to be the artifacts that you can find in-game. Whenever you defeat an enemy or complete a specific task, you have a chance to find an “artifact” from the caves that you’re mining in. The main plot of the game isn’t very in-depth or complex, but the descriptions and images for the artifacts show a lot of details about the world and its history: what the monsters are, who left these artifacts behind, etc. I have dreams of making a Katja 2; I have the story and gameplay planned out, but I’m not sure it’ll ever come to fruition.
