Making indie game Mythmatch - finessing 2D animation to tell diverse stories

From the original God of War to contemporary indie blockbuster Hades, video games love to dabble in Greek mythology, which is similarly mined and adapted in plenty of other media. Ironically, Moo Yu, who's working on narrative-based community-building sim Mythmatch, using Unity, tells me that he had stumbled into Greek mythology "purely by accident".

The game's key mechanic involves crafting both objects and creatures by merging them in threes, similar to match-three puzzlers like Candy Crush, and so Moo, who's the creative director at Team Artichoke making Mythmatch, had been studying food chains to consider what could be merged up a chain.

"From the apex predator to the lowest thing, they were all so short, in usually three or four steps," Moo says, which led to the idea of exploring mythical creatures instead, which in turn brought him to Greek mythology (one merge sequence it allows is for instance, combining three dogs to become the three-headed hound Cerberus).

He explains: "But once I started looking into Greek mythology, it was so interesting because there's just so much there. I feel like it's a style of storytelling that's very human. The gods are very powerful, but they're very petty, sad, basic, and predictable, and there was just something really appealing about that."

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Mythmatch isn't just preoccupied by the Greek gods but also of the mortals, which represent contemporary dynamics of privilege and power, with Olympus depicted as a corporation run by tech bros. It's a topic that's especially relatable to a team with a majority of women and people from marginalised backgrounds.

"If we're assuming that Greek mythology is real, but we're also telling a story that's very much about working your way up in the corporate world, then definitely my experience of the corporate world is that the higher up you go, the more white and the more male it is," Moo explains. "We capture that with most of the gods being white men having a much easier time, but the mortals in Ithaca are a lot more diverse because there's not this inherent gatekeeping when you're at the bottom."

There's intersectionality at play in these representations too. You play as Artemis who is trying to prove herself as goddess of the hunt, at a disadvantage compared to her twin brother Apollo, but still a white woman with literal power in her merging abilities. The team is taking care to ensure the gameplay and narrative doesn't make it out like you're a white privileged woman solving the problems of a marginalised community, whose leader Queen Penelope is depicted as a Black woman.

Moo tells me Penelope's representation is inspired by the stories he hears from his Black female friends. "In the absence of her husband Odysseus, she's trying to govern Ithaca, but when a Black woman is trying to say the same things as a white man, it's not received as well, or people will say she's got a bad attitude or she's bossy."

He, however, recalls that in an earlier iteration, Penelope's placeholder character art was actually Venelope from Wreck-It Ralph. "For a long time, it was this little white girl, and many things that we had gameplay-wise were fine. But the moment we swapped her over to a Black woman, a bunch of stuff felt awful. Suddenly, you're this white saviour bossing around this Black woman, so we had to shift some ideas over."

Despite the cosy and cutesy aesthetic then, with artist Beidi Guo creating both detailed portraits for each character's dialogue scenes as well as their chibi counterparts for the gameplay, there's some pretty serious themes that Mythmatch explores in its narrative.

Nonetheless, there's an intention behind the game's character designs to be enjoyed by all ages – in other words, don't expect the same thirsty vibes that's contributed to the appeal of Hades. Moo is also wary of not including content that might cause complications with age rating boards when the game does release, which was a factor behind replacing one of its gods, Dionysus.

"When you have the god of wine as a character in the game, it was just so difficult not to be talking about alcohol all the time, specifically as it was that you as the player would be serving alcohol," Moo explains. "I also think the more money you have, the more you can get away with, and we have no money. There's the whole Balatro controversy around gambling, and then my son's playing Astrobot that has literal slot machines."

Fortunately, making changes has also been relatively smooth while developing Mythmatch in Unity, which is compatible with Spine, a 2D animation software used for 2D skeletal animation. Indeed, it's been straightforward to create one set of animation that can then be used with another character skin (at least if you exclude Chiron, a centaur who has four legs).

"Spine has also come along so much in the last five or six years," says Moo. "For my last game, Knights and Bikes, I remember getting four characters on screen meant a lot of your CPU was already gone, whereas in Mythmatch you can put as many characters on screen as you want and it's not an issue at all. It's just a much more optimised, robust, and flexible system."

While a release is yet to be confirmed for Mythmatch, a demo is currently available to download right now on Steam. If want to follow Moo Yu and create your own game, the read our explainers to game creators Godot Engine and GameMaker.