Idol Hell

In 2021, my friends and I had entered a small game jam at RIT, a sendoff held right before winter break. At that point in time, our friend group had shared both an interest in anime and a collective exhaustion from the semester’s grueling required classes. We’d had a laugh and said “Hey, what if we made a game about robot idols?” Obviously I loved this concept, because it meant I could lock in on the one thing I loved most of all: drawing anime girls.

The game jam lasted from Friday until Sunday, which meant we spent those 48 hours doing everything we could to give our project legs. And, well, after ingesting a lethal amount of caffeine and enough free pizza to feed a village… it stood.

We had put together a Touhou-style bullet hell in Pico-8. I’d had a hand in everything, but settled into the roles of spritework and music, as I was most familiar with how the editing systems worked. When we were handed our “Best Overall” award on Sunday night, I realized two things: one, that being fueled by Coke Zero and 4 hours of sleep actually feels pretty bad, and two, that we had something special on our hands.

After that came a whirlwind of meetings, classes, and late nights spent at the MAGIC center. We’d entered Idol Hell into the MAGIC center’s project incubator to acquire funding, which we ended up being selected for in the early spring of 2022. In May of that year, I graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology’s Game Design and Development program. Three months later, Idol Hell reached its $15,000 funding goal. In March of 2023, the game fully released on Steam, and the rest is history.