Indie Game Spotlight: YIIK

Indie Game Spotlight: YIIK

Get ready to head back to the Roaring 90s for this week’s Indie Game Spotlight. YIIK is a Japanese-style RPG mashed up with the WarioWare series. The characters? A group of Internet Detectives. The plot? Investigate the disappearance of a young woman who vanished from an elevator. Spooky.

We were able to talk with Andrew Allanson, YIIK’s co-creator, who handled the script, dungeon design, music composition, and cutscene directing. Read on!

This game has been a true labor of love. How long did it take to create the game from start to finish?

The game took about 4 years from start to finish. There was some time off in there to deal with our Mother’s death (I develop the game with my brother Brian), but it was largely a rush of working 9-10 hours every day for 4 years.

How does the music in YIIK transform throughout the game?

Like most of the game, it’s a bit of a slow burn. The score starts off with catchy tunes, and the themes develop along with the characters. Slowly both more grand, and more experimental, and things getting stranger in Alex’s life.

I heard the creator of Undertale, Toby Fox, contributed to the game’s soundtrack. How was it collaborating with Toby?

It was a lot of fun! I met him at Camp Fangamer and he was nice enough to try out the demo for the game and offer some feedback. This was before Undertale released, so I spent the evening playing the Undertale demo on my laptop. After I heard the game’s music I asked him if he’d be interested in writing a track for YIIK and he agreed. We talked over email back and forth a few times, and I let him pick a motif from the game to build on. He chose The Essentia’s motif I originally wrote, which is featured near the end of the track. You can hear the song here! 

How does the game pay homage to the 90s?

For us it was very important for the game to not feel like a nostalgia cash-in. The setting of the 90s is used because back then the internet was a mysterious place where you could see a ghost story or something spooky and have no way of verifying if it was real, so everyone tended to accept it. This, and because cell phones didn’t exist, no one was constantly connected. The internet was [a] place you had to take time out to explore. This is very compelling as a foundation for a story. Of course there are references to real world events at the time, and things that were popular like Pogs and boy bands.

Will there be a physical release of the game?

Yes! A Limited Run by… well, Limited Run Games.

Want to see more of YIIK? Make sure to head over to their official Tumblr, @ackkstudios, to get some more behind-the-scenes content! YIIK is available now on Steam, Nintendo Switch, and Playstation!