Hohokum: Enter the Fun Fair

At last, we can reveal the Fun Fair to the world! It’s the level we’ve worked on the longest, and its roots can be traced all the way back to the first prototype of the game we showed back in 2011.

Back then, it was a no-fun fair. It was a place of danger, a beautiful and colorful city, but one that was under attack from a mysterious enemy. Bombs rained down on the town and its peaceful citizens. Your job was to collect these hapless denizens and ferry them to an awaiting boat.

Three years have passed and the city is no longer under threat; it has been rebuilt and expanded. The original citizens are back and enjoying more peaceful times… but not quite, as the Fun Fair has come to town!

This is one of the most frantic and hectic places that you will visit.
You will be FLUNG at high velocity into dizzying, concentric trajectories by the SPIROGRABBERS!
You will be SCARED BEYOND WITLESS by the terrifying and not at all cute GHOSTLY TRAIN!
You will be THOROUGHLY FERRISED by the magnificent FERRIS WHEEL.
…and if you like sushi, prize vegetables, juvenile birds, mythical reptiles, headless horses, and multi-limbed deities you will NOT BE DISAPPOINTED.*

You can probably tell that we have a special fondness for this bit of our game, as when we first started figuring out what Hohokum would become, this was the first stuff we made. The characters are still our favorites: they are urbane, cosmopolitan, and quite daft. Amongst them are Oven Gloves, Colonel Gandihar, Super Insulated Girl, and the one who is known simply as “The Cruiser” — see if you can guess which is which.

The city itself is inspired, in part, by the curious town of Portmeirion in North Wales. Built by Clough Williams-Ellis, you probably know it from “The Prisoner” TV series. We recommend a visit on a wet Wednesday afternoon, off-season, when it isn’t full of gormless grockles. He was inspired by the charming architecture of northern Italy, and so were we, but also by the building blocks of our toddler years. So we conceived a modular system, different to anything else in the game: a kit of columns, arches, verandas, and cupolas, which we stacked up to create the Fun Fair’s bustling arcades and dizzying spires.

So what about these bombs that rained down on the gentle residents? Looking back, it seems weird to us that we put bombs and explosions into Hohokum. I guess we were making a video game and we thought that video games generally have explosions in them, so perhaps ours should, too. We were wrong. The more Hohokum has grown, the more we realized that stuff like this has no place in our game. No one gets blown up in Hohokum (Well ok, there is that one epic naval battle, but you’d hardly notice it.).

We hope you like the Fun Fair. Our advice: stay away from the balloon seller. He’s a bad man.