We are still busy working from home, and things are progressing nicely, we will have some cool stuff to show and news to share with people shortly.
I think a little bit of cabin fever may be setting in for some of us, but to be honest we generally sit in front of a computer monitor most of the day so not a huge amount has changed. It’s a minor inconvenience to what the people on the front lines of dealing with Covid-19 have to endure, so would just like to pay tribute to those brave people.
With that said let's talk about the game for a bit, and more specifically about the characters race the Kun Anun.
So to start, the name Kun Anun is derived from the Cwn Annwn from Cymric mythology, which translates to Hounds of Otherworld, and these mythical creatures are the inspiration for our characters. Annwn the Otherworld is usually a magical island in Cymric tradition, a mirror of reality, and that’s what we are calling the realm the game takes place in.
There was some nice synergy here with some of the themes of the game. As Christianity spread, they suppressed pagan belief systems and represented the Otherworld as ‘Hell’ and the Cwn Annwn as the Hounds of Hell, and this has a nice mischievous and anarchist tone for the characters.
We went with a more phonetic approach to the name to try and make it more accessible to an international audience and to put our own flavour on it a bit. In Japanese culture the term ‘Kun’ is a term used for inferiors by their superiors and this fitted nicely with the anti-authoritarian theme we have. The inferior fighting back against those who would consider themselves their superior.
The game in general draws a lot from Cymric mythology and bardic traditions, and we blend that with a more eastern influence to try and create a unique voice for the game. For example, in our game the Kun Anun have evolved from wolves, Ghengis Khan is said to have been born of the wolf, so we looked into Mongol culture a bit, it started to influence some of the early armour designs and the like, the Mongolian throat signing and Mongolian folk rock has influenced the music.
So that’s a bit about the Kun Anun and our thought processes, obviously there's a bit more to our characters than just that, like why do they have horns, but that’s another story.