From Playdate to MESHCHERA
Main screen — from the first prototype to the current build.
Many game projects have a strange starting point. Not a big concept, not a finished world with characters and story, but a few separate circumstances that eventually come together.
That is how MESHCHERA started.
It began with Playdate.
I had been following Teenage Engineering for a long time as a designer. I like the way they approach their projects: simple, clear, but still full of character. When Panic announced Playdate, it was obvious that sooner or later the console would end up in my hands.
And it did. My friends gave me a Playdate for my birthday, and the idea of making my own game stopped being abstract. Suddenly there was a small, very specific platform that made me want to create something for it.
It made sense to start with a short prototype. No long story, no complex structure, no attempt to make a "dream game" right away. The first thing was to check the basic feeling: do the rules form a clear game loop, is there any tension, do you want to play one more round after the first few moves?
The first versions of MESHCHERA were very simple. More like a ruleset constructor than an atmospheric game. That is normal for a prototype: it does not have to explain where the action takes place or why everything looks the way it does. Its job is to show whether the foundation works.
And the foundation worked. At some point it became clear that it was already interesting to play. The rounds pulled you in: you wanted one more move, the next chain, a different sequence - and to see where it would lead.
That was when a team started forming around the project.
I invited Alina Zubkova to work on the visual identity and animations. With her involvement, the game started to gain a mood: distinctive images, a feeling of dark forest and swamp. On Playdate, this is especially important. The screen is small, the limitations are strict, so objects have to read quickly without becoming faceless.
Evolution of the main game board.
Konstantin Soroka is responsible for the sound and music. In MESHCHERA, sound helps strengthen the sense of place and makes every action more noticeable: a move, an object transforming, a creature appearing, the uneasy pause before the next decision. We will talk about music and sound separately later, because they are a big part of the game's atmosphere.
The idea of Meshchera appeared exactly when we moved from a prototype toward a more complete game.
The real Meshchera is a large forest-and-swamp lowland in the central part of European Russia. Pine and birch forests, swamps, peat bogs, dark rivers, lakes, fog, sandy soil, abandoned villages, old wooden architecture.
We became interested in taking that image and making it mythological. Not showing the real place literally, but building our own Meshchera from it: dark, swampy, full of strange creatures and traces of human life.
Swamps are often seen as something dark, unsettling, and oppressive. In a place like that, there is no straight road and no full certainty under your feet. The ground can turn out to be water, fog hides the horizon, and familiar landmarks disappear quickly. What presses on you is not chaos, but a feeling of still, heavy uncertainty.
In MESHCHERA, the player ends up in exactly that kind of space. But they are not just inside the darkness. Every move is an attempt to gather something, clear something, connect something, hold something together. In that sense, the game offers a person in dark moments a way to become a bearer of light: not to defeat the swamp in one action, but to find a path through it step by step.
The game is already playable, and I’d love to hear what you think. You can download MESHCHERA here: https://khvoshch.itch.io/meshchera