You can make magic happen with just two people in sync. Case in point: our developer duo of the week.

LimboLane is an American indie duo, with Day Lane based in New York City, and Yugo Limbo living in Seattle. The duo met on Tumblr and quickly started making all sorts of games that have a distinct type of charm to them, as well as a lovely kind of uncanniness (also, teeth. Please play Smile for Me). 

We sat with the two to ask them about their journey as game developers, as well as what they learned from Smile For Me, and what’s going into their latest title – Great God Grove.

Introduce Yourselves!

Day Lane: Hey! I’m Day! I’m a producer, game developer, and renaissance woman from New York. I’ve been involved in the games industry my whole life and I don’t plan on stopping. I collect business cards, stickers, and weird plants. Right now I’m based in New York City. And also just based.

Yugo Limbo: Howdy! I’m Yugo, an animator, published comic artist, and game developer! I love art so much I can never narrow myself down to one job only. I wear many hats, and plan to wear many more. Next thing you know I’ll be doing elaborate frescos and creating armies of clay soldiers. Beyond my art, I’m just a weird hippie with a turtle currently living in Seattle.

How did you get started in game development?

Yugo: Believe it or not, on my 2nd grade “what I want to be when I grow up” questionnaire, I wrote “video game character maker”. I saw that little man Yoshi in Super Mario World and just knew. Thanks Yoshi. So I had always wanted to either make games, or design characters for them. I monkeyed around in RPGMAKER2000 a lot in middle school, but never finished any projects. My true path in game dev came alive when I met Day. 

Day: I’ve been making games for as long as I’ve known what games were. My family loves games and as kids my siblings and I were always messing around with game design; inventing ridiculous sports or making up rules variants for our board games. My first published games were actually board games, but I’ve been designing and programming computer games since I was young. It was always a hobby, though. Releasing a commercial video game was a pipe dream until I met Yugo and made Smile For Me during my junior year of college!

How did the two of you meet?

Day: We met on Tumblr in 2018. I was a fan of Yugo’s work, and I thought the uncanny side of their art would make for a really good adventure game. We started talking and realized we had a lot of the same inspirations- Doublefine, Humongous Entertainment, the character design of the Mario RPGs… We started working on Smile For Me immediately!

Tell us about Smile For Me, your past game.

Yugo: It’s a weird video game with teeth. Like, it could bite you. So be careful and let it sniff you before you pet it.

No, okay- Smile For Me is a first-person adventure game about cheering up a bunch of solemn weirdos in a suspicious self-help retreat called The Habitat. You play as a flower vendor, and can only communicate by nodding or shaking your head. You’ll need to convince all of these people to leave The Habitat before the promised “Big Event.” Which may or may not involve teeth.

Day: We self-published Smile For Me in 2019 on Steam, and it totally blew away our (humble) expectations. This year, with publisher Serenity Forge, we’ve re-released Smile For Me on all consoles! Now you can get Smile For Me on the Nintendo Switch eShop and play it with motion controls! You know, if you were looking for an excuse to vigorously nod and shake your Nintendo Switch.

The game is also available on Xbox, Playstation, and PC with controller support and a graphical remaster.

How do you feel about Smile for Me’s reception?

Yugo: We were absolutely flabbergasted at the reception- especially the fan response! Within weeks of the original release, we had a sea of fan-art and even fan-fiction before us… we had no idea our little passion project would have resonated with people on such a level. We were really just making a game for fun in our spare time, expecting just a few people to play it. How wrong we were! We’re extremely happy to be receiving that same passionate response from fans new and old, to this day, four years later!

Tell us about Great God Grove.

Day: Great God Grove is an adventure game about a pantheon of gods fighting. The people of the Grove have worshipped all these outlandish deities since the beginning of time, but one day the King of the gods goes crazy and starts sending mean letters to all of the other gods. Fights between gods break out and it seems like the world is going to be destroyed!

You play as a mail carrier who needs to stop the bickering of the gods to prevent annihilation. Your main ability is to use speech bubbles like items! When you hear characters say a useful line, you can suck it out of the air and into your inventory. Then, if you find someone who needs to hear that line, you can repeat it to them. It’s a puzzle game all about misinformation and misunderstanding, where you’ll solve puzzles by helping people communicate. The world is huge- you’ll explore 5 regions, meet 8 different gods and more than 50 humans.

Where did the inspiration for Great God Grove come from?

Day: The most common constructive criticism we got from Smile For Me was- “we wish we could see these characters interact more!” So we said OKAY! And made a game with equally lovable characters but way more interaction between them! Great God Grove is all about helping the different characters of this world communicate with each other.

It’s also definitely a love letter (ha ha) to the mail service. Not enough games where a mail carrier saves the world! We’re fixing that.

Are there any lessons from Smile for Me that went into the development of Great God Grove?

Yugo: Really, Smile For Me trained us to be more efficient in just about every step of the game-making process- art, coding, writing, etc. We aimed small and were really able to refine our skills and get the process down pat. Great God Grove is WAY more ambitious than Smile For Me, but that’s because we now know what we’re capable of skill-wise and as a team. Never try to make your magnum-opus the first time you try to make a game (or any project, for that matter). Start small, don’t let yourself get too crazy trying to make the best thing ever- you’ll only get frustrated, and probably won’t finish.

What do you hope the players will feel when they get to play Great God Grove?

Day: In my opinion, if you’re making a puzzle-adventure game today there’s a necessity to be doing something really different and special. There are a million point-and-click adventure games out there, and a lot of that design space has been explored. I always want to be making games that do things no game has done before. That’s what we did with Smile For Me, with the nod and shake mechanic. And that’s what we’re doing with Great God Grove by giving the player the power to use speech bubbles like items. It’s a very new kind of puzzle solving, and everything from the characters to the story are written to complement that.

My hope is just that when people play Great God Grove they’re left with the feeling that they’ve experienced something really unique- aesthetically, ludically, narratively… and that uniqueness sticks with them and makes Great God Grove a game they remember for a very long time.

Any final words?

You can find us on most social media at @LimboLaneGames. You can also learn more about us on LimboLane.com! We have lots of exciting things to announce and show off soon, so make sure to follow us wherever you can.