(The following announcement is from one of the programmers from Moki Studio, Mark Sullivan III. Take it away, Mark! - Geoff)

No gamer will deny the abundance of games with the simple objective "defeat all enemies." What is remarkable, though, is that so few of them feature mounted combat, never mind having it as the primary focus. This was one of the reasons why the summer 2008 GAMBIT team Moki Studio chose this as the starting point for the game. And thus our hero Moki was born.

Moki is not the most terrifying warrior most gamers have seen. Standing barely twice as tall as the wolf he rides, Rooki, Moki's large mask and round nose will bring a smile to nearly anyone's face. However, one face that does not smile is Chawi's, a cruel witch whose black and red mask emanates her anger and evil. This fierce appearance is complemented by her mount, the boar Uborgul. Chawi stands in Moki's way on his quest for treasure and he has no choice but to fight back. Will he survive?

Moki is a bit on the scrawny side. He fatigues easily. If he gets beaten up too much or is too aggressive, he will get tired. Then, he needs to rest a bit before he can fight again. When surrounded by enemies, you don't want this to happen to you. This is where the player must plan a bit, rather than unleashing Moki's fury through continual mashing of buttons. To perform well, the player must assess the stamina they need to defeat an enemy, how much stamina they might gain on the journey, and the wisdom of using standard versus charged attacks.

The original game concept was conceived roughly a week into development. By the end of the second week, we had a playable two dimensional prototype of our game, which ended up being a huge help for unifying the team's vision and iterating upon it. This was true of the UI as well, since we also had a prototype of that. While the game design fluctuated a bit during this period, we ultimately gravitated back towards a design closer to what our original prototype offered. That was one of the things that went very well on this project; we all had a good idea of what our collective objectives were at any point.

The team wasn't all about work, though. After a long day, we had no problem kicking back and doing what got so many of us interested in game development - playing video games. Now I might be gloating a bit but I'd like to note that Moki Studio had an awesome Rock Band team, and we even competed in a Harmonix-sponsored competition in Boston. We won the technical award, a function of points and difficulty, even given an unfamiliar Rock Band 2 song. Way to be a Rockin' Moki.

Moki Combat is now available for download! We plan to have a future version with features that the time constraints of the summer refused us, so stay tuned.