Mignon is out for Windows

Mignon is out on Windows!

Breed the fastest chicken, or maybe the most beautiful. This was a labor love and I've become kind of obsessed with chickens (the cover image for this post is from a field trip to a local farm).

'Why do the chickens all have french names?' you might ask. it's funny! Contrasting the beauty and refind-ness of French with... chickens. 'Mignon' is a name that means cute and small and as soon as I saw a chicken with that name I knew it was the name of the game.  'Why are all the chickens girls except for the one that isn't?' Well I wanted all the chickens to be girls but the artist doing the portraits said drawing roosters is really fun so... that's that! And finally, the question I get asked the most, 'Why can't I breed these chickens?' You can't inbreed them, get some new chickens!

Mignon was originally released on android and iPhone first so my friends and family can play it but those platforms are notoriously hostile to any but the biggest games. Itch.io in my experience is full of people who are excited to try out someone's amateurish but lovingly made game.

Professionally I do business software and hadn't done a major creative project before. I had done the Global Game Jam almost every year since 2016 and I wanted to publish something. I took some time off to explore things like painting, long walks, basic music theory, and of course making a game. I tried out a lot of concepts but ultimately I kept coming back to the chicken racing game because seeing that pixel art chicken brought me joy. When I was a kid I played a game where you race chickens and I've always thought if I made a game I'd make that one.

I naively discovered things artists have being saying this whole time, like that it "comes out of you" more than "you do it" and that you have to soak up life to have good ideas. All I can say is making something has made me a slightly better person. Lots of cliches.