This article originally ran in Back Alley Games Issue 11, January 2025

This month, Indie City Games’ weekend jam was titled “Alpacalypse!,” and no game exemplifies that theme quite as much as “A Llittle Off the Top,” a short comedy game produced by programmer Dwight Davis, writers Mike Gillis and Dave Kornfeld, animator and musician David McQuary, and sound designer Griffin Guge. The team submitted a postmortem to us here at Back Alley in the hopes we’d publish at least one of their llama jokes.

The idea behind the project comes from McQuary, who wrote “Llama haircut…worse haircut = more wobbly trip” in his notes app Friday evening, kicking off the project in earnest.

He spent most of Saturday and Sunday on Discord with the rest of the team, working in frenzied tandem to sculpt what would become the final game, pitching dialogue ideas and animation loops near constantly.

Gillis describes the premise behind the project as “deeply stupid,” but points out that playful ideas have the ability to inspire playfulness in the player, something he has discussed at length with other members of ICG.

He outlines the way the game builds from bizarre premise to low-stakes gameplay, positing that the player is primed not to care too deeply about the events of the game since they were presented on top of such shaky foundation.

“If you’re suddenly not shaving llamas any longer in this game, does that matter at all? Of course not. You had nothing at stake with being a great llama shaver,” Gillis said.

Three members of the team provided writing in some form to the final game, a fact that allowed each of them to pitch idea after idea until the humor was near-perfect.

“What made this team special was its willingness to cut mercilessly until we had a core loop that was feasible, and that Mike and I could start filling with silly dialogue ASAP,” Kornfeld said of the process.

It is the silly premise and bizarre humor that make up most of the appeal of “A Llittle Off the Top,” though the music and visuals, produced by Guge and McQuary, don’t hurt.

In fact, the visuals owe themselves largely to the particular humor of the writing team. As ideas were pitched and discarded, McQuary considered how to best portray them visually, eventually producing a single sketch of a llama that excited the rest of the team and produced what would become the final game loop.

“That night, I made a 2-frame idle [animation] of a llama, some tufts of hair, and an electric razor in LibreSprite. Then I got to work on creating a barbershop background,” McQuary said.

Guge credits himself mainly with producing the sound effects, a process comprised of recording household objects that would appear in the game and even shaving his own face to get the sound exactly right.

The llama voices were created from scratch as well. “[They] were particularly fun to create and were inspired by the brilliantly goofy artwork provided by the rest of the team,” he said.

McQuary produced the background music in what he describes as a “bitter rage” over a failed pitch for a Gattaca-inspired game where llamas are made to live undercover in a world ruled by alpacas. Then Guge added a midi guitar solo, and the rest, as they say, was history.

For his part, Davis learned Godot in 48 hours, a process that was both challenging and rewarding due to the straightforward nature of the software.

Davis is a local programmer and game developer behind “Hello Again,” and produced most of the final code. He stressed that development of this project centered mainly around expectation and subversion.

“With each llama our goal is to introduce mechanics in their most basic forms, then explore how to twist these knobs to create big comedic moments,” he said.

The increasingly ridiculous questions the game poses to the player remain unanswered, and in a way, that’s the point. If failure is assured, is it really failure? That is the beauty of “A Llittle Off the Top,” a game that seems like it’s about grooming llamas, but is really a metaphor for life.

A Llittle Off the Top can be found on itch.io.