Crescent County is “whimsical, warm and silly,” and a smart use of Unreal Engine 5

Anna Hollinrake has been making games for a decade but nothing is as personal as her latest project, Crescent County. It’s the first game in development by her own indie studio Electric Saint (co-founded with Pavle Mihajlovic), drawn from her experiences of starting out and finding her place in the world, and well… it features adorable witchy-motorbroom-racing, something the artist has been drawing for seven years.

If you’re a regular reader of Creative Bloq, or our sister magazine ImagineFX, you’ll know Anna’s work. She created the tutorial ‘How to give old reference drawings new life‘ and let us in on the tech an art director can’t live without. Just as with those articles, Anna’s first game under her own flag is a glimpse into her love of whimsy, vibrant colour and growling, motorised broomsticks.

The game’s colourful world, a mix of solarpunk, Studio Ghibli inspired worlds, and a quirky blend of sci-fi and magical realism has been seeping out of Anna’s head for years with no place to land. “There’s a lot of it all over, all over my art,” she laughs, “I think this was always the dream, to make this specific game.”

Crescent County is a single-player, open world, life-sim, if the life being simulated is one of an effervescent but messy young witches who deliver parcels by day to fund motorbroom street races at night. The game looks like one big lively smile, and it feels like Anna’s personality has been digitised into Unreal Engine 5.

The artist talks rapidly, explaining Crescent County is “100% my art style,” before adding, “this game is the most pure form of what I like to do artistically; it’s the game that Pavle and I formed Electric Saint to make and it’s always been a very authentic self expression”.

She pauses and giggles: “Like, why haven’t people put handlebars on brooms?”

Smiling, she tells me the game’s art style is “pure distilled Anna, for better and for worse, I suppose,” and I can’t help but think it’s for the better. Anna’s art style is lively, colourful and feels like pure fun in a paint box, and it’s no wonder her arty fingerprints are on past gaming hits that make fun a priority, like the Fall Guys phenomenon.

While the main character isn’t based on Anna, she explains how the themes of Crescent County are drawn from her own experiences and those of studio co-founder Pavle. “It’s a pretty autobiographical game in places,” says Anna who explains everything from her first job in a large studio on the Isle of Wight, to being young and moving into your own place for the first time, and all the clumsy situations that arise have informed the direction of the game.

She recalls doing ‘adult’ things like buying her first homewares; “we bought wine glasses but neither of us drink wine, so we used them for chocolate puddings and fancy chocolate milk”.

Crescent County is a lively cartoon world built on small, intimate moments that spring up in life. It’s also a game of grand ambition. Early in development the team embraced Unreal Engine 5 and “it changed a lot of things,” says Anna, “because before that, making an open world in an indie way, it was kind of unhinged.”

Anna reveals after toying with Unreal Engine 5 and ensuring it can meet their needs, such as enabling multiple people to work on an environment without it “horribly breaking” and achieving the scale needed, Anna reveals, “we actually ended up making it too big”.

Ultimately using UE5 ensured the gameplay can form in the way Anna had imagined. She says they had tried to make it “smaller scale” in previous versions but “it just didn’t light my brain up nearly as much as something that allows you to just zone out and drift and drive around and get into that real flow state feeling, but also not be so restrictive that you can’t just wander off… we didn’t want something that felt super linear”.

Despite her experience and plethora of ideas, Anna is still keen to stress she’s learning what it means to be an ‘indie’ developer. She acknowledges there remain areas of game development she has less knowledge of but that she’s enjoying the learning process. “I love design,” says Anna, adding: “I’m still learning a lot about it, but it’s such a delight to be able to figure out how the art and the design can work in tandem with one another and uplift one another”.

It’s easy to see this interchange between art and gameplay in Crescent County. By day courier Lu must plan her deliveries and jobs, earning money to upgrade her motorbroom, decorate her apartment and make friends along the way. Sounds simple? But the draw of the world and its visual design will see you veer off course for a bit of fun over the hill. And Crescent County is fun, indeed, it’s funny. This is a game that will raise a smile.

I ask Anna if humour is harder to achieve in a game than angst. “I think it’s easier to be a bit sad, and especially when you’re making something that’s emotional and a little bit autobiographical,” says the artist.

Anna adds: “There’s a direct line in there, artistically, we’re artists, we’ve got angst and pain. [Oh, she’s giggling as the words come out.] But also, one of the things that we had at the top of our minds was we wanted the game to be whimsical and warm and silly and fun, with really crunchy gameplay. It can be the most beautiful game in the world but if it isn’t fun to play then there’s not a lot of point, which is another design lesson that I’m constantly holding in my mind.”

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That word ‘fun’ is something that crops up a lot when discussing Crescent County. It’s a game where sheep herding on a motorised broomstick is an essential distraction because watching adorable sheep leap about is just, well… gleeful. It’s also a game that has mapped the ‘honk’ horn button to ‘A’ because this is essential.

“People love to make sheep launch themselves out of the way,” smiles Anna. “Little moments of humour, little stupid slapstick moments of humour… great, they’re great, and they come through really naturally. So we’re enjoying playing into that.”

As development on Crescent County grew the team discovered there was a lot more room for slapstick humour than expected in this vibrant open world. Particularly, as the team got to grips with Unreal Engine 5 “very funny things happening to it if you mess with the values”. In one moment a tweak to the upgrade system saw the motorbroom launch unexpectedly into the game’s stratosphere. Another enabled the brooms to fly (not hover). It turns out, Unreal Engine 5 calculates a lot of unseen information to ensure game worlds feel like real places.

In these moments it feels like being an indie developer and one working on an imagined vehicle game, can embrace experimentation and let it ride out to a conclusion. Anna reflects: “At all times, we are very happy with happy accidents. That’s the nature of creating anything, something unexpected happens and you see where it takes you. We don’t want to be super restrictive because… we’re making video games!”

If you enjoyed this glimpse into creating a new game then read my interview with the art team at The Chinese Room on how Still Wakes The Deep was made. If you’ve been inspired, then read our guide to the best drawing tablets and the best laptops for drawing and start creating.