Redesigning an active game is always a risk. How to get it right? How to ensure your players love it, while also making the title more attractive to new audiences? In this exclusive preview, we talk to Viktor Kalvachev, the artist behind All in Hole’s biggest update ever, to learn more about the creative reimagining of the fun and colourful puzzler.

In All in Hole, you play as a, well, hole – it’s quite simple. The hole grows the more objects you consume, allowing you to gobble up bigger and bigger objects. The goal of each level is to collect a specific number and type of objects within the allocated time.

From the very start, the team at Homa wanted to create the best game in the category – one that would stay around for decades. With that ambition, they knew that the look and feel were going to be one of the keys to success.

Having started small with an art team of just two, it also meant that they would need to expand, and that they had to be extremely picky about who would helm the art direction for the revamp. They reached out to Kalvachev, an accomplished artist and illustrator, who was happy to join. The art team is now 15 strong.

“All in Hole is a diamond in the rough,” Kalvachev tells us. When he began working on it, the potential became clear very fast, and the team was open to any changes, which made the job easier: people are often protective of what they create, but that wasn’t the case here.

Kalvachev started with a new character who will feel familiar to players of the original game: Holly, an evolution of previous protagonist Molly. She takes the stage alongside a slew of other new characters, including Officer Nibbles – a grandfatherly figure who happens to be a golden retriever cop.

With the redesign, the cast has expanded to 22 characters and counting. While the game has no overarching story, the way All in Hole presents these characters, and how they interact with each other, allows players to notice the connections between the cast and build their own story using their imagination.

Kalvachev’s favourite city in the world is Paris, and its inspiration in the game is clear: Bellora, a new animal town, takes a lot of notes from Europe. The team wanted to replicate a place and time where “handcrafted things matter. Where an artist is proud to make a door frame. Where you can see the charm of life,” Kalvachev explains.

This approach translates to the creative process of the game, too. Every scene is handcrafted, from sketches to colour palettes to how the interface looks with all the new changes. The team had accessibility in mind, too: by design, the game is playable by people with a range of different types of colour blindness, without the need to enable a setting.

The levels are inspired by everyday situations the team had, too, such as taking a child to a sushi restaurant for the first time. The revamped All in Hole is, above all, relatable. “It invites you to explore a world where a 5-year-old girl is the host,” says Kalvachev. It’s a playful reminder of how magical ordinary life once looked to us all.