Animator Andrea Love and game developer Andy Katsikapes were mingling at a 3-year-old’s birthday party in Port Townsend last summer when they conjured up what could be the world’s first-ever stop-motion video game made entirely with soft, fluffy felted wool.

“We got to talking at this birthday party about how cool a stop-motion, felted video game would be,” Love told The Leader recently while sitting alongside Katsikapes and production assistant Michelle Hagewood in her production studio in the Mount Baker Block Building in downtown Port Townsend.

“And then we were like, ‘We should make it,’” Love said with a knowing laugh.

After a year of early-stage development, “Feltopia” — described as “the cutest little side-scroller you ever felt” — will reach a milestone at the end of the month when Love and Katsikapes debut a fully playable demo at one of the largest gaming conventions in North America: PAX West, set for Aug. 30 through Sept. 2 at the Seattle Convention Center.

The demo’s true debut, however, will come a week earlier in Port Townsend, from 5-8 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 24, at Brigid’s Loft, 280 Quincy St. in Port Townsend.

The game

Attendees will be among the first ever to enter the rainbow realm, a wooly world in the clouds where a sheepherder named Sky rides a cloud horse called Cumulus while searching for their missing sheep, which are endangered by an infectious smog. After several levels spent saving the herd with their rainbow firepower, the demo culminates with a boss fight of sorts as Sky and Cumulus face off against Aquila, a dark-colored eagle that is also infected by the smog.

“We’re calling it an eco fairy tale,” Love said, noting that the game is set 10,000 years in the future after climate change has ravaged the Earth and forced humans and animals to take refuge in the clouds.

Love’s twin brother, Eric, a musical theater director in New York, has taken the lead on writing the game’s narrative, which intentionally features non-binary characters and rejects the violent themes common in video games.

“We want it to be very family friendly,” Love said. “Instead of blowing things up and destroying them or killing them, you are healing them, transforming them into their true selves with rainbows.”

Now, with a playable demo in hand, the creators plan to begin pitching their project to publishers while also raising enough money to get their game to the finish line, which is still at least two years away. Eventually, they hope to see “Feltopia” become the first video game of its kind available on the video-game distribution platform Steam.

“I’ve been telling people it’s the first 100% wool video game,” Katsikapes said.

“I’ve been calling it fully wooly,” Love added with a laugh, acknowledging that some newer games have been made with claymation, 360-degree filming and even in stop-motion. But “Feltopia” is maybe most unique for just how tactile its wool-felted world looks and feels. That quality has piqued the interest of non-traditional gamers, particularly people in the fiber crafting world, as the creators have teased the game on social media over the past year.

“The most interesting comments that are repeatedly made online are like, ‘I don’t play games, but I would definitely play this game,’” said Hagewood, the team’s production assistant.

Because it’s a side-scroller, like Nintendo’s original Super Mario Bros., “Feltopia” will likely appeal to fans of retro gaming, Katsikapes said. But it will also appeal to fans of wholesome gaming, Hagewood added.

“There’s an audience and a growing movement in the video game world for nonviolence, like family-friendly, alternate ways to think about gameplay,” Hagewood said.

Another reason the creators plan to release the game on Steam is to keep it off of mobile devices, at least at first.

“We don’t want kids playing on mobile phones all the time, so it just made a lot more sense to go to Steam,” Love said.

That concern is personal for Love and Katsikapes, both of whom have young children of their own who one day might play “Feltopia” for themselves. It was, after all, because of their toddlers that the two met in the first place.

The creators

Prior to that fated brainstorm at 3-year-old’s birthday party, their spouses had met while picking up their toddlers at Heartberry Playschool in Port Townsend. That led to a dinner party at Love’s house, coordinated by their spouses.

“I was nervous,” Katsikapes said. “Like, I don’t know what kind of people these are going to be.”

“We walked in and I was like, ‘Oh, what do you do?’ And she said, ‘I’m an animator.’ And I was like, ‘Whoa, okay, yeah, I’ve got to hear more about that.’”

That’s when Love took Katsikapes down to her basement.

“I saw all these characters and figurines that I’d seen before on social media,” Katsikapes said. “It was pretty impressive.”

Love’s short, stop-motion video series called “Cooking with Wool,” depicting wool-felted characters cooking pizza, cake, fried eggs and more, had gone viral on Instagram a couple of years earlier, even after she’d done work for Hulu, Candy Crush and Netflix’s “Pinocchio,” not to mention a laundry list of businesses and nonprofits in Port Townsend and Jefferson County.

But, continuing to focus on making short, one-off videos, however — especially to satisfy the insatiable appetite of her social-media followers — holds less potential for profitability than making video games. That, beyond the novelty of creating a fully felted video game, made it easy for Katsikapes to lure Love into the world of video games.

“There’s a lot of possibility for releasing products in that world,” Love said. “Whereas I can release stuff on social media and monetize my YouTube channel, but it just doesn’t have as much potential as something like a video game.”

While Love came to the Pacific Northwest from the East Coast over a decade ago, Katsikapes grew up here, graduating from Chimacum High School in 2008. He went on to studio jazz piano before venturing into virtual and augmented reality technology and eventually going to work for Verizon in New York City. Amid the COVID pandemic, he and his wife and their young son returned to the Port Townsend area.

Now, even with years of work ahead them to finish developing their game, Love and Katsikapes can’t wait to give Port Townsend — and the world — a taste of what they’ve spent the past year cooking up, what’s called “a vertical slice” in video-game industry parlance.

“It’s like a rainbow cake,” Love said, “with all the different colors and aspects of what we’ve been doing, polished mechanics, art, animation, music, sound — like a finished-looking game.’

And while the demo will be the main course at Saturday’s party in Port Townsend, the creators plan to serve it up with a side of actual slices of rainbow cake.