The Creation of Isekat: From Childhood Nostalgia to Steam
- Jun 8
- 5 min read
There’s a game on Steam with one of the longest titles you’ll ever read — Isekat: Crushed by a Computer, My Beloved Kitten is Transported to a Fantasy World where its Typing Skills Save the Kingdom. Before we continue, take a breather after reading that. Yes, that’s interestingly long because it earns every word.
Isekat is a typing-based action RPG where you play as a kitten who, true to the title, gets crushed by a computer and wakes up in a fantasy kingdom. From there, everything runs entirely through your trusty keyboard — combat, survival, and game progression.
The whole concept is easy to grasp and clicks almost instantly. The art style is attractive and cute, one that pulled our attention when we walked by their booth at Indie Jam 2026, Kuala Lumpur.
Within minutes of playing, what sounds like a novelty starts to feel like a long-overdue comeback for a genre that got pushed aside when FPS and action titles took over.
This adorable game is developed by InSpite Games, a two-person indie studio based in Singapore. In an industry where bigger budgets and larger teams are often treated as prerequisites for innovation, Calvin and Sheng are living proof that a small team with the right idea and grit can still go toe-to-toe with the big players. Their idea didn’t start with a business plan; it started with nostalgia and a thumb drive.
The Origins: No One Made It, So They Did
Isekat didn’t begin with a pitch deck or a game jam. It began much simpler than that, back when they were two young lads in school. “Back in school, Sheng and I played a lot of Typing of the Dead, a game made in the early 2000s that we could sneak in on a thumb drive,” Calvin said. “We weren't typing enthusiasts by any means; we just found the game purely fun and entertaining.”
That memory sat with them for fifteen years. They’ve been searching since, looking for something that captured the same feeling. Nothing came close. So, the answer was obvious. “Can’t we just make it ourselves? And we did.”
TESSR: What kind of moment-to-moment experience do you want players to have when they play Isekat? Calvin: Sometimes when you type long essays or assignments, you occasionally stumble into this zone where you're locked in, and the words just dance out of your fingers. I wanted Isekat to be a game that could continuously tickle and summon that very feeling.
The Design: Simple Yet Challenging by Choice
Designing a typing game sounds straightforward on paper. In reality, it’s a balancing act. Push too hard on the challenge, and you risk alienating casual players. Make it too easy, and you lose the veteran players. For InSpite Games, getting that balance right isn't just a design goal — it's the whole point.
TESSR: From a game design perspective, what’s the most important thing you’re trying to get right in this game and why? Calvin: “While typing skill is something that can be improved, it's not something that you can become good at overnight.
It was really important to me that Isekat have enough intensity and challenge to make typing fun but also that it be beatable by anyone regardless of typing skill. This direction manifested in mechanics like the power-ups and the invincible blocking. The things that I fought to keep in, even though some players remarked that they were overpowered.
Isekat can be great for improving typing skills, and it can be a great challenge for veteran speed typers, but I wanted to maintain that Isekat should be able to be enjoyed by anyone, so long as they know how to type.
That commitment to accessibility shaped every design choice that followed. And making it work meant some tough calls, including scrapping one of their biggest ideas before it even left the drawing board.
TESSR: What gameplay systems, mechanics, or ideas did you decide to leave out, and what influenced those decisions? Calvin: “Initially, the original prototype was a very thorough roguelike with upgradeable artefacts that could be collected throughout each dungeon run. In theory, it seemed like a good combination: lots of roguelikes have skill-based gameplay, and the randomness and upgrading gave people a reason to keep playing and improving their skills. Typing should work just as well.
But when we tried it, it felt... overwhelming. We came to realise that typing itself already takes up so much of your concentration, it can be hard to juggle the amount of thought and planning that roguelike games have.
It would still be playable by hardcore gamers, but that wouldn't have been what we were aiming for. So, we scrapped the whole roguelike system and simplified the game a lot, and the result is a game where typing is the sole enjoyable focus. Much closer to what we wanted it to be!”
The Cost: Because Making Something You Love Leaves a Mark
Not every idea that makes it into a game starts out perfect. And not every good idea even made a foot into the door. Calvin will tell you that, with a laugh, some of the characters were originally conceptualised as femboys before the team decided that the current designs worked better. “Sorry, femboy lovers,” he said.
But some cuts were harder to swallow than that.
No journey ever came without its own set of trade-offs, including the development of Isekat. The game ran much on passion, where tougher calls needed to be made for the team to stay within the constraints of reality.
TESSR: Were there moments where reality forced you to scale back your vision? Calvin: We were working off my savings to make Isekat. And at one point, we realised that our original scope of making a fully fleshed world map with NPCs of every race would be too expensive to afford to commission all the art for. Even though we had a much more fleshed-out concept of each animal country and its quirky citizens and cultures, we had to scrap it all and focus solely on the Cat Kingdom. Still sad about that.
In all things creative, grief and passion often travel together. And for Calvin, the question was never whether to keep going; it was about what the game could mean to the people who played it.
The Play: Play It, Finish It, Remember It
Isekat was never meant to be a game you play to no end.
From the very beginning, Calvin and Sheng built it with an ending in mind because for them, how a game closes matters just as much as how it opens. That philosophy runs through every design decision they made, from the accessibility mechanics to the simplified progression. It all points towards one thing: a game that leaves you with something worth remembering when it comes to an end.
TESSR: After the players finish playing the game, what do you want them to walk away feeling? Calvin: Post-game clarity. It's something that you can't really get with games that are meant to be infinitely replayed, only with games that can be finished. Rather than provoking a feeling of addiction, I want the games we make to feel like memories woven into the tapestry that is their life. That even though it ended, you're satisfied, and afterwards, you can go on and play even more games. Game endings are important!!
Fifteen years ago, two kids in school shared a game off a thumb drive. That game is long in the past, but the feeling it left behind became Isekat. Now it lives on in the memories of the younger generation and for everyone who plays it.
Ready to polish up your typing skills while having an adventure? Check it out on Steam!
🎞️ Watch the game trailer here:
Author Bio
Alison Chai is a marketer at TESSR, an artist, and a gaming creator with a finance background. She enjoys exploring the intersections of creative work, structure, and mental well-being. Drawn to the idea of "organised chaos”, she believes that the right systems can elevate creative expression rather than limit it. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
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