Fountains Launches on Xbox After Five Years of Solo Development

What we know

Fountains is available now on Xbox, bringing a roughly five-year solo development effort by Canadian creator John Pywell to the platform. The game and its DLC are listed on Xbox for $14.99.

Pywell describes Fountains as a soulslike action RPG with a Metroidvania-style interconnected world. It is built around one large, seamless dungeon: a labyrinth that twists, loops, and reconnects with itself. Players take the role of a hooded stranger imprisoned by a tyrannical regime, setting out to escape and uncover the mysteries of a war-torn empire.

A world built around getting lost, then finding the way back

Pywell points to Dark Souls as the game’s leading influence, particularly the interconnected layout of the first game’s world. He wanted Fountains to carry that same sense of mystery. It offers very little direct guidance about objectives or destinations, leaving players to explore and piece together both its route forward and its story.

Its Metroidvania structure means the world is technically open from the outset, but some paths require tools or abilities found later. The design is intended to create a loop where players find an obstruction, remember it, and return once they have the means to move beyond it. Pywell says the approach is about rewarding curiosity and gradually learning the world’s layout and secrets.

Hollow Knight was another major touchstone, informing both the exploration focus and a core combat mechanic: striking enemies restores the player’s magic resource. Fountains features demanding combat focused on precision and quick reactions, while difficulty options let players adjust the intensity to suit their experience.

The release also includes an online message system. Players can leave hints throughout the world for others to find, or try to send them toward an unwise choice.

Programming, pixel art, and musical collaboration

Pywell, a computer science graduate who works full-time in the field, entered the project with programming experience. Learning pixel art proved to be his biggest challenge. He said early builds looked far more rudimentary, and he replaced that work as his skills improved across the game’s approximately five-year production.

That development is also reflected in the animation work, according to Pywell. Characters and enemies encountered later in the game are more fluidly animated than those at the beginning. Early in development, he was not using software that gave him a reliable animation preview before assets were fully added to the game, so some of the stiffer early work remains in the finished release.

Fountains was made in Godot, an engine Pywell selected because it is free, open source, and, in his view, particularly well suited to 2D games. Despite moments that may appear to have depth, Fountains uses no 3D models. Its world is made from flat 2D sprites, with forced perspective creating the impression of depth. Pywell only used 3D modeling during development to help visualize the perspective for a spiral-staircase sprite. His original Fountains prototype was, however, a top-down 3D game.

Travis Moberg composed the game’s music in full. Pywell would outline the mood he wanted—eerie, tense, or calm—and Moberg created tracks to match it. Beyond games, Pywell cited the 1986 fantasy film Labyrinth as an influence because of its strange world, riddle-speaking characters, and sustained sense of mystery.

Pywell says the release version is the game he envisioned when work began, and that it became considerably longer than he thought he could make alone. He would have liked to add more deeply hidden bosses, but the final boss was only added a few months before launch, leaving limited time to make content that only a small percentage of players might discover.

He began the project expecting only his friends to play it. Its reception, including players finding the game in Japan, went far beyond those expectations. Fountains and its DLC are now available on Xbox.