Making the Correct Game Is Key

I didn't really believe in indie game hype. Basically, I didn't really think that indie games could gather that much traction. We were counting on a few thousand copies maybe that that would get sold optimally.
And then uh we hit the launch button and in a few hours we were like, "Okay guys, this is going really well. I think we will be break even very soon." For a long time, we didn't really touch the money either. We didn't really know. Not used to it now that we have it.
This is a conversation with Teimo Fala and Sweet Sau from Tukana Interactive, the devs behind the indie hit Dwarf Romantic. It's so successful, it even got its own board game, which is also doing incredibly well.
It's really unlikely that you earn good money from board games, like even less likely than in video games. When the Dolphantic board game came out, it already sold much better than usual board game releases sell. It's not

purely the marketing, I would say. No, it was was more the the game itself uh hit the nail on the head in a way.
They recently released their newest game, Starbirds, in collaboration with the KZK brand, which you might know from their animated YouTube videos. I want to talk with them about their gamedev journey, how they got here, and we also do some theory crafting about what it takes to make a successful indie game in the first place. I hope you enjoy. We are now at eight people at Tukana. We started back in 2020 when we uh founded the company directly after finishing our bachelor's degree. And then we started in the master's degree program of our university, the heart TV, University of Applied Sciences here in Berlin. And we started at four. So we were four founders and four designers, developers at first,
right? So you started as four allrounders essentially at game school. That's where we met by the way. That's

where I know you from cuz we went to the same uh game school at Berlin. Then you made your first uh debut game Dolphantic as a university project essentially, right Teimmo?
Um actually Dolphantic wasn't my personal first commercial game uh together with Zantro, one of our other co-founders.
I made a game before called Visual Spaceport, a VR game,
uh which we also released on Steam, but it yeah completely flopped. Um that was during our bachelor's degree actually and after our bachelor's degree after another year or so um we decided to give it another try um with and Luca together so a team of four and um we decided that the master's degree would be the perfect opportunity to give it another try to make another game um where our goal was to develop and release a game in the first two semesters basically ally of the masters and then write our master

thesis uh about it. That was the plan
and that actually kind of worked out at least the releasing a game in the first two semesters part because we yeah we made do romantic in that time and really released it in early access in yeah about 12 months after.
So you went from nothing to early access in about 12 months. Yeah, it was probably a bit less actually because we also had to found our company. We had to get funding from Medium Bot. So, it was a bit less I would say, but yeah, around about 10 to 12 months maybe.
Got it. Were you already responsible for marketing back then three or
Yep. Yeah, that's correct. Um I think because of my background in movies and movie editing, it was kind of a natural um specialization or part of my special specialization in the team. And yeah, I

always tried out doing social media stuff also during our studies. So it was a no-brainer that that we do it from the beginning on and that I'm responsible for it. Yeah.
Got it. Obviously, Dolph Romantic went quite quite big. When when did it really start blowing up? Was that was that during early access? Was was it already for the early access release? Like when when did the when did when did it explode the way it did? I would say it's really started at the release, early access release or even I think even our Steam next fest um before our release was also quite successful already like from the terms of how many downloads we got, how many wish lists etc.
Mhm. Um but then like right the right from the beginning the momentum was really high and then after the first week it just didn't really slow down. So

it was a really it took quite a while for the sales to actually go down again. Uh so that we already noticed in the first week that it would be quite a successful game.
Okay. Because usually what you get is like you get the the first day is the best and then kind of tinkers down. And for you, you're saying it it went up for like a week or something and then only then it it only peaked after a week or
I would say I don't
I think it was pretty consistent actually for the first week or I think the peak was probably at the weekend after our release. That was probably the the peak when it comes to sales.
That's correct. And the peak was at the first weekend and then it didn't really fall off that much afterwards. So it it stayed very strong for quite some time and I mean we got very lucky and we had lots of big streamers uh check out the game or YouTubers and so on and that

really pushed the game uh and worked against it falling off
of the top seller list and so on. So yeah, that that really worked out well.
Yeah. And I also especially think that we hit hit it right with the Steam algorithm that Steam just kept recommending the game for weeks after the release just because it was doing well and it was received really well.
So that was the other part of it.
Got it. So even three even you would say it wasn't too much marketing magic. it was mostly the Steam algorithm carrying the game or like what did you do in terms of marketing? I mean, it's it's a bit hard to say, but knowing what we know now, it's not purely the marketing, I would say. No, it was was more the the game itself
uh hit the nail on the head in a way and people got very deeply into it, you could say.
They were battling others uh with the

high scores and the leaderboards and so on. And so there was a certain hype around the game and that's something that's really hard to create I would say. Um but on the other hand much earlier when we released the early prototype on hio we already had a big amount of downloads and activity there. So we already saw that the game had potential in a way and uh yeah so that was kind of an indicator maybe but but still the the marketing and the effectiveness of the marketing it's very hard to to evaluate in a way how
you had an itch release before the steam release.
Yeah like like a prototype you know like an early version of the game. Uh, in a way it was like an early demo, but it was not as polished. Some of the mechanics were a bit different. Um, the user interface is different. The

prototype is still there. You can still check it out.
Mhm.
Um,
we actually made the first version of Droantic during Luden Dar Game Jam. So, it was online from the beginning. It was available from the beginning, but that was our like our first version of it. um that we also submitted for Ludum Dar and that's the one that we are talking about.
Got it. Yeah. Maybe maybe you should backtrack a bit and start from from the beginning like clearly it turned into into something very big but did you plan for it to go so big in the beginning like were you aiming that high or what was your goal when you started out?
Our goal was actually always the goal that probably most game developers h have that we can just that we earn enough to keep making games. That was our go go goal. So we didn't really plan that far farther ahead I would say. Um and we just we calculated how many sales

we need to um yeah to earn enough basically to fund our next game from that. And then we had like different options. Either we earn enough to make the next game with additional funding on top or we earn enough to be able to fund it ourselves. But that was really the upper end of our estimation. So we never expected um it to go that high honestly. And we yeah for a long time we didn't really touch the money either. We didn't really know
what to do with it even now that we have it. And it took some time to um to realize the situation that we actually have all these opportunities now and that we can actually hire more people or even pay ourself ourselves proper wages like yeah that took some time.
Okay, that's funny.
Yeah, that's a good point. And also I can still remember the release day, the

early access release day. We were I don't know counting on a few thousand copies maybe that that would get sold optimally
and then uh we hit the launch button and in a few hours we were like okay guys this is going really well. I think we will be break even very soon and uh over the first weekend uh we knew that we could pay back the median board funding that was insane. So yeah, it's it's still it's still amazing when I think about it. I I still get a rush. It's really really crazy, right? Especially such a good moment as your first game, right? when you're still very unsure about what's even possible and then you almost like for team for you it wasn't your very first game but it's still was probably still exciting to
such a I mean after Visp and after like it completely flopped on Steam I didn't

really believe in hype in indie game hype basically I didn't really think that indie games could gather that much traction ction, but also I mean we learned a lot about the market since then like um we started off as pure designers, pure game developers and the whole business expertise and the knowledge about steam and the algorithms and what to expect and what actually means and what that came after some time like we really had to learn what all that meant. basically.
Mhm.
Going back to the to the beginning, I'm jumping we're jumping in the timeline here a little bit, but you you you so you participated in that game jam and it was relatively wellreceived and based on that you decided, oh, this could actually make for a good full game like based on that initial reception you got or what was the idea behind that? Three.

So when we started the project or thought about creating a game company together, um we we had the plan of creating one game at first to kind of evaluate if we work together as a team in a in a sustainable fashion and also if we can manage to have one title that's successful enough to fund future games or future endeavors. And so the idea always was to create a few different prototypes and then evaluate which of them is more or most feasible for a small team of four as their first project and the most like feasible. Yeah, that was basically the main um criteria I would say. And then of course we also defined a few design pillars. So things we would like to have in games that are toana games. uh for example a certain minimalism, certain uh wholesomeness, maybe uh not necessarily

lots of violence. We we didn't plan on doing FPS games for example. So we knew we would be in a certain niche in a way and from all of these prototypes, I think we created eight different prototypes. Um one of them was do romantic and it already was one of the favorites from the beginning on. So we we knew immediately that this is one of the better ones or one of the more feasible ones.
Um which we could probably get finished in about a year until release.
And so after evaluating all these different prototypes, it was one of the three most likely to be chosen. And then in the end we we decided on on domantic.
Got it. But the way it came to be was still as a game jam project. So basically you were in a prototyping phase and then you made this in a game jam and added it to your pool of prototypes essentially.
Exactly. Yeah. Got it.
Yeah. The game jam took place during our

prototyping phase. So we just took it as an opportunity to make another game.
Awesome. Which other prototypes did you have? Were there any? I think I roughly remember but
yeah I think we also asked you for feedback back then. Yeah, we made like the two other favorites were one one of them was like a desert sliding game. Now there are a few games on Steam that actually have this as a core mechanic and do it pretty well.
So that you slide around like a desert landscape on a hoverboard kind of. And the other one was a fish jumping game like where you were uh where you played a fish and you jumped through different bubbles and got really fast um and had to dodge obstacles and so on. So those were the three favorites. But yeah, Dolphantic definitely won in every aspect in the comparison. Um, especially

when it comes to completeness of the vision. Like the other two had cool mechanics. Like the core mechanics were also fun, but we didn't quite know what the full game would look like if we chose them. So, we didn't have a clear vision for the goal and for the game loop. Whereas in Dolphant, we already had these quests in place. We already had a game over condition in place in the first prototype. So it made it pretty easy to to extrapolate from that and to imagine what the full game could be based on the prototype.
So there were the least number of unanswered questions.
Yeah, definitely that maybe made it less risky than the other options. Got it.
Yeah. But there were many other aspects as well. For example,
the name. We already had the name from it right at the beginning
and the name was already like we felt it was something special and it was something that fit the game really well.

And then the other thing was the setting and the appeal which we thought even in our early prototype was already there like you could already had this um feeling of like a a harmonic idilic village landscape um which we built up uh even further during development but the idea and the setting was there from the beginning. Was it already 3D the first prototype?
Yeah. Yes. Okay. Cool. And you, if I remember correctly, it's a sort of a mixture of 3D models and billboards that you ended up going with in the end, right? So, I think the trees are billboards and the houses are like 3D models or how does this work? See, you're smiling.
So, yeah, I have to smile because that's uh a thing that many people asked me.
Um, actually, the trees are no billboards. If you rotate the world, you will see that also the small branches of

the trees rotate with them. So it's a trickery. So the the uppermost part of the tree, like the leaf part, that's a flipped normal mesh. So you actually look inside of the tree. So it looks like a billboard, but it still behaves like a real tree when you rotate around it. Because we didn't want to have this cheapish look. sometimes billboards get when when they rotate, you know.
Mhm.
And we also wanted to have the shadows. So, it's a very weird solution, I guess. But yeah, that's like
Yeah. And the the art style is like a mix of some of the outlines we created with um texture textures. So, we used we generated um maps that kind of have like black contrasts on the outlines or on the corners of a mesh. And so we so we baked these down and then used them in shaders and combined them with normal

textures, not normal maps like with usual image textures which we painted by hand. And then um some of the outlines especially on rounded objects are uh just a simple frenel effect.
Frenel effect. What what is this? You flip the normal and you extract it outwards, right? No, it's like a in the in the shader itself, it's just like an overlay that kind of masks out parts of the mesh that look not at the camera and you can kind of set a threshold. So, it's a bit too technical maybe, but like it's a mixture of techniques to get these outlines. Yeah.
Did you learn about these techniques during development or were you were you already at the very beginning? Oh, we can know you can use this here, we can use that here or like how did that art style develop?
So, um I'm basically a tech artist, I would say. So, for me, many of these techniques I also used during our

studies, but some of these things we developed during development and we iterated on them to get a cool look or something that we felt is
unique or uh very recognizable. And we always try to go uh an interesting route maybe and try out things too. Yeah,
I think I think Darth Formantic does have a very unique and also strong look. That's definitely one of the strengths of the game. I would say what what would we say what advice would you give to someone who's like I I want my game to have a cool look. Where do you start with that?
That's a very good question. So, we did quite an extensive research into different possible art styles and um what we didn't do that much is actually try them out. So, we found a style that fits really early on and uh something that was really inspiring inspiring were mostly paintings actually. So, we looked at
different paintings. Uh some of them

it's called naive art. It's like paintings of the countryside in a very stereotypical way, not necessarily from big master painters, but uh normal people. And this sometimes has a really interesting, maybe a bit childish, but fresh look. And we mix this with expressionist paintings and and different art styles when it comes to colors or maybe the outlines. And then we thought about how do we do the shapes and the measures and and we kind of iterated on that and it it kind of came together quite naturally.
Would you say that's generally a good approach that you would recommend to sort of look for inspiration maybe in other media or something or what would be the tip? Yeah, I would definitely say that looking into other media and having a good knowledge of of other media is very helpful to create something that is fresh or not necessarily has already

been seen in the indie space or the game uh art style space. Yeah,
got it. So, don't get inspiration maybe from other indie games cuz then you'll end up looking sameish. Get maybe inspiration from elsewhere. That makes sense. Mhm. And going back to the game play, so the the game play was very well defined very early on is basically what I'm hearing here, Teemo, right? So were there any gameplay challenges still to solve or was it just like just make the game?
There were definitely some challenges still to solve. What we had from the beginning was the tile placement as the core mechanic and we had these quests that reward you for assembling your tiles in a certain way. But in the beginning, we didn't even had have tile rotation in the game, so you could only place it. And we had like the the tracks, the train tracks were adapting to whatever

neighbors they had. So, they weren't as restricting, but um like changed their direction. And so, those are things that we removed or changed from the game. And the quests as well, we like in the prototype, the quests uh rewarded you for like every tile that was neighboring counted as one group. Basically, there were no edges to connect. But that was also something we noticed about the prototype that that's really hard to read and really hard to control. So we went for this edge approach that you actually see this edge is a forest edge. So if you connect two forest edges together then they form a group and not if the tile just has trees on it. Yeah. So many mechanics changed in in the details or even like yeah even bigger changes like that but the core stayed

the same. the core like the general goal stayed the same and the general core interaction stayed the same I would say
but so for example the specifics of how rivers and uh rails interact that that's something you had to figure out over time like cuz I remember there are quite specific rules right oceans can kind of connect to anything but then rivers can only connect to to rivers and trains can only connect to to rails but other edges they they they can connect in whatever game. So, I I found that interesting cuz it it feels like the correct amount of restriction, right? You have some restrictions, but you still have a lot of freedom on how to place things otherwise.
Yeah, I think we actually added the lakes and the oceans during early access. I think we didn't have them in the game right from the beginning, but we added them to to give even more like flexibility or tiles that can have multiple neighbors and fit both

basically. So kind of like Joker tiles actually
and that's what the legs um are in Droantic. But yeah, that's those are things that we changed over time or improved over time, iterated on over time. The same goes for the quests um which had many iterations like also visually how we present the quests to the player. And even in the first prototype, the quests weren't even anchored in the world. They were just like global quests. So make a forest with X tiles anywhere or make X forests with uh this many trees anywhere. And in the actual released version, early early access version, yeah, we had these quest bubbles floating in the world and they showed you this forest needs to have these many tiles. Yeah. So there are many changes like that that make a big difference um but don't change the

bigger picture I would say. Uh so yeah it felt like iterating on the prototype and just improving the ideas and streamlining the ideas of the prototype without changing them completely. It all sounds so so streamlined the way the two of you explained it. It sounds so yeah we basically had it all figured out from the beginning and then yeah we adjusted it a little bit and improved the art a little bit
and then it just ended up doing really well.
Yeah. for for do romantic things just really fed together like it went super smoothly uh in hindsight uh how everything came together and how clear our vision was from the beginning and yeah that was super lucky for us uh like for second game we noticed that it doesn't need to be like that like it can or in most cases it probably doesn't happen that you from the beginning you

know exactly what kind of game it will be. But for Dohraantic that was pretty much was what happened.
So So was that based um based on the idea? Did you just stumble across a lucky idea? Basically a lucky concept.
I mean we tried to find we tried out a bit. We tried all these prototypes and we also tried to evaluate them based on if they are fit for a commercial game. So it wasn't like completely blind luck was there were some evaluations behind that and even deciding on the concepts that we uh prototyped
there were when um yeah there was some some thoughts behind it definitely but still like just having this mechanic and this good prototype alone uh can happen but that it actually is so complete as

it was for Dolphantic is pretty rare, I would say.
Mhm. Cool. So, very much sounds like Doantic basically already succeeded in pre-production. That's really interesting. T I have a a question for you cuz I remember this uh something that happened and found quite interesting but never really had the chance to talk about it and that is um performance optimization. I think you you guys spent a lot of time optimizing the performance for Do Romantic, right? Right. even to the point where you I think got a consulting call with some folks at Unity to to help you out with that. Can you tell us a bit about that maybe?
Sure. Um so for me performance is a very important aspect of a game.
Mhm.
So I was always very how do I put it? I I was always very conscious of having good performance in the game because I thought back then, okay, the the better the performance is um the more people could potentially play the game and also play it on very lowowered hardware on

10year-old laptops and stuff without um direct discrete graphics card and so on. M.
And so, um, when we created the 3D graphics, I was always thinking of ways to solve things cheaply with shaders and without lots of, uh, high resolution measures, lots of textures and stuff. But, of course, we were still learning. So, um, something we didn't really know that much about back then was that on hardware like the Switch, for example, uh, the poly count is still relevant. And on PCs that's not such a big problem anymore. So on PCs the biggest issue is fill rate of the GPU. And in many cases that comes down to um draw calls for example. So
fill rate.
Fill rate. Yeah. It's like the how much the CPU can send to the graphics card.
Ah okay.
And how quickly. I'm also no graphics

engineer so I can't go too deeply into the reasoning behind it but um for do romantic we got lucky because we optimized many things so that the draw calls weren't as high but still on the switch we had the problem of a high poly count when it comes to the trees for example and as the world is always growing you get more and more objects so we didn't really have a solution for that early on the if you don't play the game as long, you won't have a big problem with the amount of objects on screen and the poly count. But the bigger the worlds get, the more the performance tanks. And you can still see this on PC. So when people play a world with 1 million points in their high score or higher, you can really see that the performance
well it it gets worse. Um,
right. So the the better the hardware is big. Yeah. Yeah. Sure.
Yes. Exactly. But now as the hardware gets better and better, I think these problems won't show up as much anymore

as they did back then, maybe.
But on Switch, we had this problem. And maybe Teemo wants to say more about that because we found solutions to improve this.
Yeah. Actually, what we learned during our early access, and it's still funny to me what version we released initially, how badly optimized it was. Uh, we didn't know about GPU instancing back then.
Mhm. So every object um every tree on the world just had its own draw call basically and uh that was the version that we released and especially um when the world becomes bigger and we don't really have any restriction on how big the world can be apart from the balancing that yeah usually like the majority of people won't reach a certain point threshold but if they cross it Um, and what the threshold actually is is something that we only learned after the

early access release. And then it showed it really showed how how bad that is that it's pretty much unplayable at a certain point
range
and that was when we learned about GPU instancing and we when we also had this uh consulting call that you mentioned because that's what they told us as well and they showed us examples on how to do it in our case uh how we can do it without uh removing all the randomization that we had in there because for the visuals it was important to us that all the colors have slight variations like the trees
you have like these gradients in the world right like different biomes that sort of fade into each other
that as well yeah and uh yeah there were pretty interesting technical solutions for that how we could basically bake the randomization into the mesh or into the

object effect and uh use GPU instancing to draw all the trees or at least all the trees of one type or one biome in one draw call. And that was like the yeah probably the biggest performance improvement but also the one that required us to basically rework our whole rendering. So it was quite quite a lot of effort. And uh for the Switch version, we noticed that our approach wasn't really that well made or like um that advanced wasn't suitable for the switch.
Yeah, it wasn't enough for the switch. For the switch, as S mentioned, there are other topics like the poly count which doesn't really change when you use GPU instancing. You still have the same topic. So you actually have to find a solution that does GPU instancing but also occlusion culling um which we didn't have. So our uh

approach was yeah we fixed the draw call issue but um on the cost of a really high poly count no matter where you look basically.
Oh cuz you you you you rendered all of the offscreen instances as well essentially. I think that's called frustring to be completely
correct though, right?
You're right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Interesting.
And so what we had to do, I can remember still I I was on vacation and I came back and suddenly the solution was to have a low poly version of the already very low poly trees. And this actually fixed so much of the or like such a big part of the problem. So it kind of reduced the poly count by let's say a half and that was enough to get it running okayish on the switch. So that was lucky I guess.
Okay. So there wasn't a very expensive fix was just a different model for the

trees and voila.
Yeah just like a reduced version of it. And then of course we removed
uh lots of the smaller decoration and clutter things which you have on the PC but you don't have on the Switch. So, there was still some more things we could do, of course, and we changed the um the post-processing and and stuff to to gain back even even more FPS, but yeah, the biggest change was reducing the poly count of of things.
Yeah.
Mhm. Yeah, I think SW performance for Switch is a really big challenge, right? From everything I've heard, it's even even worse than uh mobile like mobile phones are more powerful these days. Don't know how it is with with Switch 2.
Sorry. two is not such a big problem anymore, but switch one was definitely a challenge. Yeah.
What were you about to say, Tim?
Yeah. I think for us the problem was that we designed the game in a way that it looks really nice. Um, but we didn't really know about all these technicalities back then. And then we we

needed to rework all the rendering by keeping the visuals the same basically. So um yeah basically the other way around then you should actually do it. And for example one other thing that came to my mind uh was what you mentioned the biomes. We have um biomes with different colors and different meshes sometimes even and they have transition zones between them. And those transition zones are also quite difficult because they they can mix different biome influences together. And there's no restriction on how many biomes can have an influence and which biomes. Um so that was also something for switch I think we we reduced it. We made the transition zones uh thinner and for certain objects we turned it off. basically this blending. Um, so for

objects where it wasn't that noticeable, I think for the houses, if I remember correctly, uh, we just turned it off. So that allowed us to still instance them, whereas usually those objects in the transition zones couldn't be batched together with the rest because they have really unique parameters.
So you can't you can't GPU instance those as easily. Which brings me back to the question like um a quick nerd question. How do you do GPU instancing for objects with color variation? Like what is the solution to that?
I think
yeah it was pretty it felt pretty hecky actually. We had like I think the Unity version that we used also didn't have some features that shader graph now has which would have helped back then to make
didn't have instance ids.
Yeah.
Oh. So we couldn't per object use an ID as a seed to randomize parts of the colors for example or stuff that we put

into the shader.
Mhm.
So we had to think about ways to create this seat and not input it into the material because then it the material is shared between all the instances. So that would override everything. So
but you can for example generate a seat from the object position or something.
Exactly this. Yeah. So what we what we did was we used the height of the object and small changes in scaling in different axes but such small changes that you don't notice them visually but the shader can kind of read these and and so we use these as seat numbers in a way.
Okay. Smart. I see. Cool. And so you ended up with a very well optimized game that also runs on Switch really well but the the Switch release was after the early access and so on, right? Yeah, actually uh yeah, we spent one year in early access for Dformantic and then another half a year later we released the Switch version

together with the Sakura Biome which we also released on PC then.
And I think one thing I remember about Dwarf Romantic Development is also that um your 1.0 O la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la launch was equally as big as the early access launch which is something you don't hear that often. Was there any anything specific about your 1.0 launch or how how did you approach that release?
Yeah, good question. And so actually we didn't originally plan to do an early access and it was while talking to a friend ahead of another studio um before our release that she told us why don't you guys just do early access because from what I hear from you what your plan is with updates and everything that would be perfect as an early access approach
and back then we originally planned I think to release in in April or May or something of uh 21. And there was another game, a much

bigger one. It's called Humankind by Amplitude, and it was like a civilization uh competitor, but it was also a hex based grid, and it had like landscapes and stuff. So, we thought maybe that's a a problem for us. Maybe that's a similar target group. Nowadays, I would say probably not, but back then, we were still very cautious. So we thought okay they they want to release on the same weekend that that we want to release. So we definitely should move our release and so we decided to shift the release to 1 month earlier actually. And so we thought about okay which features can we cut out of the early access version and bring during early access which then was the creative mode for example which was a good move because we had to do lots of performance improvements to actually get the creative mode working. So that really fit together well and yeah. So we decided to do an early access release and planned on having the full release about one year later and then did a

similar marketing campaign and outreach as we did with the uh early access release. And I think because of the updates and a very active development during early access and not such a long early access, people were still very invested in the game. And yeah, the the full release worked really well for us. And we also won awards for the game, uh, the German developer award and the German game award. And so I think these things all kind of pushed the game additionally.
Yeah. One thing you didn't mention which I think was really important for that uh circumstance was that we actually got a big Steam featuring for our full release. And that was something that we didn't really know about um before. So,

we just learned about that during our early access how that actually works that there are these midweek madness or weekend featurings like these popup featurings on Steam which are probably Yeah, they're pretty much the best thing you can get. Um, because every Steam user will see the game and that was what we got for our full release because the numbers were so good, the sale numbers, but also the review score. So that's uh I think that contributed a lot to the full release success.
Definitely.
How do you think that works? Is there somebody sitting at Steam and just checking all of the numbers and then they they're like, "Hey, do you want want the featuring or how does that work or did you reach out to them or
So usually when a project goes well and it's successful enough, you get a Steam rep. So you have a person that's that's directly responsible to be there for questions you have or to be there more

quickly than the usual support for developers. And yeah and with the Steam rep you can talk about these things. you can ask okay so uh is there um a possible slot uh somewhere in the next months for example for a for a featuring and then they give you uh options to choose from
right
but I think this depends on the game uh so each game is different has different sales curves and numbers and the bigger your project is of course the more likely it is for you to get these deals because well it's it's also good for Steam. So obviously it's in their interest to to push your project when it brings more sales of course. So yeah.
Right. So but they very much do look at at numbers, right? So they they probably check your stats before they give you a featuring.
Definitely.
And then you had release went really

well. You set on a bunch of money and then you were like let's grow the team. Did you like hire some new people immediately or like how how did things develop from there Teemo?
Yeah, actually the first person we hired was a community manager because we really underestimated how much effort and like how much activity there would be. And at like the first weeks after our release, we were basically all of us, all four of us were basically full-time just managing the community with some maybe some smaller bug fixes here and there, but it took so much time. So that was the first person that we hired and uh then it took quite some time actually for us to hire the next person because we were um we were really cautious about growing the team. Uh we were really aware that every new person in the team would change the dynamic a lot. So at first

the only people that we added to the team were a community manager or uh our marketing freelancer who we also kind of counted as a team member because he just um yeah supported us non-stop during the early access. Um but they were not really that involved in the actual development. Uh so the first person that actually was involved in development was our uh programmer right? Yeah. And we hired him actually even after romantic wasn't it?
Was after the release of the Switch version if I remember correctly. Yeah. Was in 2022.
Yeah.
Yeah. For the
maybe maybe 2023 even. I'm not sure.
Yeah. Yeah. So for the full development of Dolphantic, it was just the four of us as developers and then we had uh additional people who were managing

marketing and community for us.
But the general hiring strategy from what I can see is more more on the cautious side and more like
definitely
let's stay as small as possible for as long as possible.
Yeah. The reasoning behind it is we we know that the workflow or our way of working works really well for us and the more people we add that changes this dynamic. Of course makes sense but
we are very cautious of changing this or um bringing new people into the team. And so we want to hire slowly and carefully so that the team culture and the vibe stays the same or at least stays in a certain range. I don't know how to how to explain it but yeah
I see. And then obviously before we move on to the next game which I'm al also looking forward to talking about we also should quickly touch on the do romantic bot game which is also surprisingly

successful like in you see it in every German bookshop where wherever you go like do romantic is in every shelf basically. How did that come to be?
Yeah. So I think actually I was the one first contacted by Pigazos back then and it was not that long after our early access release actually from what we heard the board game authors noticed us um during our like during the German video game awards because they also like one of the board game authors also works for a video game company and they also were uh participating at the German video awards. So that's where they noticed us and um apparently they had a prototype for a board game in their drawer basically that they never really finished but that also had hex tiles and

um placing tiles together as a core mechanic. So what they did was they adapted this prototype to to work for the domantic IP basically and asked the publisher Pigazos to contact us. Um, and yeah, at first actually I didn't see the message because we were just so overwhelmed with all the post release stuff. But then um after some time after they contacted us again uh I noticed and that was where the conversation started and uh for us like having a board game with from our own game was like a huge super cool thing like a really uh life goal kind of material for us. Uh so we were really we yeah it wasn't a question for us if we want to do it. It was just a question uh like what exactly that

would be and how it works. But then the we had our first meeting with the two board game authors Lucas and Mel and they showed us their prototype on tabletop simulator and it was really good. like it was uh we had the feeling that they really nailed it like really nailed the game feel um and transferred it into a board game. Uh at first we were pretty skeptical that it's even possible because that in our minds like it would be too similar to games like Carason and also uh just not that interesting probably. But they showed us that it actually works really well. And they made this cooperative experience out of it, which we also thought was a really good idea because that keeps it in this same vein of having a relaxing experience together instead of like a

conflict and a confrontation.
Mhm.
Yeah. So they really convinced us with their prototype and uh we still thought we never expected it to be like a big financial uh income for us. Like we thought yeah that's super nice like a super cool thing to have but from what we heard it's really unlikely that you earn good money from board games like even less likely than it meant video games. Um, so we didn't really expect anything, but after time went on and the development of the board game progressed, there were signs that it would actually that like the big topic for board games is always the the award, the spiel award, which is uh yeah, really different than awards in video games. video games. Yeah, players don't really care about awards in our

um experience.
Yeah, I think that's true.
In board games, it's like a huge sales multiplicator to even be nominated for this award because there are so many families who just buy the every year, for example, um or even just look at the list of nominees and that's basically the pool of games that they choose from.
Mhm. So, and we managed to get into that pool and then even won the award and then yeah, that was how it changed from being a super cool passion project to an actually successful game that
uh that also is a big um pillar for us now for our studio. Got it.
You don't have to give any precise numbers. I understand that you can't but like in terms of percentages what we say roughly what share of revenue does come from board games now when you compare romantic like digital versus dwarf

romantic physical
I think team even can give you some more
we do have exact like info we have a graph somewhere I just don't know from what I remember it was like maybe a fifth of our income yeah
that's quite significant It's significant. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, that's already and like the release year of Dolphantic was different, but now in the long long run,
I think it's maybe 20% maybe.
Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. So, board games do also have a a decent tail.
Yes. But I would add one thing. So, when the Dantic board game came out, it already sold much better than usual board game releases sell. And so even before getting the nomination, we heard from the um from the publisher that it's going really well and this is unusual

and then the nomination came and it was got better and then it won the award and it got even better. So it's very rare that a board game does so well. So I I wouldn't feel comfortable with with saying, "Yeah, sure. If you do a board game of your game, it will be a super uh lucrative thing.
I can't really say this, you know." So
I think we got lucky in a way um because it just worked out really well.
It all came.
But something else that we really
Yeah. Yeah. Right. That's correct. Um, but something else that was very important for us was to keep the the visual and the art style of the board game very congruent to what the video game looks like. So if we wouldn't have taken control there and really had protected our do romantic vision in a way I think the game would have looked much more typical of usual board game releases and I think that would have

probably not really helped the game. the board game. I I was about to say it looks very strong as well. Like just like the just like the digital version of Darth Formantic really stands out with its uh look and feel. I think the same is very much true for the board game. It very much stands out among like if you if you I think that's maybe one of the reasons also why it's doing so well, right? It has that has has that standout factor if you look at it in a shelf of games. Do do you have any other theories for why the board game did so well?
So, from what I heard or what I know now about the board games industry, there's many mechanics that keep being reused in games.
So, new games are usually familiar because they basically assemble existing mechanics in a different way. And uh Dormantic made something new that uh it had this campaign structure like kind of

uh similar to legacy board games but repeatable so that you don't like destroy any of your materials or so on. And uh it also works with a different like you don't need to be in the same group of people every time. It just it gives you a lot of incentive to keep on exploring and adds new elements to the game as you learn the game. So I think that mechanic um was really important and then the rest uh like the core of the game is just super accessible as well.
Mhm. So it has this uh puzzle making a puzzle um kind of vibe
and uh works for all kinds of people like families, children, whatever. Um but also has this like with the campaign and all the additional

rules being added on top, it has the depth that you can get into it a lot if you want to. So you can optimize a lot if you're into that, but you don't need to,
right? Although it starts out very simple and then because of the progression system, you get more materials, more with more complexity over time, right? Is actually I I've never gone too too deep into the digital version of uh of Dantic. Is that something you do in the digital version as well, right? where you unlock new tiles and new complexity or
Yeah, actually in the digital version we always stayed true to our core and never really added that many rules on top. So, we had all these ideas as well, but since the game worked so well and was received so well, we didn't really dare to to change the core rule set of

the game. So, there aren't while you you do unlock a lot a lot of tiles, they are all just cosmetic basically. So, the game rules don't really get more complicated. Luckily for us, the game rules at their core are already have this potential that you can play really casually, but you can also really optimize and maximize with the perfect placements and all types of or all kinds of planning ahead that you don't do as a casual player. So the core game play still uh has the same appeal I would say but we don't uh do what the board game is doing in adding tons of rules on top.
Interesting. So in a way the board game is more complex than the digital game in terms of rules
I would say. So yeah and the the balancing had had more challenges. Maybe the the digital game is balanced in a

different way. Yeah. Sure,
if we would have added much more of these additional tile mechanics, uh, let's put it like this, it would have changed the balancing so much. And as we had to tune the balancing quite minutely to actually get it to work well with the randomization of the tile generation and stuff, uh, that was it it took some time. And so maybe that was one of the reasons why we were so careful of not adding too much. It was already very fine tuned and you didn't want to feel like messing messing with the balance there again. I see that.
So Kazakam, did they find you in a similar way to the
Did they find you or did you find them?
Yeah, so they approached us first. Um, it was during Gamescom when we showcased the Switch version of Dormantic, the first Gamescom after the pandem pandemic.

Mhm. And they back then were just scouting for teams basically like for potential partners that they could make a game with together and
that's how we got in contact. So they told us that they really enjoyed Doantic, that they really like the game and they they would be interested in also making a game or even anything in that direction and we're just um yeah looking uh for teams who would be interested. And for us that was the time where we we just finished the uh full release of romantic. finished the Switch version and we had to decide what to do next. If we want to do more Dromatic or if we want to start a new game and after some time we decided we want to start a new game. Uh we had enough domantic for now.

Um, so that's when we came back to that conversation that we had on Gamescom and we decided that it can actually work like timing wise for us and that we would be interested in making something together. Uh, like we knew them uh for a long time. We knew their videos and they also knew us from Droantic. So the chemistry was there from the beginning.
Got it. Are they also Berlin based, right?
No, they are in Munich.
Okay.
They also have some people in Berlin.
Got it. Cool. So they had the idea of they already had the idea of making a video game and they were actively scouting for teams and that that's how they found you. Got it.
Yeah. So at least they had the idea of getting their toes into the video game sector. wasn't clear yet if it would be with a completely new game or like there were many options, but that's what it

ended up being. Yeah.
Yeah. And originally the first time we talked to them on Gamescom was they were actually looking or they actually planned to create an in-house team
of developers and make their own game.
Mhm. and they looked and searched for people to talk about for for people to talk to and just share knowledge and experience and you know and then this kind of evolved into we could also do something together and then when we decided that we would like to see if we we work together on a project, we then got back to the drawing board and we started working on a few prototypes similar to what we did with Darth Homantic.
Okay, so that's different gameplay prototypes trying out a bunch of different ideas of how how a KZK game essentially could look like. Did they give you a couple of themes or was like

very free prototyping?
It was a really free prototyping phase. Again, the only difference was that we also took inspiration from the videos. So just when it comes to topics and themes or mechanics even that we could um make into a full game, we looked at their videos and uh for some of our prototypes uh that was the the origin basically. For example, for Starboards, they have a video about asteroid mining and that was really clearly the um inspiration behind the game that we actually went for. what but what what do we say how involved were they in in the process in the like in the early process did you show them the prototypes or how did that collaboration look like
so in the beginning we took a few months tee right correct me if I'm wrong to build these basic prototypes and then to

kind of loop back through them and improve some of them and in that time we already discarded a few of them because we felt like we we didn't really find um um a good um carrying uh core loop or something that we felt very comfortable with to to work on for a longer period of time or we didn't see the the market appeal, you know. So yeah, so we were a bit more critical maybe even than we were back when we built the the do of romantic uh prototypes and then we chose I think three of these prototypes and we pitched them to them to kind of decide on what to move forward with together. And that was the asteroid mining prototype. And there was another one which was more like a rope rog like building strategy thing that wasn't really that clearly defined yet.
And then we had something that was a bit

if you think back to the early parts of Spore. Don't know if you remember that game or if you know it.
Spor. There was this this this phase, this early starting phase where you're still the blob and you need to fight against the other blob like beings and and kind of consume them and add more parts and so on.
And that was kind of something we we've heard was was pretty cool and could also work in the Kotkazak visual style in a way,
but um that was also not that um thing that we decided on. And yeah, they were very hands-off. Uh because we always said if we do something together, game design needs to come first. That's the priority to have a good game where we feel comfortable with. And so we we were very focused on doing these prototypes and finding a good core mechanical core game.
And then you once again ended up going with the prototype that firstly was

sounds like it was the most well- definfined, right? It had the least open questions. Yeah, it seemed like that to us, but during development, we noticed that it's not that well defined that we as we thought it would be. Like we
in our first prototype, we had uh basically this asteroid theme, we had the pipe drawing, we had building placement, and we had the idea that it would be like kind of like a factory building game that you have production chains with resources flowing through. And that felt like a pretty clear vision like factory building game but with the and this 3D gameplay and um also like a more casual approach to it. More colorful, less technical. Yeah. But there were so many unanswered questions that we had to solve still during our development. That's why the project also took longer than domantic.

Um,
but also the the scope like from the outside perspective, it looks like it's much a much bigger, more complex game in terms of features that it has, right? Cuz you have all of the infrastructure on the asteroids. Then you have all the ships flying from asteroid to asteroid. Like they're like they're like two layers of games almost stacked on top of each other. So
yeah, all in all, just more more
Yeah. Yeah. More and everything. More and
more and everything. Exactly. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. That's true.
Now when we look back, we're like, "Oh my god, how did we not how did we not see this?" But that's that's how it is.
Especially because that's what all people warn you about that this that you need to be careful that you don't over scope on the second project. That's what every team does basically. After you have one successful game, you decide, well, let's step it up a notch. And we

stepped it up quite a few notches I would say. And also I mean we had this really unique opportunity of having Kotkazak on board and that's also one aspect that convinced us to try even more things like
yes
we would never do a game with cutscenes if we didn't have Kazak uh on our side and we probably wouldn't have done a narrative um like story line either because that's not really like Dorman IC obviously doesn't have any kind of storytelling. Um, Starboards does and that's one of the aspects that we decided to do because we know we knew that that's what goodiz can do well and what they can contribute and we want to use this opportunity that we have uh with this game.
Got it. Did they which parts did they contribute during development? Did they

contribute in terms of art and cutscenes and so on or what did they do exactly?
Yeah. So um from be from the beginning it was clear that the game design and game development is ours. Basically it's our responsibility and also we are the ones who um has have the decision power uh when it comes to those things and uh same goes for like the actual like the visuals when it comes to what works for the game and what works in 3D. So at the beginning uh their main focus was that they need to make sure that it fits to their brand so that they have like basically a word or a saying when it comes to like the overall look of the game that it looks like it would fit into their uh Kushkazak universe and also everything related to texts and wording. Um yeah so

to give an overview I would say um we may uh we were responsible for game design, game development uh the whole technical side, the artistic side and um like yeah like the what the game looks like and also everything that we knew from earlier like um marketing for PC game publishing and so on. And their role was um like keeping the brand identity, doing research for us, writing a lot of the text that we have in game and also uh what actually became bigger than we originally thought was that they produced many art assets for us. Like pretty much everything in the game that is 2D comes from them.
Nice. And most of the animations also are theirs. So for example um the

buildings that we have uh Luca and Sui uh made the concepts for the buildings and uh made the 3D models for them and then they added animations for them because that's something that they are really good at and really quick
at
then. Yeah. And then the obvious last thing is marketing. Like they have this huge
marketing reach and yeah from the beginning it was clear that that is like a big potential that they bring to the table when it comes to games.
Did you do um tech art again for Star?
Yeah, especially in the first year um when we were still kind of iteratively working on the on the art style. So, we knew early on that what's very important with this project is to get a 3D style that looks similar to the 2D vector style in their videos, but also needs to work in a context of a 3D game. So, it's

important to have the shapes and the colors and everything look similar, but still you need to be able to see the depth, right? That's very important. you can make 3D look totally flat, but then you can't really see the the surface of the asteroid, for example. So, these were things we kind of had to um experiment with and actually find something that works and that took quite a lot of time. So, that was lots of shader work. Um also trying different um types of measures, sizes, and setups. And um so the asteroids are kind of a semi-procedural approach. It's basic meshes we use and we generate with a blender. And then Teemo took them and wrote magic code that kind of changes them into real time generated meshes in Unity. So we can have plateaus on the asteroids. We can add the craters and

stuff. So it's a the technical setup is much more complex than what we had with DOATIC as well. And so yeah, so I did lots of tech art and then over the two years, the closer we came to the release, the less tech art work there was
Mhm.
necessary. Of course, there are still parts of the game where where I need to do stuff. Um, but I also do the audio direction for example. So
so many different aspects that then I shift my my focus on.
I see.
Yeah. for the for the tech artists, the workflow almost sounds a bit like like some variation of prototyping what you described there, right? So, you
basically just open a new Unity scene maybe and try to get the look of one asteroid, right? Or how does that process exactly look like?
Yeah. Well, um that's that's kind of how we did it. We had like a visual prototype which was uh detached from the game mechanics at first just to see how

can we actually create something that looks similar to the 2D vector style and then we started kind of combining it together and see what actually works and what doesn't work. So, um there were many things we had to do to kind of improve uh on the on the basic setup to actually make it work uh in a gameplay sense and also make it functional. And then yeah, we we created the the buildings and all of the 3D assets. They created some animations for it. Then at some point, we decided that the birds themselves will have a bigger role in the game. So they will be the the crew that kind of takes you on the journey through through different star systems and so on. So we also had to think about will they only exist in the cutscenes or do we actually also want to have them in other parts of the game. And so we decided on dialogue segments and also having the birds comment what you do and you know have

like small profile images but we wanted to have them animated. So you have to think about how can we actually do this? Do we use animated sprites? Okay, then we need to think of having six different characters and if we want smooth animations then you need 60 fps animated sprites and then you know you have I don't know six or more different emotions and you would also like to have them blend blend into each other. So maybe a 2D sprite animation isn't the thing you need. So we
thought about ways to create these birds in a smarter way. So now the the birds are 2D shapes in 3D rigged to a rig
and this then gets animated and so we can use animation blending for all the things the do. So all of these things are things you you could have never imagined in the beginning of the project

and these are the things that make it so much more complex and challenging. So there's lots of tech in there. Yes.
And from from the gameplay side, the complexity was like the complexity of there being basically two gameplay layers on top of each other. Was that planned from the beginning or was that something that evolved over time? it was planned from the beginning but it wasn't as clearly defined.
Mhm.
So um yeah I think there are a bunch of uh aspects that make the game design or the game system complex actually and that is one part but like solving um the interplanetary transport was just one of the many aspects that we had to figure out. One other thing was like this whole uh resource economy that we have. I honestly underestimated how much effort it is to design a resource economy with like 50

to 100 resources that all kind of make sense together and also and that can be introduced one after the other. Like you don't start off with all the buildings. you. So you can't just have one system of resources like one graph basically how you can craft everything. Um you need to decide or you need to figure out at this stage of the game what do you have available and does this or like does this feel complete and is fun to explore. That was a different aspect. Um, and then also like the general game loop was also something that we took some time to actually figure out like what the goal would actually be and if you could actually lose the game. At the beginning, we still had a few ideas uh of how we could make the game loable.

Okay. And it's not losable anymore right now. it's not losable anymore because in the end most of the ideas that we had resulted in time pressure basically in some way
and
yeah that's something that we decided on at some point that we don't want to be we don't want there to be any time pressure in the game. We want it to be a relaxing experience and um more like lean into the the puzzle kind of challenge that we have in Droantic that you have this environment and you your challenge is to figure out how to fit everything in this environment and how to connect the the pipes and the buildings together so that in the end everything works like a machine.
Right. So it's kind of a logistics challenge. Yeah.
Build more and more complicated factories as you progress through the game.

Yeah. But this whole uh system or this whole layer on the game with the quests and goal and like progression, how you earn your buildings, uh if something costs something or not. All of that was something we had to figure out during development.
Mhm. Did you play some factory automation games for for inspiration or where did you
Yeah, we definitely checked out the bigger ones uh like Factorio or there were also other ones that are not as big but more similar in regards of uh casual factor or aesthetics.
So, we definitely check them out. Um, but we I would say none of us is like a super fan of the genre.
Got it. So, you kind of turned it into your own thing. So,
but now that I think about it, like games like Factorio are also not not really losible, right? Maybe if on

hardcore or whatever, but like if you play it normally, they're not not really losible.
Yeah. Actually, a few of them weren't losable at first and then after some updates or after some time they introduced like an enemy that can destroy your buildings.
But
yeah, it's probably still not really use lossable. It's more like a constant pressure you face that you have to fend off. But I think this type of game also like you don't want to lose in a factory building game where you spend all this time building up a huge factory. If there was something in there that just makes you go game over and you lose all your progress, that would be like the most unsatisfying thing ever, I think. So, it's more like a matter of pressure and tension that is added in some of these games.
Yeah. Yeah. It's more also like an optimization challenge and I I think a

lot of the satisfaction for in factory builders comes from maybe for example building things more efficiently than than others or something. I think there is cool when and there's some show off potential like the in factorial the people who like show off their perfectly organized factories. Do you have something like that for Starboards? Like some showoffs showing off their insanely efficient creations or like what's like the the community dynamics that evolved for this game?
So it's uh it's layered.
Okay. Some players are very focused on optimization and also during the demo period during NextFest, some people really minmaxed the the the two or three levels we had in there and um got to very high scores. So, it's still something we also thinking about what type of additional modes could we add to the game to give those type of players

even more freedom and more base to really go deep into this minmaxing.
How do you get scores in space?
Yeah. Uh, currently you have like an efficiency score. So, um, the more resources you deliver to the main station, you get a score for it. And if you deliver a very a certain amount of resources in a good distribution, please correct me even more, Tim, you can explain it better, I think, than I than me. The the the better your your final score at the end of a sector or like a level is.
Yeah. So the score is something that we also developed during development. So we came up with it because we noticed what actually is the thing that you can optimize. And the thing is um that we decided on was uh like the rate of resources that's delivered to your space

station but also the mix of resources that you don't deliver like just one resource but distributes uh your economy so that it
produces and delivers all resources in an a certain um amount and that's one part of the score. the one part where you can actually I would say the trickier part of the score to solve. Um and then the other part of the score is uh we have the system of module quests is what they are called where you basically every module quest represents a new resource that you have to produce. So uh and every completed module quest also gives you one score. Uh so that's the part of the score that you can complete by just producing every resource once or for the amount of uh

times that you need for the quest.
But that's just a matter of um time basically or yeah of completion. Whereas the other one requires you to build up your whole infrastructure in a way that it is coherent and has this end result.
Got it.
Yeah. So that's how the
is the the score deliberately also not not time based. So there is if you want to optimize your score you you're not under additional time pressure because of that.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Yeah. Because we wanted to keep everything more or less chill. We know that some people get still get a bit stressed out maybe or at least feel some sort of a pressure to achieve what the quests ask from you. Um and adding additional time pressure for us didn't feel right. So yeah.
Right. You didn't want people to optimize the fun out of their own

experience by optimizing for
right. Yeah. Actually, we have one as like one single achievement at the moment that uh is a timebased achievement. Uh
oh.
And it's the most hated one. Definitely.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah. So there Yeah. And I can understand. I I feel the same way. I think you also I think in Islanders you also had this one time based.
Oh yeah. It was not people's favorites. Yeah.
I never completed that one. We should have learned from you.
And for starboards, you're also doing early access at the moment if I'm not mistaken.
What's the the reasoning for that three?
So yeah, I think it's a familiarity to this release model in a way because we did it back when we released and we felt that we so codes brings this huge community with them, right? And for us

it was a bit difficult to maybe gauge at first what do they expect from a game, what do they actually want from a game. And so we felt like it would be a good idea to actually give them a voice and listen to their feedback. So an additional reason to do early access for us. And uh also we feel that if you do a a good early access then it could play out like two releases like the early access release and the full release. So, we get two of those release peaks or release marketing beats we can do. And so, it felt like a like an ideal choice in a way
if you get lucky with with that one again. But I think from from what I can see, let me quickly check out the Starboard Steam page. But I think it's also been doing really well so far, right?
Yeah, it's definitely not a bad release. Okay. Yeah, it's it's it looks looks quite solid. Not sure if it's quite domantic numbers, but it's looking very very solid.
Cool. So, so what are your plans with

the starboards moving forward?
We have a bunch of options and um since we're not alone in this, we still need to basically discuss what what path we take.
Mhm. Um, so yeah, there are many options and many ideas floating around, but we don't quite know yet what exactly the path will be for Starboards.
But have you got
What we definitely know already is Oh, sorry, I'll just add something. What we definitely already know is that we of course want to continue the story campaign. The the scale of that is not too clear right now. So, we know that there will be another star system added. There will be more cutscenes. We'll try to uh well finish the story at some point. Um and then we are also thinking about possible modes or things we can do with the
the game play and the game loop. Um we already have these small bonus levels in the game
uh that most people miss. I I think

so we can improve on actually playing those and finding those. And also we we want to give players that long for more or maybe a bit less of the handholding through the story campaign to find a way to offer them that. So yeah, but it the exact way of how we will do it. It's it's still in discussion in a way. Yeah.
So but you you you said that you were interested in seeing how the community reacts and maybe adjusting course depending on that a little bit. What what has been the feedback from the community so far or like what's what do you feel are their pain points teemo?
I mean there were quite a few points where the instructions weren't as clear as they should have been I would say.
Okay.
And then because of the technical base um there's a lot of potential for issues uh with certain generations for example. So that's one of the parts that we want

to solve. Um, apart from that, I think most people just want to have more of the game because we have this campaign now.
And as soon as you're finished with the campaign and maybe even with the achievements, then there's not really much else to do. And I think that's something that we definitely have high on our priority list.
I see.
To give players more to experience. So that means you'll have to add even more resources to the already large pool. The funny part is that the I think in my like in our initial system we already had like 80 resources and the early access version already only contains like 40 like maybe half.
Um maybe a little bit more. I'm not quite sure. But yeah, we still have a lot of resources actually that we haven't put into the game yet. So you

don't have to come up with like not everything has to be completely new. Luckily you have some things already prepared but
also more buildings will get added, right?
Nice. Mhm.
There's some buildings that are aren't yet in the game.
Yeah. But other interesting parts like there are some wishes in the community that are super interesting to us because they would require some new game design solutions and we have some ideas on how to tackle those. Like I would say the the most requested things definitely are on our radar. Um, and we still, yeah, we we will try to find ways to to solve those requests in a way that also works with the game. Yeah.
Good. Are you already cooking some new projects or are you I mean, it just released into early access, right? So, you're probably still full full on board

with Stars.
Yeah, I mean was 3 weeks ago, I think, our release. So yeah, there's still a lot to do like even just bug fixing and um general improvement but also working on the new content. So starboards still has uh quite a few uh challenges up ahead I would say.
Mhm.
Um and what comes after that I think now with starboards we that just means that we have even more opportunities now even more things we have to decide between. We already had that for domantic like all the things you can do with a good game after it's finished. But yeah, of course at some point we also want to do something new again.
So
sure that makesense.
But the timeline is not decided yet.
I think you you also were one of the games that moved your launch date uh due to Silkong, right?
Yeah, that's correct. Would you in

hindsight say that was a good decision or would you have done things differently or what's your thoughts in hindsight?
I think it's a good decision. I think uh it it took us a while to decide,
a few days actually,
but uh I think it's a good decision in the end. So,
we were at Gamescom when we actually um revealed our original launch date on the 21st of August. we revealed that we want to re launch the game on the 4th of September. And on the same day, they launched their or they released their um launch date trailer
or launch date info and we were like, "Oh my god, what is happening?" M
and then we did some some sort of a deep dive into researching what kinds of releases will come in the next weeks and so on to kind of uh evaluate if if we should move or if we should stay there. And as Silk Song was the most wishlisted game globally back then with I think

three or four million wish lists which is totally insane
we thought that it might be a good idea to get out of the way.
Mhm. Especially since uh the whole press and influencers, YouTubers, streamers, we felt like a huge part of them will do content uh about Silkong and uh so yeah, we we looked at the following weeks and we decided the week after is a better um spot to to release. And I mean in hindsight it's it's you can't really say if it would have gone worse if we would have stayed on the 4th of September
but I feel that it was the better decision because we had a bit more um possible coverage in the week after
and uh yeah so
I think it was a was an okay decision. At least
we we stand behind the decision.
Yeah, I see. I see. But you're also not completely butred about it of like how

dare they just drop the trailer or something cuz I think
I mean yeah there was some some sort of a controversy about that. Yeah.
I also I was in an article about the price.
Yeah. And uh I said that the price discussion in in light of the silkong price of around 20 or $20 is of course a hard fact and something that is that also informs how where you position your own games, right?
And um so yeah, that was an interesting discussion and some people changed the the narrative of that article. So there were copies of that article coming out in different outlets
where the narrative now was that indie developers criticize the pricing of Silkong because they feel like it's too cheap and they have to make their own games cheaper and stuff. So yeah, that was an interesting take.

Right. So they maybe twisted your words a bit or how what do you mean?
Well, not necessarily my words, but
it's like they they
made a a narrative. There are probably there are probably some indies who feel that way for sure.
Oh yeah, sure. Sure. And I to a certain extent I I mean I I can understand it but I also understand the players who say well if this amount of money is good enough
for you and it is a good value proposition for me then why should you make your game more expensive?
Sure. Sure. Outside
although I think you can also understand team Cher's perspective as well. But I feel like honestly 20 bucks is
probably a very well optimized price for the game because like makes makes it kind of into a no-brainer to purchase.
Exactly. Yeah, totally. And a no-brainer price is something you should always try to
to opt for example. I think we we undersold it a

little bit, but that was a really good decision for the pricing because it was a no-brainer at some point.
Agree. Cool. Do you want to um engage in some theory crafting about how to make like successful indie games in general or is that something you uh don't entertain so much?
Yeah, let's let's try.
Like after after making two fairly successful indie games, a first question would be do you think it's actually uh reproducible Teemo? Uh so in generally I would say we always try or we we never claim to have a formula of how to make a successful game even after two games
because the circumstances are so different. So yeah, I think we definitely learned quite a bit and we look at prototypes and look at game new games differently now but and we yeah I think our decision our decisions are better now like we can better decide on

if a game has potential or not but I think it's really difficult to to take the lessons from one game and yeah reproduce it with a completely different one, we already had this experience with our two games, even from the same studio, from the same team basically. Even there, it's not really reproducible. So, it's even more difficult when it's a different team with different people.
Okay, that's fair point. But also, it's uh you made two very very different games. Would you say it might be easier if you made like more similar games? Like, for example, you made I don't know a more dwarfantic inspired game. Would you have been able to take some learnings maybe from the first one?
I think that would definitely be the safer choice. Like if you if you're struggling as a company um and if you have one successful title in your disposal then it's definitely the

smarter choice to lean into that and make more of that. Um but in our like our decision was based on the fact that we actually with the success of Dformatic we kind of earned ourselves the freedom to do something completely different. Um and we have the means to to carry the risk basically. But it was definitely not a decision made purely for the like econom business
uh side. Yeah.
Got it. Do you feel like the art styles make a big difference in in which games succeed nowadays or what would you say are the like if you browse random games on Steam that maybe aren't released yet? And like what are the things that make you go that's probably going to do well?
That's a that's a big question. So I'd say it's that you you could approach this in two different ways. One way

would be what we or what I would have said one or two years ago. The more visually appealing something is, the cleaner, the more easy to read or grasp what the game is about, the better it will do. But now we also see lots of very games that are optimized for streaming or games that are optimized for a very big hype phase. um that don't necessarily need to look super polished and are mostly about the um recognizability maybe. So um I think it's it's it's a more layered thing. You you can't really have a generalized answer to that. Um but still of course if your if your game is um visually appealing and very polished optically then I guess more people will click on something or at least you will have more attention for it in a way.

Yeah, I think that's that's still true.
But if your game is very recognizable and maybe especially trashy, not in a derogatory way, right? Like I'm I'm not trying to put this down in any way. I think that's a very viable tactic also or a very very very viable approach. Then you can also get lots of attention with that. I think nowadays the the biggest question you should ask yourself is how can I get the attention because that's the reality of our business right now. There are so many more releases every week and this will get more. I think actually sticking out of the noise is even more difficult. And so yeah, it makes sense that many different more or less successful titles try out different tactics and we will see over the next years which of these are the most successful. I think yeah
I mean if you ask me I I would say and I

wonder if to which degree you agree to this. I would sort of say that there are only really two main tactics that you can use to get attention for your game. One is to have Steam do the marketing for you and one is to have content creators do the marketing for you. And there are like different variations of both tactics, but that's kind of the two main options you have. Will you
Yeah, I think that's a very good take. Yeah.
Okay. There might be one additional thing though, but the I think the impact of it is a is much more of a slow burn in a way and that is if your game gets the the press and the awards and people talking about it and it's more like an organic recommendation thing. I think this can also work. Uh, but it might take longer and it might not be as like the cycle might not be as quick as for hypushed by Steam in a in a certain short phase

or something.
I see. I see. For example, one example that would fit into that category would, for example, be something like Outer Wilds that didn't do particularly well with well with content creators. It also didn't do particularly well on on store pages, but like I keep recommending it to everyone and it kind of spreads this way, right?
Exactly. Yeah.
Yeah. I see. I see that. So, let's say you you start a completely new team or a new game project, like one commonality I I see among successful devs, I'm not sure if it's a coincidence or not, is that they all they often times seem to have very thought out workflows and processes. they're like very rarely they're just doing random things and it somehow ends up working out like what what are the workflows that you feel are most likely to produce successful results? So I think the first step for a studio and that's one step that we already managed to overcome is uh to to

overcome your nativity I would say and to actually understand what the reality of of games is on the market. Um that's a thing that we notice a lot with uh young teams starting their first game that they don't really that they still have these expectations of what it could turn out to be. And that's the same thing that happened to me back with our VR game. We everybody told us yeah don't do a VR game that's can't make money with it. And we were convinced that there are some examples for successful VR games. So we can also do it basically. And that's the part that I mean that you need to understand that uh what what the players actually want and like for example in our school was already always a big topic to make something new and creative and different

but that doesn't really translate into success I would say. So it's it's important to have this as a base I would say but if you want to have a successful game it needs to have familiarity. So it needs it can't be too different and too special because then people don't understand what it is and they can't compare to other games. You don't really know where to put your marketing efforts
so on. So that's the first uh thing I would say. Um, but that's a thing that we already kind of overcome. Overcame,
right? So, a lot what you're kind of saying is that a lot of deaths go into the space with kind of almost the urge to be too unique, to stand like to stand out so much to the point that nobody really has something to to compare your game to.
Either or. I think the opposite is also

true. Like that's um specifically from like from our circle. I would say that like there's a lot of this innovation spirit but I think other it also happens that people start making games by just liking a game and then deciding they also want to do this type of game basically and that's the opposite spectrum which is like too similar to games that are already out there and that's also not really uh the formula for success I would say because then you're you're not adding anything new to the market. There's no reason to,
right?
But then people hear what you just said and they're like, "Oh, I need to add something new to the market." And then they go overboard in the other direction. So, you kind of had have to hit that sweet spot, right?
The balance.
Yeah.
I see. I see.
Yeah. It's difficult. And then also I feel like from from looking back at all of these projects, I think one of the

core things we think about is if you see something from the game, a screenshot, a short video clip, something like this, and you can kind of imagine what the game play would feel like or what you actually do in the game. Even if you don't have a complete grasp of everything yet, that's a good indicator that you have something that's marketable. Because if you don't have this, there's a huge hurdle of actually understanding what the game is about. And for many players, in my opinion at least, this can quickly translate into, oh, I don't understand what it's about. It's probably not for me. And that's the worst thing that can happen. So, the easier you make it for people to approach your game, the better. And this could also mean that the mechanics can be innovative and unheard of in a certain extent and still you understand them quickly through the marketing material. So I think that's that's kind

of the caveat there.
It can can be as innovative as you want as long as you can easily communicate it's kind of fine, right? But that's
I think so
that's the problem with
but that's that could also be a hot take. At least that's like what we learned or at least that's the perspective we have now with the 5 years of experience on the market. Yeah,
I think to be fair, the thing the two things are highly related, right? I think if something's very complex and too too innovative, then it's also usually going to be difficult to explain it in a single screenshot or something
probably. Yeah. like um I wonder looking at like starboards versus love romantic if maybe this is also one thing that makes starboards a little more difficult is that looking at the screenshots it's not as obvious what it's about right cuz if if you look at romantic it's like extremely obvious it's game about placing tiles and getting
points based on how you place them
for starboards it's um not quite as

trivial to to figure out what it's about looking at the screenshots I get you I mean you can still make a very very good guess. Of course, it's like not horrible, but
Yeah, I think so. I think it's actually a bit more difficult to market this game. Definitely. And we we we did much more to market it.
And of course, we have a bigger partner in the boat. And
it didn't turn out as a much bigger hit than Dolphantic was, right? So,
this is an interesting learning too.
Yeah. Yeah.
Mhm. It's also kind of frustrating from a developer perspective to see that the amount of effort you put into something doesn't exactly correlate with the amount of success it's going to have. Does that kind of does that kind of nudge you to make uh smaller games for your next projects again or what are your thoughts so far? I think generally we prefer to make smaller games just so

that we can make more games because there's like when you look at our prototyping phase, we have so many different ideas and so many different things that we would really like to see as a completed game at some point.
And if you take five years for one game, that's just not happening.
Yeah. And then of course also the like just the costs of making a long game is a big concern. Um so yeah we we try to keep the game smaller but still um starboards took twice as long for the early access as doatic did. So, we already extended our time frame quite a bit because it's just
not really possible to make the kind of game that we wanted to make in one year for Stars. But I think for the future we will definitely think about that again. Like if we want to delve into genres or and game systems

that aren't really doable in one year of time, but there still a discussion because on the other hand, many interesting games just take this time to make. So
yeah,
if you need to restrict yourself too much, then that's also not quite what we want. We want to be able to like realize our creative visions. And if they require more than do romantic, then that's just how it is,
I think. Yeah. But generally I think Starboards was on the upper end of complexity of what game we want to make as a company.
Unless you grow way more maybe you can do but that's not your plan from what I understand.
No, we're still
correct. Keeping it small and growing slowly. Yeah. But still
we just moved into a new office by the

way. So that's an exciting period right now. But
we still don't plan on hiring more people. We we want to have a well welloiled machine in a way. Now machine is a bad word for it, but
the team right now feels super good and everybody is in a good place, I think. Um and so we want to keep it this way. So that's that's very valuable and we're very thankful for it. So
um messing with this is maybe not a good idea.
Mhm. And then the fact that you have a relatively lean team also takes a lot of stress and pressure off of your shoulders, right? Because you have not not as high of a burn rate and you have a very long breath and you don't need every game to be like a mega success. I mean, we talked about the prototyping that we did. And I think that's probably the main thing regarding our workflow is that we just try to do many different um prototypes. And then the probably the most important like there are two more

important steps. First is the step to evaluate your prototypes which is a thing that we're getting better at. But there's still I think the longer you make games and the more games you make the better your judgment becomes when it comes to uh deciding what concept or what prototype actually has potential. And then the other thing is that after the prototype there's always a phase of refining the prototype or like continuing the prototype and at some point you just need to know ex like you need to know what the game exactly will be because like the first prototype never has all the answers. So there's always some period of time after the initial prototype and there the challenge is to to find the right pacing. I think to to set your goals, right, so that you can um decide what the game exactly is

without taking years changing everything about the game.
You need to answer the correct questions at the correct time is also a bit what I'm hearing from your response there. Right? You It's a probably a mistake to lock in everything from the very beginning cuz if people hear what you just say and they're like, "Okay, sure. I'm going to just start out by writing a game design document then that defines everything right away. That's probably also not the way to go, right?
No. No, definitely not. We are all about iterating over over game design. So that's always what we what we want to do because we think that's what results in the best games. So that um that you don't lock in all the things from the beginning but you keep on looking at the game how it evolves and are open to change things if needed. But that's also like a trap, right? that you

if you keep it open for too long then it just stays in this vague state of being and at some point you need to find the right moment to say yeah this is good enough this is like this solution works well enough that it will turn out to be a good game in the end like
there's maybe there are still issues with it but the issues aren't that detrimental to the game as a hole. Um, yeah, and that's definitely another skill to master when developing games.
Mhm. So, yeah. I mean,
I think Jonas, your your video with the fishing boat on the sea where you where you talked about iterative iteratively searching for different answers or different pathways maybe in in the development. That was a very good metaphor for how we work in a way. And I

mean we come from the same school of course you also studied at at the HTW for a while. And uh I think this this kind of core approach is similar in how we work too and that's like a foundation for for all the other stuff that we learned on the way.
Yeah. So also the the prototyping as a very core concept of how you make games. It's very much sounds like the prototyping and the the way you evaluated those prototypes and so on sounds like it is a was a big factor at the very least for your success story. So and I would also think that that's a good idea like I I haven't met many people who are like we did so much prototyping ah that was such a waste of time like I've literally never heard that I think.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's also just fun, right? It's fun to do.
I have kind of a spin-off question about that for you, which is like recently I've been very much thinking about appeal prototyping cuz

I don't this is this a bit of a hot take from my side, but I'm starting to feel like making a game that's fun is actually not the difficult part. As soon as you've made a couple of games and you have some experience with how to iterate, then you you get sort of confident that you can make almost any game system fun with a couple of iterations. Like the the tricky part seems to be um the the appeal side. So I'm wondering if maybe the correct uh approach for more experienced developers is to not start with gameplay prototypes, but to start with art and appeal prototypes. Do you think I'm crazy for thinking that? Like, can you kind of see where I'm coming from?
No, I don't think it's crazy. I think it's a very like circling back to the the question you asked me before. Um, I think that's one of the approaches or perspectives you can have on that. I'm also kind of asking myself the same question for for quite some time now since in the last

weeks I don't know if you've seen Mega Bonk for example which is super successful
yes
and in a way you could say Mega Bonk or maybe also Pedal Pedal Pedal are games that are surprising because in my book in in my perspective when I look at these games I'd say okay I don't think they are appealing in the classical sense of the art looks super wellmade or they're super polished or they're super aesthetic to look at, you know, and the appeal here might be something different then. And I don't really think you can you can say you could prototype such a game with an appeal as the goal. You know what I mean? So, it's like a So, I'm I'm kind of still on the fence of how I
kind of
I would say
hard to say. you mentioned or you said appear prototyping but that doesn't really have to refer to the visuals only right it I think it's uh you also like

this uh term the player fantasy right yes and that's also the appeal and it's really separate from the art style I think
and I think that's really valid to to give this part of the concept more room than for example the fun or the mechanics because that's what draws people in. And if you have the skills to make an enjoyable game, which I agree with you that I think pretty much every idea can be made into an enjoyable game, not necessarily a successful one, but an enjoyable one. And I think if you manage to to find a like find a fantasy or or a visual aesthetic or setting that's just super intriguing for people and start from there. Um I think that can work but

yeah it's also also pretty difficult probably.
Yeah.
It's difficult. I also I also think it's difficult. I think what you said making it intriguing. I think that's that's one of the important aspects.
Yeah.
So if the if you look at appeal as something that's intriguing then yes I would say it's definitely a good approach Jonas.
I mean so the way I define appeal is is like this general attraction force that upon seeing a screenshot or a short clip you want to play it. And the problem with
with that definition of appeal is is that it can have so many causes right it can it can be the art. It can be the fantasy, but what what makes it kind of meaningless is that it can also be the gameplay, right? You can also see the gameplay of something and be like, "Oh, that game play looks really fun. I kind of want to play that." And that makes
not sure if that definition of pe appeal is almost so universal that it makes it useless.
Yeah, it's difficult. I agree.

We had an interesting conversation recently with our team about the appeal of stars actually. Um because we also think that it doesn't like there's more potential there. Let's just frame it that way. And uh one discussion point was that like kskazak videos always have these huge scenarios like these big topics, big existential topics of black holes and nuclear bombs and all these kind of
you get always after watching a video always have this feeling of existential dread almost. Yeah. And I think like that's a really dramatic type of entertainment, like a really high tension type of entertainment. And like one um opinion about Star Wars in our team was that our game doesn't really have this level of tension that the videos have. But that's also like a

thing that you like if you want to if you want this type type of tension to be the appeal of your game, then that needs to be a decision early in development because your whole system builds on that. Like we can't just introduce something crazy asteroid destroying at this stage of of the game. It's just I would say it's too late for that. But that's just one one other example of appeal that you can define early on if you if you want to. I think we went more in the dwarf romantic appeal kind of way that we we were like, yeah, we want to make a factory building game, but it's it looks nice. It's inviting. It looks colorful, vibrant, and it's also it has this toy
character that it's just satisfying to place down things. And that's the appeal that we went for as a different

direction, but it's also a direction that we defined really early on that that's what we want to achieve. Yeah. But now after our release and after spending all this time with the game, we definitely look at the I think we learned a lot a lot from that again for the next project. things to consider in this early
uh stage where we define the appeal.
Do you think you were maybe too gameplay focused in the early phase or did you already think a lot about like appeal and marketability uh for this project? M I think in general we are really systemic people like we really enjoy game mechanics as a team
and uh yeah so but we also like the visuals definitely also played a role right from the beginning. Sure. Of course, because you need to nail that entire look. And so, obviously,

what we maybe don't do that much is because we're not really narrative people.
So, we don't think that much about what story the game tells. And I think that's that's what I with with the dramatic example earlier. I think that goes more in that direction actually that you have some some story or some event happening or events happening in your game and that you focus your appeal on that. And I think that's maybe one part where
we can still learn to to
get a better judgment. Mhm.
What were you about to say or was it just
Yeah, I just wanted to say maybe in the future. So, because we knew the a certain visual style would would need to be a focus of the game too, right? The aesthetic, the the vibe and so on. This kind of also maybe limited the way we

approached the game a little bit. And of course, constraints are always good. It's always helpful to have a certain framework to fit your game into. Um, but on the other hand, before we usually always had the the prototype, the core game loop first before tackling the visuals, the setting, the theme, and so on, which then really matched well to the game plan. And here we had to fit two parts that were already there together in a way.
And this was a challenge. And in the future, I think we will go back to how we did it before.
Okay, got it. I I found also the the examples you gave quite interesting, like games like Mega Bonk or Vampire Survivors and wondering how how you would plan for that type of appeal. That's a very good question. Like I think for for games like those, it's often also the the power fantasy

and you can
the game feel. Yeah. Yeah. You can still kind of see that in the screenshots in a way, right? So you can kind of see, okay, this is a there's like one dude in the middle and it's surrounded by enemies. So you kind of intuitively understand that's like a power fantasy type of game.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I think that screenshot you just described is just super inherently appealing to everyone.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Interesting. Yeah, it's really not the the the beautifulness or the beauty of the art style. I think that's not necessarily anymore the thing we are looking for. Yeah. And uh I think the market chose that that's not the the criteria.
One thing that I'm I found very impressive about Mega Bunk. I'm not sure. Have you played a bit of
or not yet to be honest, but it's okay. I've I'm always looking at at let's plays and uh and so on. Yeah.

One one thing that really impressed me is how um they polished everything that really matters. Like all of the combat, all of the movement, all of the feedback is like extremely polished. And then the things that don't matter, they just left in very very raw, right? For example, the characters, they don't even have an attack animation. You just walk around like the the attack is just a pixelated sprite that spawns in front of you. just like whatever like yeah very interesting approach.
I mean if it if it works it works.
No I found it I found it very inspiring to be honest.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
All righty. Um yeah that was another good tangent that we started there. Cool. Yeah. Thanks so much for for for your time. Really appreciate it. Was was a lot of fun.
Thank you Jonas.
Yes it was really fun.
Thanks for having us. that.