If you play indie games, you may have noticed Strange Scaffold’s incredible hit rate. Every single one of the studio’s games — from Clickolding, I Am Your Beast, and most recently, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown — has ended up somewhere within the “Positive” ranking system on Steam (with several achieving “Very Positive” or even “Overwhelmingly Positive”).
So, how does the studio’s creative director Xalavier Nelson Jr. ensure his studio only turns out bangers?
To find out, I sat down with Nelson at this past March’s Game Developers Conference — or more accurately, I sat down with him right outside GDC, as he couldn’t afford a ticket to the prestigious (but expensive) game-development networking extravaganza. And even that is part of Nelson’s strategy of working within extremely tight constraints, and never trying to do more than exactly what his studio can afford to do. Think the opposite of Icarus: build the wax wings, but then don’t fly into the sun. Nelson’s business strategy is to just fly straight.
“I feel like it’s more crucial than ever to make games efficiently and quickly, because as we can see from where the rest of the industry is at, you almost can’t afford to do otherwise,” Nelson told me as we sat together on a bench by the Yerba Buena Gardens, a park close to the convention center. “And in our case, I really feel it boosts our creativity. We’re making this game [TMNT] for less than $300,000 in 18 months.”
When making lots of small games is more sustainable than making one big one appeared first on Polygon.
