Patch Notes #4: Strange Scaffold rejected a 'culture of hope' to resurrect I Am Your Beast

I Am Your Beast is the finest wagyu expertly prepared by a Michelin star kitchen. There isn't an ounce of excess fat on the barnstorming, bloody, breakneck shooter—and lord knows it's absolutely dripping with flavor. That is very much by design.

Developer Strange Scaffold has made a name for itself as one of the most efficient studios in the game industry. The company, led by creative director Xalavier Nelson Jr., styles itself as a "human-centric" operation that strives to build video games in ways that are "better, faster, cheaper, and healthier."

It's a philosophy that has enabled the studio to release 15 projects in five years, with four of those (I Am Your Beast, Clickolding, Life Eater, and El Paso, Elsewhere) debuting over the past year. Nelson Jr. has spoken at length about how the company leverages a "constellation" model to deliver results by working with a rotating group of contractors that can hop between projects.

For outsiders looking in, the notion of wrapping a single project in 12 months—let alone bringing four to market in that time—might seem impossible, but Nelson Jr. claims Strange Scaffold consistently delivers by shunning the "culture of hope" that permeates the game industry.

Speaking to Game Developer shortly after the launch of I Am Your Beast, Nelson Jr. says the constellation model imbues Strange Scaffold with the "basis of a studio that is fluid but feels solid outside of me as the single consistent piece." It's about championing "decentralization and modularity," he explains.

Denying that aforementioned 'culture of hope has resulted in Strange Scaffold becoming increasingly strict when defining the boundaries of each project. Nelson Jr. says it was a "surprising" evolution given how regimented the studio had already become, but absolutely necessary to the company's survival.

Take I Am Your Beast. The project has existed in some form for years but struggled to find its feet due to team members moving on and other issues that stifled momentum. Eventually, the finished version was developed in nine months at a production cost in the "low six figures," which Nelson Jr. explains was identified as a "recoup point that's a lot easier to hit." That is the result of rigorous, hardline planning.

"By the time we did find funding [for I Am Your Beast] we had to start from scratch, so we built that [version] in around nine-and-a-half months. From the beginning of development, rather than saying 'let's give this garden the space to exist indefinitely,' we said 'this is a nine month project,'" he explains. "The idea is just, with every project, to be very upfront and very rigorous as a team about saying exactly how much space this project will be allowed to consume."

Nelson Jr. says Strange Scaffold adheres to those timeframes and budgets by treating them as non-negotiables. He feels that rarely happens in the modern era of game development. "Everything is a flexible race towards the best possible end," he says, offering his take on how the vast majority of studios are currently approaching production.

"We have not built a sensation of production rigor. We have almost created a culture of hope whereby we always hope we can get a little bit more time to polish a feature. We always hope we can get a bit more time to localize to another language, or to add another animation here or there.

"It has added to an impression from our players—which is not entirely inaccurate—that games are things to be worked on indefinitely, and the more time and money you have to work on a thing, the higher the quality bar raises in a linear manner."

Nelson feels developers have become "increasingly good at making games," but "terrible at producing them." He says that's why so many projects are being scrapped pre-launch: because studios and publishers simply aren't equipped to get them out of the door.

"No one knows when anything is going to come out, what quality it will be—including our players—and it terrifies everyone," he adds. "When every game is a  Schrodinger's Box, why not over invest into a few titles and hope for the very best? It's something that we have become very used to doing. It is not how the industry existed forever. It is where we are now."

He feels developers are still triumphing. Still landing their moonshots. But the bar for what the industry perceives as "success" continues to rise exponentially, creating the sense that anything other than meteoritic returns for publishers, investors, and developers is tantamount to failure.

It's a mindset that has everybody chasing a honking golden goose rather than working to mitigate risk and deliver sensible, sustainable returns. For those in the development trenches, it's now even harder to see the forest through the trees because producing games has become "gambling by another name."

"We aren't shipping projects. We are gambling," he continues. "We are gambling all the time, and I don't want to gamble on the lives of my collaborators. I don't want to gamble on the quality of the projects that we're bringing to our players either."

Nelson Jr. wants Strange Scaffold to exist in "stark contrast" to that environment and is adamant the studio will continue pursuing projects with explicit limitations. "Even if a game is successful, if we don't hit our timeline and budget then a part of that project has failed and is a point to improve in the future," he adds. "I was told before I started my studio that this was not a route to shipping successful games, and now we have this portfolio of 15 titles that we've shipped in five years."

He says it's vital the company continues making titles it can survive shipping regardless of their commercial success. It's a pitch that has resulted in the studio shying away from traditional publishers, who perhaps don't want to hear developers admit that upfront, but it's also the secret behind Strange Scaffold's endurance.

"People want to hear 'heart,' 'passion,' 'this is my last hope' and to benefit from the inherent exploitation that comes from that," he says. "Because when it's you and your three best friends making the coolest indie game of all time and your entire livelihoods rest on that one bet, you will burn yourself to a crisp to give it even 1 percent more chance of success. It's a shame we encourage that environment instead of delivering reasonably scoped games that do a really fucking cool thing."

Another bonus of actually bringing rad video games to market at wildly different price points is that you begin to cultivate a community. Right now, Nelson Jr. explains Strange Scaffold isn't just selling I Am Your Beast. It's selling the studio as a creative and commercial entity.

"[We're selling] that portfolio of creativity. I'm not looking at a single project. I'm looking at how the sales of I Am Your Beast go on to inevitably impact every single other game we've launched," he says.

For instance, Nelson Jr. admits an older title called Sunshine Shuffle initially failed to turn a profit but that sales have now "greatly improved." That's purely because the studio has survived long enough to allow other people to discover it. That's a clear win, but it's not the only metric for success. Nelson Jr. emphasizes that even if sales never picked up, Sunshine Shuffle is still a project that "deserves to exist." That in itself is worth celebrating.

"One thing that struck me very early in my career was how often I'd meet people behind legendary games, and because those games hadn't sold well commercially they couldn't look at those dev cycles as positive things," he says.

"Among the many things that Strange Scaffold seeks to challenge by simply staying alive [is the idea that] every game you ship should in some way be worth existing. We want to validate its existence and validate the players who haven't discovered it yet. When they do, it can and will be their favorite game."

His parting advice to devs looking to follow in Strange Scaffold's footsteps? Bringing us rather nearty full circle, he implores everyone to "embrace limitations."

"I've worked on nearly 100 games at this point. The impulse usually from people on all sides is 'let's do more. Let's push it out a year. Let's get let's double the length of the campaign. Add more enemy variety.' It is more, but is it what the game needs?," he says.

"I Am Your Beast is a game that, because it embraced limitations, manages to be this adrenaline shot that cares for nothing more than making you feel—and feel right now. [We'll be] continuing to embrace that for all of our projects. They don't have to be the biggest. They don't have to be the most graphically complex. What they need to do is make you feel. Make you feel right now, while respecting your time and your wallet. It's what's kept us alive for all these years."

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