Dylan Cuthbert, Q-Games founder, answers our questions about soup, do-overs, and drops teasers for their next game like mad.
Cat: What are your core development values?
Dylan: Our core values are fun and technology. We want to push boundaries in both areas and that drives everything we do.
Cat: Which of your games do you identify with most?
Dylan: That's like picking a son or a daughter over another, it's a little impossible to do! However our upcoming game that will be announced soon really embodies everything we've been building up to over the years. Watch this space!
Cat: Where does the inspiration come from?
Dylan: The inspiration comes from a few sources, one of which is simply that I have played a *lot* of games and a little bit from all my favourite games creeps into everything I make. On top of that though there is a lot of influence from art, especially modern art of all shapes and sizes. Music can also play a part, for example, HFB's soundtrack for Shooter influenced a no. of decisions we made for that game's scenario.
http://s2.n4g.com/media/11/...
Dylan's self-portrait. Or Nom Nom Galaxy concept.
Cat: Is being prolific (you are) a necessary part of being a successful indie studio, or a necessary creative outlet?
Dylan: It's a necessary creative outlet - we can only make a certain no. of games in our lifetimes and I still have lots of genres and ideas I want to explore.
Cat: If you had one extra life for a do-over…what’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made with Q-Games?
Dylan: At one point we didn't have a stringent enough control on the types of people coming into Q and we ended up with a small group of people who were only working for themselves and not with everyone else. The situation was resolved but it did create some stress for a short while. A small indie company like ours needs people who work with each other fairly and evenly, without creating holier-than-thou cliques. I don't have any hard feelings, it's just a personality type that doesn't match well with out size but on the flip-side of the coin it *can* be much more successful in smaller groups where there are no "others" to look over at and comment upon.
Cat: What do you think of the FaceBook gaming environment and its predatory structure?
Dylan: I really don't like it - we have PixelJunk Monsters on facebook and it earns us practically nothing simply because we really don't want to put ourselves in a situation where we even feel like we're ripping off or squeezing people. If we were to throw that feeling out of the window we could squeeze a lot harder and make it a profitable venture I think.
http://s2.n4g.com/media/11/...
Soup!
Cat: Economics or inspiration: PixelJunk Shooter got a stand-alone sequel, PJ Monsters got an Encore and a FB game - what’s it take for a game to get an "encore"?
Dylan: There was just too much content for it to be an encore. PixelJunk Shooter 2 had the same amount of stages *and* an online MP mode. The new combined "Shooter Ultimate" remake on PS4 is awesome by the way.
Cat: Music, monsters, cooking, soup - is it fair to say that we see a lot of "Dylan's Favorite Things" explored in Q-Games titles?
Dylan: Yes of course.. anything that I'm interested in at that point in time tends to get included into whatever games we are making. So what am I interested in at the moment? 1960s Russia, Clockwork Orange, Prague.
Cat: Platforms, you’ve made the rounds and settled on PC first for Nom Nom Galaxy, what’s the platform decision-making process?
Dylan: Basically, market size and reachability. I'm still not entirely convinced by Steam although PixelJunk Eden eventually did quite well for us. It feels like people just wait for prices to go dirt cheap and then buy up in bulk. It's very difficult for people to "discover" you on Steam I think, even though we have the PixelJunk brand/name etc.
Cat: ...and will it be coming to other platforms (Which ones. Go on. Tell us)?
Dylan: Well we've always liked Sony's platforms so keep your ears to the ground.
Cat: Tower Defense. Strategy. RPG. Terraforming. Nom Nom Galaxy is a game about... the viciously competitive nature of the soup market?
Dylan: It's a cross between a simulation and an RTS/base building game I think, including elements I really like, like the falling dirt/mud and lots of monsteres!
http://s2.n4g.com/media/11/...
Nom Nom Galaxy
Cat: Which elements of Nom Nom Galaxy did gamers react to in unexpected ways? Parts they loved/hated that you didn’t anticipate?
Dylan: Nom Nom Galaxy is a weird concept to wrap your head around at first - I'm going to put soup in a rocket and ship it into space? There are always a lot of puzzled looks when we first demo it at game shows. People come in expecting Nom Nom Galaxy to play like other games, but when they start putting the pieces together, you see lots of smiles.
Cat: What are the best things fans have contributed to the soup?
Dylan: The fans have been extremely helpful! With practical stuff, like tweaking the keyboard and mouse controls, we got lots of useful feedback. For gameplay related stuff, we've got a backlog of great ideas we're working on, including ways to replenish the dirt around your base, different types of planets, and weather!
Cat: What is the development process like this time, having so many chefs in the kitchen at such an early stage?
Dylan: Early Access suits our development style quite nicely, actually. Even before we brought Nom Nom Galaxy to the public, it was being developed in an organic fashion where we iterated on ideas we came up with as a team. The main difference now is that our 'team' is the whole community and we're working with a little more focus to hit our weekly and monthly updates.
Cat: Does soup, arguably the most forgiving of foodstuffs, leave room for regrets?
Dylan: Never! Well, there are always things that you may want to work more on, or features that you have to cut because they aren't working. Some of that is hidden in Nom Nom Galaxy's code now! But as a team we're happy with the direction we're going.
Cat: What do you think of going 3D, even experimentally?
Dylan: Watch this space! Big announcements soon.
Cat: We've got kids that are nearly birthday buddies! Do you ever see yourself going down the edu-game road? Q-Games as the next Toca Boca?
Dylan: I've certainly thought about it since Jamie came into my life, so it's not ruled out. Toca Boca is awesome!
Cat: What does being an independent developer mean to you?
Dylan: Being independent is really important for me because it leaves a lot more control in our hands, it's up to us and we have the responsibility to do everything for our game and control every aspect of how it is seen, released, priced, or created. Game developers are almost all control freaks so being cogs in an non-independent company makes them uncomfortable, which is why you have seen a lot of creative people branching out by themselves recently thanks to the lower barriers of entry.
Cat: Reveal the future: what comes next for Q-Games?
Dylan: Watch this space! Big things are afoot! :)
Day 31 | Q-Games
We were expecting problems with mod support, but there are a lot of other issues.
This is why you get the GOG version on gog you can select the version of the game to download.
On pc fallout 4 fallout new vegas and skyrim are all broken on steam because they all got the same "next gen" update.
Skyrim dec 2023
https://www.pcgamer.com/sky...
Can not find new vegas but anyone that modded it knows the script extender there was also broken
Not accidental, they want modders to stop modding their older games to force them to mod Shitfield.
There doing the same on starfield with a mods store and blocking mods
There goal is like blizzard and what they did with fallout 76 you make mods they can sell and you become a slave.
On skyrim they have "trusted" mod devs now basically a badge that lets your mod on the store you get a crumb of the sale when someone buys it.
lol to the disagrees, the last Skyrim update broke mods too. They've been trying to kill mods to monetize them in creation club for years, it's not a stretch that they purposely put out patches just to break free mods.
The disagrees are from people who have common sense. They aren't trying to kill mods. Most mods for any game will break with a new update because they rely on files/code that have been changed. This isn't new. Even with Bethesda this would happen way before the creation club. Mod support is literally one of the things that got Bethesda to where they are, and they're one of the only devs that releases comprehensive mod tools for each of their games.
Over 14 GBs and doesn't change much at all? What? Taking up that much drive space for a pathetic 'remastering' is shameful.
Par for Bethesda.
LOL people are actually expecting massive improvements or something? From Bethesda?? the same people who released Skyrim multiple times and the all look like shit? THAT Bethesda? are people for real?
As of right now, there are no monopolies in the games industry, and for the sake of the medium as a whole, they never should either.
And yet the biggest tech companies in America are essentially that. They buy up all the small comps only to kill them off and steal what they have, and if they can't buy em they bleed them to death.
Eventually they’ll realize the value is with the employee not the company. Buying an IP means nothing if the people who contributed are let go. They’ll get it one day.
tech is different because they buy threats and then kill them. Twitter bought Vine and did nothing with it. Despite people seemingly liking it. Could've had tiktok a decade before bytedance. go figure.
They buy IPs not talent. That's why these buyouts never work and the IPs die. Right now it's too expensive to develop games - but I expect that to shift maybe as AI tools can make it easier. The best games have been indie games for awhile as big developers fuck their ips to death with "games as a service" -
A voice actor from The Coalition's third-person shooter series, Gears of War, has hinted at a new game announcement coming in June.
Hopefully Microsoft will go back to the original story line and get away from that woke nonsense from the last Gears game Gears of Woke! But were talking about Microsoft so all the betting money is on more of the same woke nonsense.
Had no idea Monsters was on Facebook o.O Wonder how that version is.
I like there games simply because there more then just tower defense games like PJM, hope it's in 3D
"Dylan: Our core values are fun and technology. We want to push boundaries in both areas and that drives everything we do. "
Great motivation, Dylan! I am anticipating any releases by Q-Games hence forward. Nom Nom Galaxy is epic!
" Well we've always liked Sony's platforms so keep your ears to the ground. "
i Hope i see it on ps4 or ps vita
Can't wait to hear about their big announcements. I'm pretty green when it comes to indies. I'll be watching these guys from now on ^_^