How Xalavier Nelson Does It

Xalavier Nelson Jr might not be a household name, but you’ve probably seen him around. Maybe via one of the many, many games from his studio Strange Scaffold, like I Am Your Beast, Clickolding, Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, or El Paso Elsewhere – the latter of which saw him voice the main character and create an entire rap album for the soundtrack. Maybe on TikTok, where he dispenses legitimately useful game development advice with an energy I can only describe as frantic. Or perhaps at an event like GDC, where he’s everywhere and nowhere all at once. 

As I approached Nelson for an interview in San Francisco’s oasis-like Yerba Buena Gardens last month, another developer recognized him and blurted out what we were all thinking “Xalavier, man! I don’t know how you do it!”

This is how Xalavier Nelson does it.

Aftermath: One tie that binds all of Strange Scaffold's otherwise very different games is a dedication to a tight, focused scope. How do you maintain that scope, even as game development shifts and unexpected things inevitably happen?

Nelson: I think something that has become very prominent as a lot of our leg weights – to use anime terminology – have been taken off, is that developers and publishers and investors have increasingly leaned into an environment where developers are trained to make games but not to ship them. And that's a very subtle distinction that's so important, because when you are shipping a game, when you have ten months left, six months left, four months left, you do think about your priorities, what quality means, and how that quality will manifest for a player in a completely different perspective than someone who is working on the game. 

I think I'm confident that this is a big reason why crunch – or overtime, or whatever you want to call it – is still so prevalent in the medium, is because we are entering the point where we start thinking about shipping a game while the game is in production, potentially close to launch, instead of at the beginning of the game's origin. So what [Strange Scaffold does] is not rocket science. We have our time. We have our budget. I spend a significant amount of time knowing exactly what I want from the new vision of the game and even potentially the tools to make it. I start slowly pulling in team members to validate those assumptions and to talk about how we would achieve that goal. And then from moment one, we are focused on finding bit by bit how to ship that game. 

This has been scary to do, obviously, but we've also become increasingly transparent with talking about that process as it shifts, as the game moves towards ship. So Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3, we originally advertised it as as a match-3 survival-horror comedy RPG. We got a wonderful play test in December where our play testers said that the story was great, the mechanics were engaging and novel, and the art was beautiful, but that no one knew what the fuck they were playing. It had no unifying structure or framework for players to understand what the game there was and what it meant for them to be moving through it. 

And so really confronting that alongside the team, a one-hour meeting became a three-hour meeting. We saw based off of our development timeline [that the clock was ticking]. This was December, so we said, “OK, based off where we are, we have about 24 hours to figure out what we do with that.” We assembled a fallback plan. We all broke for 24 hours. I set some additional constraints of what this solution would need to satisfy and what the original creative goals for the project were to guide what that solution was.

One of our designers, Dan Pearce, came up with a Metroidvania structure to tie it all together, and that would utilize what we already had, but give it a unifying structure and metaphor for the player to move through. And we all thought that was really cool. And 24 hours later, we had a solution, the game continued development, and I made a public TikTok talking about how our genre changed and how we could call it Matchroidvania. 

There was a time in games where this was more common and more public. Well, maybe not public, but there's a time in games where this was more common because, [for example], the PS3 is launching in two years. You only have a console generation. You only have this much time or this much memory that a gaming console can give you. Now that our leg weights are off, a lot of the instincts for what it means to ship a game and ship it consistently and at a high quality have been lost with it, and it's resulted in systemic breakdowns at every level of the process.

Aftermath: You say this used to happen a lot, and I think it still does. It's just that it tends to come out for bigger games as an expose after the fact, as opposed to during development as an act of transparency. You hear about what happened to Dragon Age: The Veilguard and how it was functionally multiple entirely different games over the course of development, a couple of which were scrapped almost entirely, with parts eventually fashioned into the so-so game we ultimately got. It seems like you believe in communicating that as it's occurring, instead of keeping it under wraps and hoping no one ever finds out.

Nelson: Yes, because also, with how quickly we make games, we couldn't market the game at all if we weren't going to let our discussion around the game encounter the public sphere as well. So my hope is, as we continue to be more transparent, as we talk about genre shifts and about learnings and about successes and failures, players will see our games as the things that they are and that all games are – which is a collection of choices made by artists, rather than as a product that has either succeeded or failed in their eyes. Because the former gives us a conversation. It gives us all a place to grow from. The latter is kind of a bland race towards whatever is the newest outlier that will capture our attention before we're left waiting for something to give us life again.

Aftermath: You talked about the idea of succeeding or failing, and that’s become a big part of video game discourse. There's all this discussion around “dead” games, games that didn't sell enough, or their Steam numbers aren't doing well. And one thing that you guys have also done that's unique is, you’ve started letting players – and even prospective buyers – know when you’ve moved on from games, when you’ve stopped updating them. You're like “Yeah, this is a completed project in our eyes. We're moving on to the next thing. We have to by necessity.” How have people received that?

Nelson: There has been, I'd say, overall, more of an appreciation for us to be honest about it, given that games live on the internet pretty much forever and now, which is a beautiful, newer trend. People are coming back to An Airport For Aliens Run By Dogs for the first time. And that's wonderful, but it means that there needs to be a communication element of “This is new for you; for us, we're working on our 16th, 17th and 18th games right now. If you find a bug, that's a delightful quirk of the game as it exists, and it's good, and we've moved on, and that is natural and normal and right.”

There will always be some grumbling about that in the live-service world, but I've found, overall, more players are receptive to having it concretely explained, rather than waiting for, even, say, a game breaking bug. I remember when I played a game on PS2 or Xbox, and I looked online, it was like, “Hh, this is just a bug that's here forever now.” Rather than that being a fact of the times or never communicated, and just sitting here waiting and hoping that the thing gets better, I find that most people appreciate the transparency.

They appreciate being treated like people, and a lot of incentives in game development and a lot of strategies around game development right now, especially from larger entities, are focused on treating both their developers and their audience as little like people as possible. Because then that makes these groups into little discrete chunks that you can solve, rather than as people who in a conversation can talk back to you and can have a meaningful input. 

Aftermath: Right, and you were mentioning that you’re on your 16th, 17th and 18th games. You publish a lot of TikToks. You do many, many things. Can you walk me through a day in your life? How do you accomplish all of this without going insane?

Nelson: I sleep six to eight hours. I wake up roughly 10 minutes before my first meeting. I read my Bible and pray and in some cases, beg for just, just for sanity, and I'm doing a lot of admin around the studio of going through emails, answering emails, chasing opportunities. I'm in meetings, collaborating with my fellow developers on solutions for things, reviewing material and figuring out what to do next. I am, yeah, doing a lot of feedback on things as they're brought in and talking about the vision of the game and whether or not something fits.

One to several times a week I'm making time for developers, either inside or outside of the studio, to talk to them about what they want to do with their lives or their studios outside of our own and ways we can either support, or that any of my experience can be relevant for, what they want to do next and how they want to do it. And then after all of that stuff is done, which brings us into 5pm, 6pm territory, I have dinner with my wife, we might relax for a little bit, and then I begin what we colloquially call Night Work, which is when I get to do writing and design and documentation that typically I don't have space for during the day, that helps unblock people for the next day.

Aftermath: It strikes me that you are very multidisciplinary at this point. Some people would consider just doing the social media work that you do to be an entire job. Similarly, for El Paso Elsewhere, you learned how to rap, you did the soundtrack for that, or at least a substantial chunk of it. Where do you find the time to also do those things? Is that Night Work?

Nelson: It's Night Work. Sometimes it's day work. I'm constantly trying to calibrate my work-life balance as well, and I am treating that as a priority more than ever. But yeah, to run a studio like this in the way that I want, I know that, at least for the foreseeable future, there's no way I can have a standard 9-to-5. So finding a version of this that makes me happy and lets me be the type of person [I want to be] and show up for my family in the ways that I want, and treating that on a very individual, bespoke basis, has been the most useful thing, and that's what I try to provide for my collaborators as well. 

When I notice that someone has a working pattern, would they like to work at a giant burst and then rest? We have conversations inside the studio of how to support them in that way, rather than try to force them in a way that doesn't fit their creative style or their natural patterns: Produce one asset in these fixed hours and then get away from it and then come back, reducing their effectiveness and their happiness in the process. We will sometimes have conversations with people where, because of things outside of our studio, they're like, “I'm feeling burnt out. I'm feeling drained in this way or that way.” And we have a bespoke discussion of that. I see part of the development of the game, a critical piece of it, as in that moment, and when and how people feel comfortable and safe talking through what they need, what is needed from the game, what the game needs from them, and then working towards a bespoke way to address that. 

And yeah, that same strategy applies to me. There's days that I can really lock in on writing, and I can even push back or eliminate meetings to create space to work. And then there's times that I'm mainly facilitating other people and reviewing other people's work and making that an ongoing discussion of that ratio. It is tough, and it does mean that a lot of hours fall on me, but it also means I live the life that I want to live, and now I'm deeply grateful because I recognize that most people don't get the chance to do that. 

Aftermath: Honestly, relatable. That's the Aftermath cycle, too: never not working in some ways, but happy with what I'm doing.

Nelson: If you're addressing things in an individual way, you can also make space for things that matter to you, right? Me and my wife– her name is Brianne. She's a giant weeb. Coolest person who I've ever met, the most caring person I've met. Sorry, I think she's really cool.

Aftermath: That's good. I'm glad that you're married to someone you like. That’s allegedly how it’s supposed to be.

Nelson: So one thing that really matters to us is dancing. I taught her how to dance, and we dance together. And so when I'm making a schedule for a weekend, when I'm working with my studio producer to figure out what my schedule looks like and what projects need, there's times where we'll shift some things so there will be a more intense time at the back end of the week to make space for us to dance together earlier in the week, and make space for this habit and this exercise that helps keep us sane in doing what we do otherwise. And speaking from the experience of having worked on over 100 games and worked in a lot of different ecosystems, environments that are far more rigid, I find myself so much happier getting to, on sometimes a daily basis, figure out what matters for me and my collaborators and fix that – rather than create a perfect spreadsheet that serves no one.

Aftermath: In establishing this kind of cadence, it sounds like this has been a process, something you arrived at. But I'm sure that you got there in fits and starts. Were there ever points at which you were close to burning out, or in the headspace of, “This just isn't workable. I've got to change this?”

Nelson: 2023. Studio nearly closes down. No one is really showing up for us in ways that I thought my track record would make easy to do, and the reason I burnt out wasn't even the workload, which is the funniest and worst part. The workload was not the thing that made me burn out, despite the fact that we were working on, like, six or eight projects at the time. Yeah, I think my peak was nine. That wasn't what caused my burnout: It was the existential load of feeling alone. It was the workload of not just doing the work to push projects forward, but also creating pitch documents and demo materials and doing meetings with external partners at all hours of the day and night to find funding. I call this the work on top of the work, and it's something I'm sure you're familiar with. 

Aftermath: Yes, very.

Nelson: You love your job, but to make it happen, you now need to kind of crowdfund all the time, and you’ve gotta create documents for it and rewards–

Aftermath: And advertising yourself. Building all the scaffolding that holds up your work, basically. 

Nelson: And for a while, Strange Scaffold had a good scaffolding for making things, but when I confronted every situation in which I needed to do additional work to keep the scaffolding even present, it nearly broke me in the process. I went through practically an ego death of having my values challenged and figuring out what we cared about, and this was chronicled in the documentary we did with Noodle last year. We gave him access to our entire archives to chronicle the story of Bass Reeves Can’t Die. He got to read everything in that server to chronicle the entire history of that project, including our recorded meetings.

I'm really proud of that documentary for a few reasons, but one of them just being that, like, that's a typical indie game story, and that's the part that we don't budget for when we talk about a 40-hour week. What does it mean to avoid burning out when you are fighting for your very survival? The additional workload of getting the tools to use to survive, that can break you. By the time El Paso Elsewhere came out, I was fairly confident we wouldn't be able to make another game, and I was almost excited to be free from carrying the burden of the studio. 

Aftermath: How did you get through that period? How did you come out the other end? 

Nelson: Honestly, getting my values rearranged was enormous. I really found a new relationship with my faith. I've always been a Christian, but really being able to recenter those values in the context of games. Like, it's really easy to start idolizing an IGF [award] or a certain sales number or concurrent users, so getting my values rearranged by that time, and being open to whatever God had for me next, I think, was critical. 

I think finding someone who would, by the grace of God, show up for us [also made a huge difference]. At the time I was working, on top of all the stuff for the studio, to keep the studio open because no funding was coming in, I was taking every freelance job I could get. And one of those jobs was on a project called Pillow Champ by Frosty Pop Games. I was telling Faisal Sethi, the founder of the studio, we were very surprised when we started working with each other, because we found in our conversations, we were the only two people who worked like each other that we had ever found. 

And I was telling him about my next project after El Paso – how it was gonna be a UI-based horror-fantasy kidnapping sim. I knew exactly how the game would work and how I'd scope it – and [I was saying] that after El Paso came out, if I decide to make a game ever again, here's the thing: It'd be beautiful, because no one would ever fund it, but I'd probably be able to do it without funding. And he thought about it for a second and said “I would fund that.” And that resulted in the five-game deal we've done that has now extended beyond that with games like Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion III.

What I wasn't asking the industry to do was fund one game. I was asking them to believe in how I made games. And even when people saw our results and liked those, they didn't tend to also believe in our process, at least in a tangible way that resulted in them supporting our livelihoods. So Faisal showing up specifically for my process, and to the degree of doing a five-game deal and then going beyond that, because he believed in how I work and who I am as a creator, was [game changing]. Even if we’d gotten, say, a multi-million dollar deal for El Paso, that was the type of being seen that I have been waiting for my past decade working in the development side of this industry. So, yeah, Frosty Pop showing up was part of that value realignment, and finding acceptance of ego death and freedom in that was part of that.

Aftermath: When you say “ego death,” what do you mean in this specific case?

Nelson: Ego Death is, from what I understand the term to mean, when your sense of self has been so utterly challenged or revised that you were kind of just left a blob that can start to emerge into a different shape in an ideal circumstance. So I'm in a shape that looks a lot like how I did look before, but I'm a little weirder. I'm deeply grateful, and I am unwilling to participate in any ecosystem that does not substantially allow me to perpetuate the values I believe in anymore.

Aftermath: That was the first time you felt like you had really been seen in terms of your process, which seems to matter to you more, almost, than the individual games that come out of it. What do you feel sets your process apart or differentiates it from what other people in the industry do? 

Nelson: I think a lot of people have a lot of amazing processes. The more their processes align with who they are as creators, I think the better it goes. Landfall Games with the wild and amazing often multiplayer games they make like Content Warning and now Haste coming out, they make games that are totally aligned with who they are in ways that make sense for them. I don't know if you know the story of Content Warning, but they went for a vacation in Korea for a month to just make that game, and then they had rest and downtime afterwards. So a very focused game production process, and even some of the ways that they set up the business to enable them to come together and then rest, come together and then rest to make these games is what works for them as people and what produces games that people love. 

Larian makes the giant games that it does, where other people crash against the rocks trying to handle them, because of longstanding teams that they kept together and incredible toolsets they build over time, but also [by] not working in any circumstance or with any partner that compromises their values, the values that allow them to make what they do. I don't think anything Strange Scaffold does is particularly groundbreaking, but the thing that every process echoes and supports is this constant balance between pragmatism and creativity. I'm not here to make games. I'm here to ship them. If we're not moving towards ship, I don't want to make that game. If I don't know what it would look like for a game to ship from beginning to end, we don't begin production. 

So the discipline of Strange Scaffold – of us having the playtest where no one knows what game we're making, for me to come in as creative director and kind of set that hard limit of “This game is coming out April 22, what is the solution that fits the time we have?” – I think that's something that's really hard for a lot of people to let go. They want everything they make to be perfect. I want everything I make to be good and intentional – and to let me and everyone else make our next best thing, the next thing our players didn't know they needed, which means I can let go of individual perfection and make games happen.

Aftermath: That type of timeline sounds pretty rigid, and I think that from the outside looking in, somebody who follows games would be like, “OK, they’ll definitely need to crunch at some point in the cycle.” You were talking about 2023 and all the extra work you took on at the time to keep the studio afloat. Is that kind of how it happens when things go wrong? Do you personally take on a lot of extra work to fill in the gaps? Does it splash back on the team? What do you do in a worst case scenario? 

Nelson: Sometimes there is crunch. Because we work part-time, there's not usually [all-encompassing] weeks, but we’re adding to people’s weeks. I'm very cognizant that if someone’s working 20 hours for us, if they start putting in 40 hours, that’s crunch – on top of whatever your life is, even if you do nothing else, because it's more than what we believed and scoped the game to try to be. 

So it's taken a variety of forms, but it's part of why I've gotten more rigid in my perspective over time and more open in my solutions. So I will sometimes stand in conflict with my team to make sure that six months from now, we don't have to crunch ourselves into oblivion to make the version of the game that is being tentatively discussed, and I've tried to refine my approach to get better and better at spotting when a version of a game is being discussed that [would cause that issue].

Whenever something goes wrong, it can take a variety of fashions; it has taken a variety of fashions, unfortunately. But the approach of each project we plan is in the aggressive, discipline-led way. It's aggressive positivity of, like, “I love making games – and making games that fit into our lives – so much that I won't let you put this cool thing into the game that challenges that.”

Aftermath: Did anything like that happen on, for example, I Am Your Beast? That game seems very rigidly scoped, very clear in its vision. How did you have to pare it down in order to achieve that? 

Nelson: I Am Your Beast, to be completely transparent, was a situation where I feel as a creative director a lot of things got away from me. A lot of those things are communication patterns that have been refined since. I thought it was very well scoped and rigid in its intention. The team was within the constraints we had. Originally, the game had you dipping in and out of stealth to do things. And we found that, the less stealth we had in the game, the better it got. So we just removed it entirely.

I thought all those things pointed towards a game that would have a smooth road to launch, but as was seen publicly, we ended up having to delay, and that was for a few reasons. One of them was people saw how busy I was across the studio; they didn't want to talk to me about what was happening in the game. And there's always other things happening in the studio; I think a term used for this is “vision attracted by movement.” I was like, “Oh, I guess everything is moving smoothly, and we're just making the game that we scoped and discussed. Cool.” I didn't realize that, outside of my field of vision, there were ways that the game was increasing in scope that weren't visible on the top level but, in the final game, I think can absolutely be seen. 

I think that lack of context led to points where when I was told, “Hey, it's taking a long time for our horde-style levels to come together, it's going to take this or that,” [and] when I asked questions, I was like, “That still sounds like you can do it. Let's make any adjustments we need to to make sure that we can still provide this alternative mission style in the game.” What I should have done, and what I would have done with more personal attention paid to different pieces of dev process, is identify [like] “We've been trying to make this feature work alongside other work for three months. When we're making a game in nine months, we should have just cut that feature a month and a half in.” If it isn’t coming together, you will find a cool thing to do to add variety. This wasn't worth burning that time on, especially, and I should have listened more to my team members when they threw up that flag. 

We had, like, a midmortem on that project, because when we missed our launch date, there was a real reckoning. [Team members] were like “We trust your ability to ship so much that when you told us everything would be OK, we just kept doing it.” There was not a whole lot of communication that happened, and then some of that communication got obfuscated, and I didn't make calls to cut features or change focus as soon as I should have. That led to that game being very well scoped and knowing exactly what it is, but invisibly having both crunch and, I would say, effort that didn't tangibly result in a significantly greater experience for the player. 

When I see something like that and see that Beast did great, I don't go like, “Ah well, that's fine in the future.” When I heard the rumblings of “This feature is taking a while” [on another game], I'm instantly like “What do you mean? Taking a while? I thought it would be a week. What's happening there?” Or when we get the play test results, I am more instant. Previously, I felt things would work themselves out. 

So starting from the place of discipline, becoming more disciplined over time, and trying to do that in a way that still allows people to feel agency and joy in their work, it's a constant collaboration. But I think if you speak to other people at Strange Scaffold, a lot of folks would say that they like the games they make. They get to make different types of games because of the scale we work at. And it's really nice to see those games ship. 

Aftermath: How big is Strange Scaffold? How many people work for the studio, and how is it structured?

Nelson: Each team is its own individual size. But the number of people in the server is over 80. Very few of those people are working at the same time. At one point the server was over 100 people. But [by] the end of I Am Your Beast, a bunch of people had done, stone soup-style, their little bit, but at the end, there were, like, four or five people left in the room. It fluctuates based on project.

Aftermath: How do you handle pay and crediting?

Nelson: We credit anyone if they do any work on the game ever. And for pay, we pay people hourly. So everyone else gets paid hourly, and I hope that the game sells so that I can also eat. 

It was the risk that I wanted. The systems you set up give you the life that you live in. You can only hope it's the life that you want to live. I didn't want anyone to risk not being able to feed their kids because they're working on a game called An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs. So there’s an explicit understanding: Even if the game goes bad, you'll still get paid. It's on me. But that also means the next time we have a conversation about scope, I'm going to be bringing my every experience I've had with this to bear – to push back on even a cool thing, to preemptively make sure we never get [to a bad place] again. All of that is part of an ongoing collaborative discussion that I think is crucial to shipping games, and I would hope that all of my peers can and do have.

Aftermath: On paper, it sounds like this kind of rigidity and process is almost at odds with the idea of making something weird, or even, as you said, having agency within the company – at least, if you’re not the guy in charge. Do you think that people's ability to have agency within Strange Scaffold stems from the scope of games that you make? This model of making so many that you can go through loads of different ideas, as opposed to the current triple-A model of, “OK, we've got this game we're going to create. It'll be huge. It's going to take eight years, and we've got to do things in the safest way possible to ensure we get a return on investment?”

Nelson: First of all, as we've seen from a lot of exposes and so on, an eight-year game is usually a two-to-three-year game that took six years to get to or find. Second thing is, creativity thrives within constraints, but there is some buckwild narrative that has emerged in games over time that if you have no constraints on you, you'll make better art. We know that this has not been the case over time. Batman: Arkham Asylum versus Suicide Squad being examples of a team with constraints and a team who is under the pressure to recoup hundreds of millions of dollars, I think, is a great example of that. So I think the creativity that people – that at least I – feel at Strange Scaffold comes from a freedom that’s granted by scale. You see this in film as well. You can take bigger swings on a thing when it's smaller, typically.

In full transparency, we made Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown in 18 months with a budget of less than $300,000. When you're making a game that's smaller than the size of a single commercial campaign for TMNT, you get to kill off Splinter and Shredder. You get to do a turn-based game. Whereas, if you were spending $5 million, they'd say, “Can you do something like Shredder’s Revenge?” You earn back the ability to be interesting the tighter and more efficient your cycle is. Clickolding can exist because it was a game built in a month and a half. And the world in which it doesn't exist is the world in which you need $200,000.

Aftermath: And it has gacha mechanics. 

Nelson: And it has gacha mechanics! I think it's something that should be paid attention to, but is because it's not, we're finding a lot of quite muddled project rights now – indie games, double-A games, and triple-A games that seem like they’re on the cusp of providing this unique experience, but by virtue of the context into which they're pressured to exist, they have to put in the gacha mechanics. They have to put in the long-term engagement things, or keep in the stealth mechanics, because, well, will someone buy this if it doesn't let you solve a problem any way [you want]? I remember that was a big conversation that we collectively were having as journalists when Watch Dogs 2 came out, where it was like “Man, this is a game that seems calibrated in every way to have a nonviolent protagonist, but because of the context in which he exists, he has to be able to have a shotgun or assault rifle.” 

I want to pay attention to that stuff, and I want to share with audiences by talking about that stuff publicly. Yes, you don't get to play as all four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at the same time. But because of the limitations of our engine and the budgetary and timeline constraints of our game, you get to experience a story and a gameplay dynamic you never would have otherwise. We want to invite people to have a conversation with us on that level. And it's been so freeing and gratifying to see people embrace that. I think people do want a conversation in this time, rather than a one-sided product where they press a button to say whether they connect with it or not. 

Aftermath: It occurs to me that the ecosystem in which a lot of this is happening is Steam. Back in the day, it was possible on Steam for somebody to release a big indie game and then go into the lab for, like, four years or whatever, release another game, and find success, because the field was smaller and everything was less algorithmic. Whereas now you can have this one success, and then years later, put out another game – a very good game! – and people have just forgotten you. Either they literally forgot you, or you’re encountering a new generation of players who never played your first game. It means nothing to them. And so it occurs to me that, in releasing so many games, Strange Scaffold is able to pave over some of those gaps and stay fresh in people’s minds. Your studio name – rather than a specific game or series – can be your calling card even in an era when that’s become increasingly difficult. 

Nelson: One of the things, from the foundation of the studio, that I was thinking about is when I connect with a filmmaker or a film writer or a musician, not only do they have a lot of stuff I can look at, the way in which they produce things means that I can have a conversation with their wider body of work and get really nerdy about the difference between After Hours and Killers Of The Flower Moon in a way that one singular project never gives you. Games have existed in times where that's possible, but for the most part, because of the miraculous scale we're able to exist at, have moved away from that relationship and that conversation. 

So if we're going to talk very directly and transparently about TMNT, if we're going to talk about going up against Shredder’s Revenge, I never want to go up against Shredder’s Revenge. No one can beat Shredder’s Revenge, and I wouldn't want to try. But I would love to be in conversation with it. I would love someone to play Shredder’s Revenge and then play our game and then see that we've made a bunch of stuff, and then say, “How did all the things those developers made before translate into this thing?” 

As you said, we exist in a world where outlier success will always occur, and it occurs for more people than it ever has, numbers wise. But there's such a higher ratio of people that that ratio gets smaller and smaller. You can turn this into a more complicated thing, a situation in which an artist is only allowed to say one thing ever, even as a potentiality, is desperate and sickening and sad. And when I started my studio, I knew that was not a route I ever wanted to go down. I didn't want to make one magnum opus. If even El Paso Elsewhere had been my magnum opus, I never would have made I Am Your Beast, right? Never would have made Clickolding. And I want to exist in a world where I produce all those other things, not the single knockout punch that gets all the awards.

Aftermath: In that context, doing a sequel to anything has got to be interesting, especially in terms of refining your process. You’re making a second El Paso Elsewhere. How are you applying the lessons you learned while making the first game – as well as the lessons you learned on something like I Am Your Beast?

Nelson: One of the things that I've embraced for that is that certain parts of the game should be done before we even build other pieces to allow for a shorter dev cycle. So we're making the rap album far in advance of the levels being locked for the game. Because if we have a finished rap album already, you don't have one thing that resulted in crunch on El Paso Elsewhere, where a piece of music gets done, it inspires people to do a thing, which inspires the music to change again, and it becomes a loop. 

I'm surprised that game launched in as stable of a state as it did. We were doing ‘round the clock days “inspiring” each other. But what I saw as a studio head was “We are crunching each other into the ground right now, and I never want this to happen again.” So we're making certain pieces of the game ahead of other processes. 

We're making a successor to Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator right now as well and really digging into how this process and this rigidity that hopefully provides the constraints that enable creativity will give us a foundation to figure out what we really care about for this game to say, so that when we hit either player feedback or issues along the way, we'll be able to even more concisely address those issues without blowing our scope and causing us to have to be forced to live an unhealthy work-life balance to get the game out the door. 

I want to be making games when I'm 60. And the world in which games are currently made and the process in which we currently make them – and frankly, the way in which even Strange Scaffold can still sometimes build games – won't allow that to happen, right? And so I'm not going to stop until I find the processes that let me still be building multiple well-scoped games joyfully when I'm 60. That's my goal.

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