“Strange Scaffold is not built to make five-year magnum opusesಌ. It is built to try to find what may be your next favourite game every six months.”

Xalavier Nelson Jr. is a titan of independent game development. He reckons he’s worked on nearly 100 games throughout his career, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Strange Scaffold, the studio he founded and shepherds as creative director, makes some of the weirdest and most wonderful games you’ve ever played. An🔴d you will have played them.

From An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, to 2024’s most uncomfortable game 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Clickolding and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:El Paso, Elsewhere which is soon being adapted into a movie starring LaKeith Stanfield, Strange Scaffold’s games are frequent, varied, and 🦂completely unique.

“I knew coming in through the door that I didn't want to make a game where if a game about stock photo dogs in alien airports failed, people couldn't feed their kids.”

Nelson is immensely proud of the incisive, intentional games Strange Scaffold has produced, but equally pleased with the modernised system of game development he has implemented at the studio. “Our production cycles are built to think about the human beings that make a game,” he explains. The real♏ity is a little more complex, but sentimentality and care are as important to the st🐼udio’s ethos as creative output.

“I knew coming in through the door that I didn't want to make a [studio] where if a game about stock photo dogs in alien airports failed, people couldn't feed their kids,” Nelson says. “I never wanted that to be the case. So from that value, extrapolating a process from it, I was like, okay, I will pay other people up front, hopefully providing the most interesting, flexible, fairly compensated work that they can do outside of their day job and I will live off the dividends, meaning that the risk lies on me, but also to a degree, the reward, because the revenue share for projects goes to Strange Scaffold as an entity and me personally as an entity.”

But how exactly does that process work? Instead of the standard game development🦋 configuration of hiring developers on a salary so that they make a game to tight deadlines, Strange Scaffold operates on a more flexible ‘constellation’ system.

The only permanent member of staff at Strange Scaffold is Nelson, and he pays othe𒉰r developers to dive into a project as needed – whether that’s to be on hand for advice, to fill in for someone having a family crisis, or to work from start to finish on a game. He pays them up front and tries to mitigate overwork and crunch.

“It means that you have all of the joy of creation with far less of the direct fear that usually contributes to burnout,” he explains. This flexible approach has allowed Strange Scaffold to adapt to everything the universe has thrown at 🍒it.

“We've had just about anything that you can mention occur to the team, but because we have even just the possibility of backup, that means that outside of myself, no one person needs to be a load-bearing island upon which the entire game rests when and if things occur,” Nelson says. “People can support them, step in to replace them either temporarily or permanently, and the game can move on, as can the person.”

Even the modern publishing model is broken, in Nelson’s mind at least. Why should developers work themselves to the point of burnout and immense stress on a playable demo to pitch to publishers, only to tear the whole thing down and start from scratch when funding is earned? It means developers often do lots of unpaid work in this stage of production, and many games don’t get made because studios can’t afford to make the initial demo to get past that firs🐭t hurdle. Nelson wants to avoid that obstacle and explore shorter and more experimental games outside the usual landscape.

“I didn't want to be trapped in a room attempting to make a magnum opus for five years.”

My only issue with Strange Scaffold’s constellation system of game development is the single load-bearing part: Xalavier Nelson Jr. He works a lot, and hard, as not only creative director, but writer, voiceover artist, TikTok marketer, rapper, and more. How does he ensure that he doesn’t burn𝕴 out and betray the philosophy his studio is built upon? Nelson🔯’s answer was, predictably, equal parts insightful and rambling.

“We as an industry acknowledge that game design is a series of making choices that we know will, in a small way, calibrate a player's experience, but we don't think of a production cycle the same way,” he says. “We think we can slap the same assembly line on every single game and every single team, and we get surprised when that assembly line falls apart.

“So, Strange Scaffold [as a studio], like a game, has been game designed. We've chosen intentional drawbacks, we've chosen intentional compromises, we've chosen intentional advantages, and I've chosen those based off of what I know of myself, how my brain works, and what I need as a person.

“The reason we work on multiple things is because I knew I didn't want to be trapped in a room attempting to make a magnum opus for five years. For other people, that is the ideal way for them to make a video game, and ideally they've calibrated all of their processes and risks to function around that fixed point. In a similar way, everything that happens at Strange Scaffold, and the busyness in my schedule is to account for my background, my life, my neurodivergency, the things that together construct who I am as a person.

“So, do I practise what I preach in terms of trying to push against burnout? Despite being very busy, I do, because I approach it as a holistic solution, and that comes from working on so many games. I've had games where I've worked on them five hours a week and nearly cracked under the strain. I've had other games where I was working with whatever team it was and felt fine, and it was because the factors of burnout are more complex than simply hours worked.”

Nelson’s vision is succeeding. Strange Scaffold is making brilliant, exciting, unusual games and quickly gaining recognition 🍌in the industry as not only a creative powerhouse, but also a studio doing development differently. And yet it hasn’t been without its pitfalls.

“We've managed to get through the darkest storm for our studio – in 2023 we nearly shut down El Paso, Elsewhere and finding people who believe in us and our processes of the studio for the first time is what allowed us to stay open,” Nelson explains.

He told the full story of Strange Scaffold’s brush with complete closure on , but the shortest possible version of the story is that the studio survived. “Having weathered the darkest storm, having come into a place where people really value our continued presence in the industry, I'm not interested in making a game that could be made by anyone else. I want to make games that only we can make, that only can be made in highly specific ways. And I'm deeply excited that I get the chance and grateful that I get the chance to keep exploring that.”

The next game that only Strange Scaffold can make is 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:I Am Your Beast, a first-person shooter that sees you take on the military industrial complex in a series of high octane, time trialled levels. The idea came directly out of Nelson’s grey matter, but the execution was only so well realised because of the team worki𒉰ng on it, and the flexibility of Strange Scaffold’s constella🀅tion model.

“A lot of what I do as creative director or studio head at Strange Scaffold is create lines that other people help me colour within,” he explains. While I Am Your Beast was Nelson’s brainchild, the atypical scoring system came from lead programmer and co-designer Dan Pierce, wh🏅o really pushed for the Bullꦫetstorm-style scoreboards just days before the demo launched. Nelson wasn’t a fan – think of the scope, the UI, the impact on other aspects of the game – but he allowed Pierce the opportunity to try it, and it was a huge success. The game now has 100,000 wishlists ahead of its release later this week (thanks in no small part to the addictive nature of trying to beat friends’ scores and times) and could be, in Nelson’s words, the studio’s first “mega-hit”.

This first-person shooter with a Bul🦋letstorm scoreboard and survival horror-inspired mechanics may be poised to become Strange Scaffold’s f﷽irst mega-hit, but I couldn’t spend almost an hour on a video call with Nelson without mentioning the most uncomfortable game of the year, Clickolding. The weird, creepy experience is a short blast of unbridled discomfort, and I had to know where that came from.

“That's not a game that you get to make if you spend three years on it,” Nelson says. “Most likely, it's a game that works both financially and team-wise if you make a precise thing in a precise package. And it went through its own hurdles and unexpected development challenges and pieces of crunch [...] But those conditions and those processes and those factors let the game exist in the first place.”

As for the future, Nelson predicts surprise after surprise. With Strange Scaffol🐓d, you never can expect what it’ll create next, but the creative director’s tone of voice suggested something really out of left field. But on a more macro level, Nelson wants Strange Scaffold to keep making cool things, to keep forging its own path, and to maybe lead some others down that paཧth with it.