JORDAN GONZALEZ: It is interesting working with the person that--
working with your wife or your spouse or whatever.
It can make it weird.
But I wouldn't want to do this project any other way.
ERISA LIU: Yeah, because when you fight,
it's like regular spouse fight, right?
Both of us didn't want to give.
So it's like, you know what?
Let's just put both of them in.
JORDAN GONZALEZ: There's small creative differences,
small creative differences everywhere.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I'm Jordan.
ERISA LIU: And I'm Erisa.
And we both make up Bluecurse Studios.
And we're working on our first game, Snacko.
JORDAN GONZALEZ: When this project started,
we were at a pretty stable place in life.
I was a full-time software developer making a pretty decent salary.
And you were just about to go into the games industry on your own.
And then we kind of said, you know what?
We're not going to do that.
Let's do the hardest thing possible.
ERISA LIU: Let's have no income.
JORDAN GONZALEZ: Yeah, let's have no income
and then try to get people to trust in our vision.
ERISA LIU: Right before Snacko, I was still in college learning game art.
So it was mostly 3D.
We started doing these game jams because my college taught Unreal
Engine, I think one of the best choices
to do fast iteration on because of the Blueprint scripting system.
So it was really easy to prototype and iterate.
JORDAN GONZALEZ: It's the path of least resistance
to getting your idea into realities is the way I like to think about it.
ERISA LIU: It's so fast, it's Unreal.
JORDAN GONZALEZ: Oh my god.
ERISA LIU: [PLAYFUL SCREAM] That was so funny.
I'm so funny.
So this all started--
I had one cat, Mikan.
And then when we met, we adopted another black cat together, Momo.
And those two kind of became the base of Snacko.
JORDAN GONZALEZ: And their personalities also kind of match.
So Mikan in the game is a very skittish, nervous cat who's--
ERISA LIU: Likes to eat.
JORDAN GONZALEZ: --likes to eat.
And then Momo is kind of a silent, strong--
she's the main character.
ERISA LIU: It's a marriage of an adventure game and a farming
simulator.
The adventure is you, as the player, figuring out
why the island was abandoned and trying
to revitalize it and invite people back to enjoy a quiet life where
you're free from Slack--
JORDAN GONZALEZ: Free from capitalism.
ERISA LIU: --and Zoom meetings.
[LAUGHTER]
JORDAN GONZALEZ: It's supposed to be more of an RPG feel.
ERISA LIU: You told me no farming.
Under no circumstances, are we putting farming in the game
because it was going to be too--
BOTH: Complicated.
JORDAN GONZALEZ: But we added like, nine little tiles
to the player's house that they could plant vegetables in.
And then that was like the beginning of the end.
It was just--
ERISA LIU: Because that's what people latched on to.
Everyone was like, oh, it's a farming game.
And then he was like, OK, fine.
JORDAN GONZALEZ: [BLEEP]
ERISA LIU: It's a farming game.
JORDAN GONZALEZ: I want to say there was like the before MegaGrant
and after MegaGrant Snacko.
ERISA LIU: The before and after?
JORDAN GONZALEZ: There really was.
It was like--
ERISA LIU: The MegaGrant arc.
JORDAN GONZALEZ: --it was like the cute project your kid is working on.
And it went from being like, I was afraid to talk about it,
to being like, cool.
This is cool now.
I'm happy.
ERISA LIU: So with that sort of comfort of having the MegaGrant,
we were able to just continue in a more sustainable way.
You get into a bad cycle of, let's do this thing
that is not going to benefit the project in the long term,
but it's going to look good now.
And we need it to look good now because we need to show it
to publishers or to people.
When we got the MegaGrant, people started taking it more seriously.
We got emails back again from publishers or people
who wanted to support the project.
Next up for us is releasing the game.
We just want to release the game.
It's been our baby for four years.
And we want to see other people playing it and enjoying it.
We're so close, but it's so hard.
If there was like a graph for game development, it would be like, wow,
this is really cool and really fun.
And then it goes like that.
JORDAN GONZALEZ: Difficulty curve.
ERISA LIU: Yeah.
And then it goes into crying.
I wouldn't want to do anything else.
I cry about it a lot.
JORDAN GONZALEZ: It is a lot of pain, but it's also a lot of--
ERISA LIU: It's a good pain.
You know?
JORDAN GONZALEZ: It's the pain that makes
you stronger, that kind of pain, not like you
slipped a disk kind of pain.
[LAUGHTER]
[MUSIC PLAYING]