Introduction
Can the small defeat the giant?
Thronefall, the game that caused much stir during its early access distribution, was officially released on October 11, 2024. In this tower defense strategy game, you build up your kingdom from scratch and fight off enemies that descend upon it. It has attracted attention through its vivid and impactful visuals, as well as its simple and accessible design that does away with various elements–leading to an impressive 1 million copies sold.
What’s astonishing is that Thronefall was created by only two people: Paul Schnepf and Jonas Tyroller. Since setting up base in Berlin during their university years, they have created numerous hit titles besides Thronefall and have come into the limelight in the German indie game scene.
The key to their game development? Minimalism. The philosophy not only applies to games; their development style is about creating ideas and instantly making them a reality, not adding anything unnecessary, a management policy of keeping the scale of the studio at the bare minimum, and advertising and candidly sharing about the game with talk of their development progress and failures on YouTube.
The gaming industry at present is increasingly dominated by algorithms, and major companies are taking over. Under such harsh conditions, can indie games survive while choosing to remain small? With this question in mind, our reporting team requested an interview with Thronefall creator Paul Schnepf.
<This interview was conducted on August 21, 2024, at the Indie Arena Booth of Gamescom.>
Interviewer and Editor: Jini
Interviewer and Planning: Daichi Saito
Author: Shu Chiba
Interpreter: J-mon
Photographer: JUMPEITAINAKA
English Translation: Caitlin Beggs Kojima
English Translation Review: Rie Ihara
Learning Game Production at University and Creating a Hit Debut Title While Still in School
Jini:
Nice to meet you. I’m Jini, and I am a video game critic in Japan.
Today, we’ve come from Japan to talk with you, one of the developer of Thronefall, about the incredible design of your game–one that I’ve personally enjoyed among the strategies games released in 2023.
I’d like to ask about your minimalist approach to your game development–something your store page, in particular, attests to.
Paul:
Nice to meet you, and welcome to Germany. I am Paul Schnepf. I run the small game developer studio Grizzly Games with my friend Jonas Tyroller.
Jini:
Before discussing the game, could you first tell us how you met Jonas and formed Grizzly Games?
Paul:
We met in the game design major program at the public university Berlin University of Applied Sciences (HTW Berlin). I was in the same class as Jonas and Friedemann Allmenröder, Grizzly Games’ other original member. At college, we had a class in which we formed a team and created a game in three to four months. The project we worked on there then led to the birth of our debut title Superflight.
The decision to release it on Steam was more of a primitive desire to show off our work that we were proud of, rather than a business calculation. We created our company as a way to sell our game legally, so it was just the course of events.
（『Superflight』）
Jini:
Superflight was also a minimalist game. There are no particular instructions–you simply glide through nature. And at about 300 yen, the price is minimal too. Nonetheless, you were all still university students at the time. Don’t you think the decision to become an independent indie developer required bravery?
Paul:
The fact that we were still students may be exactly why we did it. We didn’t know any fear.
By Superflight going against our expectations and selling well, we began to feel that we could make a living with our own games. It’s not like we weren’t hesitant about the risk of being independent. But at any rate, it was a studio made up of three friends, and even if we failed, all we had to do was clean up our own mess. In fact, that carefree spirit is probably due to the fact that we were students and had nothing but ourselves to worry about.
In the middle of things, we thought maybe we should expand the scale to make it a large-scale game, and I discussed this with Jonas, but in the end, we realized that the current style was the best fit, so we abandoned that idea.
Jini:
Is it usual for a university to offer a game production course?
Paul:
I think maybe it was rare in Germany when I entered university. I believe there were only two schools in the whole country. Afterward, the country seemed to become aware of the growth of the gaming field, and I hear that now there are many more [offering such courses].
Jini:
What sort of game creation did they teach in that curriculum?
Paul:
My school focused on practical experience. Since the first year, the fundamentals of creating games–such as programming, the history of video games, design, story, and art–were drilled into us. What made it very German was that there was also a lecture in which we made board games. It is very helpful for learning game mechanics.
So with this variety of experiences, Jonas and I had a good command of most things.
（HTW Berlin）
Jini:
I see. So currently Germany has a place where they teach game development so thoroughly. Were there other benefits of developing games in Germany?
Paul:
Public welfare is very solid [in Germany], with the best example probably being the education system. There are many national and public universities where you can get an education either for free or at an inexpensive price. When we were students, we were able to keep our production costs down thanks to the university program and public aid money.
The society as a whole also has many welfare systems. Even if you get injured or [your business] fails, you can still live using insurance and benefits. Even wandering artists are protected by society to some extent and can create their works freely.
Be that as it may, the gaming industry has yet to gain public recognition in Germany. The truth is that compared to the technology, construction, automotive, and medical fields, working in the gaming industry is still not considered a “proper” job.
(The location of our interview in Germany, gamescom. Its huge indie game booths stood out compared to other game exhibitions.)
Jini:
I see. Actually, as part of our research before coming to interview in Germany, I looked up what German children say they want to be when they grow up. Girls choose professional occupations like teacher, doctor, or childcare worker, and boys choose manufacturing jobs like mechanic, auto mechanic, and IT–either way, very tradesmen-like jobs were popular. This contrasts heavily with Japanese kids who aim to be YouTubers.
Paul:
There is a system in Germany in which kids usually decide when they graduate from elementary school (Grundschule) at the age of 10 whether they will get an education specialized for a certain profession or an education for college entrance exams. For this reason, we have a culture that highly regards the “Meister” system and craftsmen (Geselle), and this is probably why practical occupations are chosen.
Jini:
I see, so that’s why the few creative occupations you see in children’s dreams are that of things like an architect or a designer. German people’s creativity has been demonstrated with utilitarian creations such as cars or buildings.
Paul:
Yes, the job of architect is certainly very German and would be considered both a creative and “proper” job. The same goes for graphic designers and those who work in media. At any rate, when it comes to game development, it still doesn’t appeal to many Germans even now.
Minimalist Game Design
Jini:
Now let’s move on to our main topic: Thronefall’s minimalist game design. Firstly, it says on the Steam store page that Thronefall’s concept is “minimalist strategy.” What was your intention behind emphasizing this and presenting it as the signature of your studio?
(The Steam store page states, “A minimalist game about building and defending your little kingdom.”)
Paul:
To put it simply, the intention was to reduce headaches, for both the players and creators. When giving the player choices, we maximize impact while also minimizing stress as much as possible. This is how we maintain extensive accessibility*. This is our philosophy.
Take the strategy games StarCraft and Age of Empires, which are popular in Germany too, for example. In these games, you manage units and buildings and fight battles, but when doing so, you must manage extremely vast units. You must decide where to put certain buildings and where to dispatch certain forces. For this reason, the large amount of operations needed later in the game makes your head explode.
So in Thronefall, we decided to reduce player operations and headaches by intentionally reducing choices, such as not allowing detailed operations for units and limiting purchasable resources to only one single thing.
What I liked in particular was that towers and houses can be placed where the player chooses within a pre-determined construction site, not just anywhere. In many strategy games, you are free to place buildings wherever you want, but when you actually play the game, the experience doesn’t change much due to buildings’ placements, so this “freedom” ends up with no meaning.
Of course, complex games can be interesting precisely due to their complex nature. Actually, I often play complex games in my own free time. I’ve been hooked on RimWorld lately. That game is very complex and difficult. But as I play, how the characters’ lives overlap and how the base develops weave a story for me. However, we aimed to create a strategy game that was minimalist and that anyone could play, thus we created Thronefall.
* Usually the term “accessibility” in gaming culture refers specifically to features added for people with disabilities, but out of respect to the speaker, we have included the wording as is.
(The white dots on the screen show the buildable sites. In this game, sites and types of buildings are fixed, allowing the player to focus solely on which buildings to build and in which order.)
Jini:
That reduction of headaches is exactly what impressed me about Thronefall. Nonetheless, if you reduce choices too much, you get a monotonous, boring balance. In this regard, Thronefall masterfully balances the additions and subtractions of game design. What criteria did you use to determine what to add and what to take away?
Paul:
First, we did not add things carelessly. This is important. We stuck to our original idea as much as possible. We searched for harmony and equilibrium between complex and simple.
And so whenever we encountered a challenge, we explored choices to overcome it aside from simply adding things.
We often receive feedback from players saying that there are not enough options. Using the example from before, we get told things like it’s not fun that you can’t freely choose where to build facilities. The easiest way to handle this would be to make it so that players can choose to build facilities wherever. However, would that really take away the players’ dissatisfaction?
The true source of their dissatisfaction is not that there aren’t enough options; it’s that they feel that cannot fully exhibit influence. We addressed this problem by releasing multiple variations of facility upgrades. By keeping things simple while also offering a suitable amount of complexity, we made their choices more impactful.
(Various player opinions on Steam come in daily.)
Jini:
So you don’t accept the feedback at face value and instead use it as a hint for proper communication with the players.
Paul:
Feedback from players is always correct. The issue is how you handle it. Our style is to improve what is already there and communicate it to players more effectively. In fact, I think our game has improved precisely because we did not add any unnecessary elements.
Jini:
But the Uferwind map was added with Thronefall’s latest update (as of August 2024). This is a complete change up until now, with the map being enormous and a little complex. I personally enjoyed it very much, but why did you add a map that wasn’t as minimalist?
(Uferwind, the cornerstone of the midpoint of the game and a magnificent spectacle in which the player intercepts a vast array of enemies with an equally vast array of defense equipment.)
Paul:
Well… It hurts when you point that out (laughs). You’re right; that map is a product of our indecisiveness. We felt that players wanted more of an expansive experience in the later stages. That might be how “ordinary” game development works. However, maybe we weren’t able to completely trust the users who have been with us this whole time… In fact, [Uferwind] wasn’t very well received…
Jini:
F-Forgive me for my inconsiderate wording. As I said, I personally love the map.
Paul:
Thank you. We plan to return to our original ideas and trim things down some more with the next stage.
Jini:
You said moments ago that [the game’s] stress-free minimalism benefits both the users and the creators. What are these benefits for the developer? What sort of development techniques are possible precisely because there are only two of you?
Paul:
More than anything, I’d say it’s our ability to make speedy decisions. When making a new game, we first share our ideas. Then among those ideas, we choose what we think is good and create a simple prototype in two to three days. With that, we judge whether we should proceed with the project. If it’s no good, we begin creating the next prototype.
(Thronefall’s early prototype.)
Jini:
Two or three days! What an incredible pace. Some developers aren’t able to refine their prototypes enough while some make snap decisions. Your development style sounds like an ideal cycle in terms of efficiency and rationality.
Paul:
But we wouldn’t have so much trouble if that ideal worked perfectly every time (laughs). Thronefall initially started with the intention of making it into a deck-building card game. Jonas came up with numerous ideas that he felt would definitely make the game a success, and I agreed. They were ideas we didn’t expect to fail.
However, when we combined those ideas and tried to run the game…things didn’t go well for some reason. Usually, that’s when we’d give up with dignity. This time, however, we couldn’t accept reality. We couldn’t do away with our desire that it simply had to work out, that it would undoubtedly be a fun game. And so we struggled and struggled. We finally accepted that we had failed three months later. Jonas and I came to the conclusion that we couldn’t make it a fun game no matter what we did. It’s always painful to let go of ideas you had been attached to.
Jini:
Jonas went into detail about that on the devlog*.
* “Devlog” is a combination of the words “dev” (short for “developer) and “vlog” (short for “video blog”), and refers to miscellaneous videos sharing the production process of content that developers create, day-to-day opinions, etc. Grizzly Games’ Jonas has his own YouTube channel where he posts devlogs, with such videos as “We Carefully Deleted Our Indie Game.”
Paul:
This setback took a toll on us. We felt down in the dumps and didn’t want to do anything. Just prior, our first and second games were successive hits, and we thought we mastered creating games. But in the end, we didn’t understand anything. Did we even have the talent to create games in the first place…? That’s how hopeless we felt.
I finished a meeting with Jonas on Discord and crawled into bed with a heavy feeling of anguish weighing on my mind.
Then I woke up suddenly the next morning at 4:00 am…with a new idea.
“Build your own kingdom and defend it.”
Propelled by this image, I sat at my computer and created a prototype in six hours. I ran it, and I was convinced that this was exactly what we had been after. I quickly called Jonas and said, “I have a good idea.” It was Thronefall.
Jini:
You often hear of developers clinging to an idea, and then three months become six, six months become a year. As someone who has actually broken free of that kind of development, are there any lessons you’ve learned?
Paul:
If you feel you’ve come to a dead-end, first come back to your original intention. Then you’ll remember the reason why you wanted to do that idea as well as your core emotion. It’s important to sustain this emotion. This original idea becomes the core of your game that you must protect even when it is made into a product. Once you have that determined, you’ll naturally see whether you need to redo or do away with something. I believe worrying and suffering over things is also an important experience.
A Word on Visual Pleasure
Jini:
I get the impression that your efficiency and speed are due to the fact that there are only two of you in the studio. How do you divide up the roles between yourselves?
Paul:
Because we were trained well in university, we can perform most tasks related to game development. Since we both take on the occasional necessary tasks, we don’t have a specific division of roles…But if I had to say, Jonas is often in charge of balance adjustments, design, and ideas for new units, and I’m often in charge of visual aspects.
Before Thronefall, Friedemann was in charge of visuals. He is a truly wonderful artist and is still a close friend. However, he left Grizzly Games to pursue his own art in solo productions. We couldn’t afford to hire a new artist, so I filled in for him.
(SUMMERHOUSE, a construction game created by Friedemann after going solo. <https://store.steampowered.com/app/2533960/SUMMERHOUSE/?>)
Jini:
But whether it’s done by Friedemann or you, the art in Grizzly Games’ works is beautiful. What makes Thronefall wonderful is that you can delight in creating a warm, miniature-like fortress from scratch and see it develop. It possesses not only good visuals, but also pleasure crucial to games. Enemies make a “smoosh” sound when defeated and drop coins, and when you collect those coins, you hear a little “clink” sound. It’s so satisfying. In addition to the cute visuals, the animation and sound make it a very pleasant experience.
Paul:
What’s pleasant for the developer is sure to be pleasant for the player too. We tried to be minimalist with the visuals as well. We applied the same shade for the shadows of all the buildings and other objects. Also, the boulders and trees change with the theme set for each stage, and we changed their appearance by doing things like stretching them in height or width within the stage. Creating each and every object anew would have been a lot of work.
(The sound effects and animations are satisfying.)
Advertising in a Post-Algorithm Age
Jini:
Next, I’d like to move away from the content of Thronefall and hear about the external aspects and your unique method of advertising. Jonas has earned popularity for his game development YouTube channel as well where he uploads devlogs. When did he start uploading devlogs?
Paul:
In 2018, around the time we completed Islanders. He created a YouTube channel and started uploading videos in which he talked about game production. He currently has around 200,000 subscribers.
(Jonas’ channel regularly reports on Thronefall’s development process.)
Jini:
Looking at the videos, it’s interesting to see all the different ideas you come up with for games. How do you two manage to come up with ideas in such rapid succession?
Paul:
Our heads are always full of ideas! We have so many that it’s almost a problem. We find the raw material for our ideas everywhere in our everyday lives.
One source of inspiration for us is games. I mentioned earlier how I am hooked on RimWorld, but at the same time, I think that I would like to make a game like that someday but in a more accessible form…and I often think of how we can adapt the game in our own ways… I think, if it were us, to what extent could we take that essence and flavor it minimalist?
(RimWorld)
Jini:
Speaking of games that you like, your partner Jonas said in an interview with a game media outlet about two years ago that his favorite game was Outer Wilds. Are there any other games that Jonas has been into lately?
Paul:
…Other games? I’m not sure… He’s always talking about Outer Wilds… As soon as the topic turns to Outer Wilds, he starts talking super fast…
(Jonas’ solo work Will You Snail? that he professes was influenced by Outer Wilds.)
–It’s universal that nerds speak fast when talking about what they love.
Paul:
I, too, have been playing nothing but RimWorld for the past three or four years, so I’m not one to talk (laughs).
–By the way, I discovered Thronefall through that amazing logo and trailer. You get a glimpse of the game’s minimalism even in the trailer.
(The Thronefall logo)
Paul:
Thank you. We aimed for a color scheme that intentionally went against what’s currently popular for games, yet used vivid colors that were eye-catching. Maybe I have traces of Friedemann within me…
The capsule features just the logo and font, while also using the word “Throne” and a medieval-looking font to allow users to intuitively guess the content of the game. We made the trailer to convey concisely what kind of game it was. Trying to create an ambiance with cinematic imagery like AAA games do is not suited for indie games.
(The official Thronefall trailer, narrated by Jonas)
Jini:
The introduction page is one example of your careful crafting. Recently, indie games have become intensely competitive, and advertising methods have become important for even the indie market. Do you have any thoughts regarding promotion for indie games?
Paul:
Personally, I don’t really like advertisements. It’s ideal for me that games spread via word of mouth. Looking back, I think we were able to debut at a lucky time. When we released Superflight on Steam, we didn’t do any advertising. We didn’t even send out a press release.
Even so, we had about 15 interviews from media outlets that made the game a hot topic. At the time, there were relatively few indie games.
People making new indie games now are faced with big challenges. Even if they do what we did back then, their game would be buried in the current sea of other new releases, unable to get any attention. There is less room for truly independent studios to survive now.
We ourselves cannot simply release a game; we rely on ordinary advertising methods. For Thronefall, we released a demo for the Steam Next Fest, and we received assistance from an advertising and PR company specializing in indie games. Jonas’ devlogs are also one part of that.
(A game’s sales are greatly affected by whether it makes it to Steam’s “New & Trending” and “Top Sellers” lists.)
Jini:
I agree with you; there are so many new releases on Steam every day.
Emerging now are methods of hacking into Steam’s unique algorithm in order to stand out on Steam. Is it possible going forward that researching the algorithm will affect not only advertising but game content as well?
Paul:
I wish it wouldn’t have an effect. I hope not. However, looking at the reality of things, the algorithm’s influence grows bigger and bigger by the day. If it continues like this, it may alter the content of the games, just as you say. I definitely don’t want that to happen. I wish for good games to sell, not games that have adapted to the algorithm. That’s my earnest hope.
I would like to say something to developers and publishers in the gaming industry, regardless of whether they are big-name companies or indies:
I want you to stop selling things that don’t exist. I want you to make fun games. I’m certain our games are fun without the need to exaggerate.
The algorithm that I’d like to see working is one where games sell simply because they are fun.
Afternote
On the Rhine River’s bank opposite the Koelnmesse–the gamescom venue where our interview took place–exists Museum Ludwig. Here, countless German works of art are on display, but what stands out among them all is the contemporary art typifying “expressionism.”
And what left a lasting impression on me from among those pieces was Imi Knoebel’s “Anima Mundi 2-5 II Ed.” It’s an odd piece, made up of about 30 canvases painted with vivid yet simple shapes, all disorderly arranged. Knoebel, who currently still lives in Düsseldorf, a city neighboring Cologne, is considered a leader of minimalist art, which flourished in the post-war era.
As I listened to Paul talk about his ideas on minimalism, reflected in everything from game design to art to the production scene, I couldn’t help but think that there was some connection between what he spoke of and the art that Germany had cultivated.
Of course, anyone can make something simple. But it is next to impossible to take that and infuse your own flavor while also managing to avoid adding anything unnecessary. At the same time, they must have the flexibility to continually change. They know that they must change in order to survive. Perhaps their failures and indecisions they remember alongside regrets are necessary sustenance for these two young creators.
Where will the indie game industry–becoming more and more like an unpredictable torrent–-carry creators next? The surface of the Rhine River, watching over the changes within the game community from the Koelnmesse’s edge, today flows calmly.
