Founder/Owner of Pixel Drip Games Joseph Roberts is an Adelaide-based developer and former VFX artist working on Tempus Rail. A Deckbuilding Rogue Lite game using the core gameplay mechanic as a time-travel theme. Trapped in a temporal loop, fight your way to the front of the train and destroy the engine before the day resets. Tempus Rail is a story-rich, first-person, roguelike deck builder set in the Wild West. Play to win or take your time to uncover the mystery behind the train and its passengers.
We sat down with Joe to discuss game development and his move from VFX.
“(First comes) the core gameplay mechanic, because it has to be very simplified, you can’t think to yourself, ‘I’m going to make the next Horizon Zero Dawn, open world, combat and climbing,'” he said.
“You have to lock it down to something quite simple. It’s important to get the mechanics down first and it’s easy to think about a cool story but not know how to turn that into a game.”
Independent or ‘indie’ games have taken the world by storm in recent years. Games like Stardew Valley, developed by Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone, Thomas Was Alone and even games like Undertale – were all developed as one-person projects.
A ‘horizontal’ move
With Joe, the switch from working as a VFX lead artist for an Adelaide-based company to working on his own game came naturally. It was more of a “horizontal” move rather than starting fresh.
“I never even thought I would want to be a lead artist in any capacity for a long time. It wasn’t until a big life shift – first of all my mum died – and then I got into self-help books. At first I thought I was reading a self-help book called Extreme Ownership.”
“The book was a business management book, not self-help. But I read that and thought, Oh, I would be capable of taking more decisive control at work. So then I moved into creative control and eventually as a lead artist for the company.”
But that’s where Joe’s VFX career progression met its milestone. In 2022 Joe faced a tough decision as to whether he’d continue at the company. If he did he most likely would’ve been pushed in the direction of leadership and management. As with many other professions, moving into leadership would mean less (sometimes no) creative work and more people management.
The “Great Resignation” of 2020-2022
In an Insider article published in 2022, journalist Urooba Jamal interviewed several people who utilised COVID’s workforce shakeup to shape their own paths in life. One person, a former senior software engineer at Netflix named Michael Lin, quit his mind-boggling $450k p.a job to pursue his own business.
Another man, David Paasche was nearing a six-figure salary at a job he’d gotten straight out of college but instead, joined the circus. Literally. Meagan Turner left law to become a counsellor and a woman named Lindsay MacMillan left banking to write romance novels.
“When I told family and friends that I’d dropped out of law school, a lot of them said that I was crazy,” she said. “But the cost of doing something that you don’t enjoy forever takes its own toll,” said Meagan in the interview with Insider.
“It does feel less creative at first, but once you have the technical background it goes back to being creative.”
With titles working as a VFX artist under his belt such as Thor: Love and Thunder, The Boys (S2), Shang Chi, Spiderman: Far From Home, Thor Ragnarok, X-Men: Days of Future Past to name just a few, Joe is no stranger to working on large projects stretched over a long period of time. But, there were a few skills, most notably coding, that he needed to work on before making the switch to game development.
“I’m into the creative stuff and very comfortable with asset creation, modelling, texturing and rigging. Even before I left my job, I probably spent about two years learning how to code, as that’s the bit I didn’t have.”
“I worked on smaller projects, as in things I never even released, so I knew that I could do it,” he said.
(Indie) video game development requires a multitude of skills and abilities ranging from creativity, problem-solving, time management, leadership, coding and the technical understanding of various game engine programs such as Unreal and Unity.
If you’re interested in game development there are generally two ways to approach the mammoth task; use the skills and capabilities you already have and transfer them or, to develop your skills and technical know-how along the way. In an AskMeAnything! thread on Reddit back in 2017, ConcernedApe mentioned that Stardew Valley took over 4.5 years to develop and that he had to learn the necessary skills as time went on.
Tempus Rail is in development using Unreal Engine. Developed by Epic Games, it’s free to use but, requires a lot of technical understanding. With the core mechanics of the Alpha stage game down-pat and with five months of development under his belt Joe’s currently upgrading its quality of life.
“I’ve got the vertical slice done. I’ve got every element in the game done (deck building, simple dialogue, the combat, merchant shop) but it’s not a full game yet,” he said.
For the theme – a wild-west time travel game that loops the player back to the start – Joe wanted to build on the core game mechanic as a nod to those players already familiar with Deckbuilding Rogue Lite games.
“(Time travel) is kind of indicative of the rogue-lite genre, which are basically endurance games because if you die you go all the way back to the beginning, which resets you,” he said.
“So I wanted to integrate the mechanic into the story itself. The whole point of the game is that you’re trying to stop the train before the loop resets.”
Joe currently works 12-hour days, six days a week to meet his deadlines, but it’s a two-pronged answer in terms of what success looks like for him.
“For the game itself, success will be when it’s a commercial release. Because so many projects get abandoned,” he said.
“For me, success is having options and being in a career/job that you want to be doing rather than being in it because you have to.”
If you’d like to stay up to date on the development of Tempus Rail it’s now available on Steam Early Access. Next week we sit down with the host of One Minute Remaining Jack Lawrence who also quit his job to pursue his own project.