An Interview with Colin Moriarty, Game Developer

Many of you know Colin Moriarty as a veteran games journalist and industry personality. Since mid-2018 however, he’s become Colin Moriarty, Game Developer. Following a career in games journalism that has taken him from GameFAQs writer to Senior Editor at IGN, then on to founding two of the most popular Patreon-based companies in history, he’s now taking on the other side of the screen.

Having just announced the purchase by his company, Colin’s Last Stand, of 49% interest in games developer Lillymo Games, where he will act as Chief Creative Officer and Lead Writer, I sat down (virtually) with Colin to discuss the process of creating their latest game, Twin Breaker: A Sacred Symbols Adventure, as a very small development team; how he dealt with the criticism of the game, and a whole lot more.

Full disclosure: I have been a Patreon supporter of Colin’s Last Stand since its inception. Though this in no way influences my writing or the questions I posed to Colin, you as the audience deserve to know in order to preserve transparency and allow you to parse what is written here in the manner you see fit. Now without further ado, on to the interview.

SUPERJUMP
I want to start by saying congratulations on the success of Twin Breaker. Have you been surprised by the sales the game has seen and the demand for physical copies?

COLIN MORIARTY
Thank you! Yes, sales figures — especially for physical copies — was well in excess of our expectations, and we’re glad to have met the demand for those copies. But we’ve surpassed 10,000 copies sold in total, which isn’t so bad for an indie brick-breaker. We’re really happy with how it’s done.

SUPERJUMP
In light of your purchase of a 49% stake in Lillymo Games, makers of Perils of Baking, Habroxia, and of course Twin Breaker, you obviously have confidence in the studio and its future. Looking at it a different way, what do you see in the fandom and zeitgeist of gaming today that gives you confidence in the continued success of the types of games Lillymo has made and will continue to make with you as Chief Creative Officer?

COLIN MORIARTY
I think in Barry I have someone who works hard, who has experience, who wants to make great games, or wants to put in the time and effort, who doesn’t complain. These are all wonderful qualities to have not only in a friend, but in a business partner. It remains his company, but now I have a stake in it, and I believe we’re capable of doing great things together.

Obviously, our partnership is a capitalistic pursuit. Barry can make the games, I can write them. I can use my marketing muscle and access to my community to sell games. There’s a lot that went into us deciding to permanently collaborate with each other, but I’m thrilled we’ve decided to go down this road together. I’m telling you, we’re going to make great games.

SUPERJUMP
As a follow-up, do you see a point in time where big-name, AAA studios will pivot to making games that are smaller and shorter, still of a quality befitting the studio, but getting them made more quickly, say every 1–2 years? Or will the trend of making these massive games, that take the studio 5–6 years to complete, continue?

COLIN MORIARTY
I think that you’ve already kind of seen that with some studios. I think of Dontnod, who started by making a game like Remember Me, only to pivot to smaller, episodic adventure games, only to then pivot to making both at the same time. I feel like studios need to do what’s best for them and their survival and vision. But there’s no doubt that AAA is an arms race, and I personally have no interest in being there. We’d love to get a game out every year if we can. We don’t want to demand too much of your time or your money. We want to give you supplemental content that acts as a bulwark towards quieter times in the release schedule.

SUPERJUMP
When you were a teenager writing on GameFAQs, did you ever imagine that you would actually write and develop your own game?

COLIN MORIARTY
No! I’m not even sure it’s something that I truly considered doing until I worked at IGN, and got an inside look day-in and day-out as to how the industry operates, how game devs work, and how I might fit into the scheme as a piece of the puzzle. Now that I understand my skill-set within the realm of game dev, it’s really cool to be a part of it… but I never expected it would happen for me. It’s a thrill.

SUPERJUMP
With your long career in games journalism, you’ve seen and talked to a lot of different studios and developers. What made you choose to work with Lillymo Games and develop Twin Breaker with Barry?

COLIN MORIARTY
Barry actually approached me, and if I’m being candid, it’s his industriousness, hard work, and knowledge that allowed us to put out the game. I was just along for the ride, providing story, notes on the game itself, and obviously some marketing heft. I’m thrilled to work with someone so talented and knowledgeable in his craft. He really wants to make great games, try new things, and whatnot. It’s really awesome.

SUPERJUMP
I would like to give our readers a view into the process of a small team developing a game. The idea for the game was yours, of course, Barry was responsible for the programming while you did the writing of the story. What was that collaboration like, and what kind of input did you have on each other’s parts of the game?

COLIN MORIARTY
Well, Barry knew I loved brick breakers and he sent me a prototype of what would become Twin Breaker. I loved it, and I wanted to be a part of it. I wondered to him: What would a game like this look like with actual story, actual context, characters, stakes. Why couldn’t you have an arcade-style Arkanoid or Breakout clone, but have it be more than that? That was kind of the genesis of the project. Barry lives in Ontario, Canada, and I was in in California at the time dev began and in Virginia by the time we launched, so we are far distant. He kind of makes the game in his silo, he sends me builds, and I provide notes. I then wrote the story in my own little silo, presented it to him, we tweaked it a bunch, added collectible documents, dialogue, etc. Then we fused it together. It’s probably not the best way to make a game, but it works for us.

SUPERJUMP
You stated you were surprised at people saying the game was really hard, because it was easy for you after playing it so much. What was the testing process with this one, and how would you do it differently for your next game?

COLIN MORIARTY
One of the primary lessons we learned making this game is that we have to let more people play our stuff before we launch moving forward. The old conventional wisdom of game development is true: You get too close to your game, and you can’t see its flaws or imbalances very well. We played Twin Breaker over and over and over again, so it’s funny, because my thought was: “This game is going to be easy for people.”

But it ended up being really hard, even impossibly hard, for some people. That surprised us. I don’t know that we would have changed anything in the end, but we would have known better if we were more open with the process. More people behind-the-scenes will play our future games before we launch, so that we can clean things up. I mean, we did have to patch the game several times for broken Trophies and the like. We can’t do that again. Lesson learned.

SUPERJUMP
You’ve obviously been writing, prolifically, for most of your career, yet you were candid on your shows that you found the writing for Twin Breaker to be difficult to push through at times. What was the difference you found between the writing you’ve always done and what you were doing for the game?

COLIN MORIARTY
Well, creative writing is just so different than journalistic pursuits, non-fiction, history and politics, the things I would otherwise creatively chase after. But I, like virtually all of us, am such a lover of fictional worlds and characters and adventures, and while I’ve written them for myself and have half-finished novels and stuff like any of us, I’ve never put something like this forward for people to digest and enjoy or criticize.

It was difficult honing the game’s story down to something small, because I had more I wanted to say, and it took some creativity to fit the story into the game in a way that was unintrusive. I think one of the things I’m most happy about with Twin Breaker is that the story is there if you want it, but it never gets in the way from what is a fun, raw, and replayable core game. Everything around it is additive if you want it to be there, and I think most people understood that, though I’ll admit it was difficult to read some of the criticisms of the game’s plot!

SUPERJUMP
Following up on that, can you share a bit of what your process was like for writing Twin Breaker? Were you able to sit for long stretches of time to write, or did your busy podcasting schedule make it more fractured?

COLIN MORIARTY
Well, I wrote the first draft in October of 2019. I actually wrote it on Long Island at my dad’s house, and I even have a notebook with the sketches of the opening sequences that I wanted to see, et cetera… not that I’m a talented artist, because I’m absolutely not. But I had this vision for what the game would be, what inspirations I was drawing from, and wanted to try to set it in motion. By the time the game was wrapping up, I started to rewrite the story pretty drastically, including the opening and ending sequences.

I also wrote the collectible documents to add more texture to the world. And at what seems to be the very last minute, I added the dialogue scenes into the game between Chris and I (and the aliens). So, it was a bit scattered and disorganized, which is actually very unlike me… but this was my first experience doing this. Eventually, I had to let it go.

SUPERJUMP
One of the hardest things for many creatives to deal with is the public reaction to their work. Some reviewers weren’t exactly complimentary to Twin Breaker’s story, how did you handle that aspect of it?

COLIN MORIARTY
Yeah. As I said above, it was hard to take some of it, but that’s me being on the other side for the first time. If anything, it was extremely instructive as to what that’s like, how to handle the criticisms, how to take on board the valid points and cast off the rest, and how to utilize all of that in making our next game better. I’m disappointed that more people didn’t get the intent of the story — it’s an anti-war game about the danger humanity poses to itself, and how individual countries can strive not to fight, but to act peacefully — but if that didn’t shine through to anyone, that’s a problem with the writing, I suppose.

SUPERJUMP
Your love of twin-stick shooters is well known, which I assume led in some part to making Twin Breaker. Your love of JRPGs and tactics-style RPGs is also well known, do you see yourself making games in those genres at any point?

COLIN MORIARTY
Yes! We will absolutely be exploring those genres. We’re ramping up to bigger and more detailed projects. Habroxia 2 is next up, which is a sequel to Barry’s arcade space shooter. Then we’ll do a sequel to Twin Breaker next year. And then in 2022, we’re looking to launch a JRPG-style, 16-bit aesthetic, pixel art-driven game, since that’s a genre and look Barry and I both love. I’m already writing the story for that, we’re contracting artists for help and getting assets created and whatnot, and we’re really looking forward to showing the world what it is, how it works, and what it’s all about. As far as a tactics-style RPG, yes! We’d love to do that, too, and we actually have the idea for that. But we need to work up to that point first.

SUPERJUMP
You have said since Twin Breaker was released that you plan on doing a sequel, will that be your next project? How do you think your experience with the first game will inform the development and process of creating the next game?

COLIN MORIARTY
Well, I think with a sequel to Twin Breaker, we need to keep intact what made it work so well, make some tweaks, maybe adjust the difficulty settings or have multiple difficulty settings. Some of the stuff I was talking to Barry about was maybe adding upgrade trees, tweaking the RNG-dependence of the game a bit (which was a major complaint with the gameplay from critics, which I understand), and more. But we have a special formula with that game that I wouldn’t want to mess with too much. I think people liked it more than our Metacritic score suggests. But no, our next project is Habroxia 2, and then Twin Breaker 2.

SUPERJUMP
Let’s end with a fun one… assume you have an unlimited budget, unlimited personnel, etc. What game do you make?

COLIN MORIARTY
I’ve always wanted to make a Mega Man reboot. A third-person, gritty, open-world game that takes place somewhere between Mega Man 1–3. I’ve always had this vision for it in my head, and I know I could write that game, but that’ll obviously never happen.

I’d also love to be involved in bringing Castlevania back to prominence, but obviously that’s not going to happen either.

At Lillymo, we need to prove that we can make consistently great games, and then who knows? Maybe those opportunities will present themselves to us.

SUPERJUMP
Thanks so much, Colin for taking time from all you have going on to make this interview happen. Best of luck with all your projects, congratulations on the new house and pup, and we’re all looking forward to what comes next from you and Lillymo Games!

COLIN MORIARTY
Thank you! I appreciate your kind words.