Developer Interview: The Lost Weld

Hi! I’m Kimberly Blais, founder and solo developer at Mama Makes Games, an indie game development and software shop. I’ve been working on The Lost Weld, a story-rich, fantasy-themed action-adventure game, over the past year and have been fortunate enough to work on it with some amazingly talented voice actors. However, my biggest claim to fame is that I’m Mom to four amazing children, including two little ones still at home. Hence the name, Mama Makes Games!

This is a great question and something I knew very little about prior to working on game development. I think it is easy to take voice acting for granted and just enjoy the stories. But so much detail and thought goes into every professionally voice acted word!

I had the wonderful fortune of being introduced to Erica Schroeder, voice actor extraordinaire! She is a classically trained perfectionist and the director for The Lost Weld. She spent so much time thinking about each and every line and imbuing meaning into the story through her voice direction. She is just an incredible artist, and her involvement brought on fantastic talent to work on the game! The cast is a secret for the moment, but when the demo comes out later this month, we will be unveiling some amazing voice-acting talent! I am excited to share more soon!

Yes! I have four kids, and they all have been super supportive and helpful with my game development journey. My youngest sons, who are eight and 10, are my main playtesters. They have so many great tips and feedback that it’s not just helpful but also inspiring! And they have really challenged me to push myself further than I thought possible. We have a lot of fun working on the games together!

The results were actually somewhat surprising to me. The research that I conducted, which involved 209 people in a Census-balanced population, showed that gamers — and not just female gamers — really want something different in their gaming experiences from what many games currently offer.

The research showed very clearly that most gamers would prefer story-rich, non-violent games that don’t sexually objectify women. Additionally, a majority of gamers would be particularly interested in playing games made by women! I think that’s pretty understandable, as I feel that, as a solo female developer, I have a pretty rare perspective, and I would love to be able to share my vision with more people.

Funny story, I had already made the prototype and was preparing to send it to publishers to try to get funding to be able to complete the game. I had a strong feeling that I would find that people wanted the kind of game I was making with The Lost Weld, but I wanted evidence. That said, I was surprised by how high the numbers were, and it was very gratifying to see that both men and women would be interested. Unfortunately, none of it mattered to the publishers, who were convinced that there was no market for a game like The Lost Weld, so, The Lost Weld has been completely self-funded.

The game started with an idea that I had for a story that I wanted to tell to my kids in an interactive way. I had been doing a lot of research about games, and I had been playing with game development because of my role at a software company that I helped co-found. This led me to want to start creating games for my kids. As I started to do so, I realized that there might be other people out there that were looking for the kind of gaming experience I wanted my kids to have.

The Lost Weld was actually my first ever “real” game that I made. I love the way that games are representative of every art imaginable, and I love being part of such a transformational and expansive medium. But as I’ve worked on The Lost Weld and other games over the past year, I’ve also seen that there are quite a few voices missing from the game-making experience. For example, I have not met any other 50-year-old moms that are solo developers like myself. I’m certainly not saying that there aren’t any; I just haven’t met them. If you meet any, please have them HMU! :)

That’s easy: money! Funding has been the biggest issue we have faced. Self-funding, sweat equity, and the generous involvement of Erica, Cissy, and Madame X, have allowed me to create the story, characters, and develop the game to the place where it is now. But there is a lot of gear needed that would allow the game to reach the next level, especially with regard to motion capture, and I have not been able to secure any outside funding for The Lost Weld. Obviously, it is expensive to hire top-tier directors, voice actors, etc., and so I have reached out to publishers and such but have not had any success there so far. Once I release the demo for The Lost Weld this month, I will gauge the market interest, and that will determine if we can feasibly do a Kickstarter to complete the game.

That is a really interesting question, and I am not totally sure how to answer it. People have mostly been kind and supportive. We have had a few nasty comments, and some people who have seemed annoyed with me for mentioning the gender of our team. Some people have assumed that we must be trans and have said some not nice things. I have also had quite a bit of mansplaining done to me about game development. But I think mostly being ignored/dismissed would be the best way to describe the overall way I have felt coming into this industry as a new person. 

Honestly, I think that I was a bit naive coming into the game development industry. I was so sure that by doing something unique and so connected to female voices, that we would for sure have support from people in the industry. I mean, the rhetoric is that the gaming industry is reforming itself with regards to sexism. But, in practice, the industry is extremely conservative, and it all comes down to finances. They’re just not interested in taking chances when they’ve made so much money with the same game formula year after year, no matter who’s making it or what new markets it could reach. The fact that many of these games are sexist or just downright misogynistic doesn’t seem to matter to them; they just want them to be profitable, and that’s always going to be easier to prove through a retrogressive perspective.

Yes! There are definitely some influences both from old Celtic tales and various readings I did as an Anthropology major. The whole story has some significant metaphorical and allegorical overtones, but we’ll just have to see if we’ll be able to make the whole thing so people can decipher it!

I worked on the game alone for the first couple of months, and that is when I wrote the script, did the world-building, character backstories, and so on. Erica Schroeder and Cissy Jones came on once these elements were all completed, so that phase was not as collaborative as the directing and voice-acting were. Auditioning, recording, editing, and all of the other acting-related tasks were really fascinating, and I have greatly enjoyed getting to work with Erica and Cissy! I have learned so much from them! Solo game development is honestly quite lonely, so it has been wonderful to have these two amazing women to collaborate with! Additionally, my friend of several decades, Madame X, created all the wonderful music. But she’s so fast that it was all done in a matter of a few days, so that’s been more a treat to just hear the songs again and again while working further on the development.

Our plan is to finish playtesting the demo and release it on Steam for free in the next couple of weeks, so mid-August 2022. We will get feedback and hopefully develop a feel for how much people like The Lost Weld and are interested in its completion. We are also going to be in the Steam Next Fest in October, and hopefully, that will help grow our audience further.

So what happens next with the game is really dependent on how much community support we receive for the demo and how many people end up following our Kickstarter page. If it seems like there is enough interest in seeing the game made, then we will roll the dice with a Kickstarter campaign and hope that we get the funding needed to finish the game

Great questions throughout! They prompt me to think about how I’ve observed in the current state of game development a kind of glass ceiling on inclusivity. This can be seen across all the different dimensions of game making and game playing, from sex to race to economics to country of origin to language and so on. From where I am sitting, I am most dismayed by the incredible barrier to entry for non-technical people to begin making games. There are so many really creative and artistic people who have a lot of fantastic ideas for games, but their voices are not being heard at all because they lack the technical expertise to use these extremely technical game engines. It’s not really a question of if the tech is freely available [or] if the tech is designed in an extremely exclusive and, one might even say, an arrogant sort of way. I’d like to hear more voices talking about how the larger game development companies seem very callous in their treatment of anyone not technically inclined. This can be seen in how overly complex they make their systems and how little they bother to document them. And, I think more broadly, the industry as a whole tends to be very exclusive, especially towards anyone not in the AAA world.

But I have been working on a project that I am hoping will help remedy this problem. It is called JoyMaker, and I’ll be announcing more about it soon. I suppose I still believe the industry can be changed, just maybe not from [the] inside, right?

My youngest son has continually been able to find a way to jump off the edge of my worlds and “soft-lock” my characters. It is so funny to him every time he does it, and he keeps finding ways every time I think I have stopped him. He actually just did it again recently in The Lost Weld, and he refuses to tell me how he did it! He said it was an Easter egg for other players to find, and if I don’t catch him in the act, then he doesn’t have to tell me how he did it. :)

Well, that’s easy for me! A Mistian from the Isle of Mist, just like Piper and her family in The Lost Weld! I admit this is a game I made for me just as much as my kids!