The worlds of tabletop and video gaming are becoming increasingly close, and games such as The Horror at Highrook are among the closest to blending the two. A cosmic horror RPG presented as a tabletop board game but with the audiovisual bells and whistles of a video game.
Developer Nullpointer (Tom Betts) has largely worked alone on the game using his own funds, but he did receive a welcome boost from Innersloth’s Outersloth funding program along the way.
EpicRPGTales spoke with Betts (who was suffering from kidney stone issues at the time of our interview) about working as a solo developer, the appeal of board games, and how funding and publishing have changed in the industry.
You have backing from the Outersloth program but are a solo dev. So, what are the benefits of being a solo developer? I’ve covered many of what you’d call micro games on itch.io in the past, and they are often fascinating experiments by solo devs and small teams that sometimes build and build to bigger things, even if not to the size of what you’ve made. How do you find that process?
So yeah, you’ve touched upon something interesting there with the prototyping and developers love it because you’re having ideas, testing them out, iterating on things. You’re trying things out without worrying about the commercial end product or the polish.
It’s also something, like, I’m quite old, and that was something I did when I was a lot younger and I think that’s sort of natural, but at some point, you have to try and earn some money, and at that scale of things, it’s very difficult to make any money out of that. You get a few kinds of setups like SockPop, Co-op, and people like that, and their brand is to make small games, and they do okay, and they make some great games, and they’re pretty polished for small games, but again, it’s still quite hard to do that, and you have to be good at having a rapid turnaround.
So, I still do a lot of prototyping, and even when working on (The Horror at) Highrook, I still have to take time to cleanse my palate because I’m a bit of a workaholic, so time off for me usually means prototyping another idea. So that’s very freeing, but it’s also kinda something…Like, I don’t wanna say ‘a young man’s game’ because it’s not quite what I mean, but it’s not gonna bring you stability. It’s not gonna help your studio. I did a lot of that, but as you make more games and you release more games, you realize that, despite those being interesting, the game takes a long time to make, especially to the point where it becomes a commercially releasable product that people are going to be happy to buy into. So at that point, you have to leave a bit of that behind, that kind of small-scale method, that prototyping, and decide where you’re gonna commit.
That’s understandable. I mentioned before that you’ve benefitted from the Outersloth program (Among Us studio Innersloth’s game funding program). How’s that been for development? Has it been very hands off or has it been collaborative?
Oh yes, it’s completely hands-off. I’ve been talking to publishers for years, and I started talking to them for a previous game I was making. So before I go on, a bit of history. I’ve been making games for about a decade now, and I used to do that with a friend of mine until he went off to do something in more traditional writing, and I carried on making the games. One of the first things I did was make a game for Humble before they collapsed, and that was interesting because they’re quite a big publisher, but it was still in friendly publisher times, so the deal was okay, and they were nice people. But towards the end, it got a little bit strange because there was obviously stuff happening there. When the game came out it was okay, it did okay, and I got a Game Pass deal, which was great for me as it meant I could spend the next year or so prototyping another game.
I mean, this goes back to what we were talking about with how solo developers work, and I think then, I wanted to make a bigger game. I think it’s inevitable that a lot of developers in that small-scale area will eventually want to do something more with a specific idea or a specific game because they wanna do it justice. They wanna give it more depth, more world, or more content.
So that’s how I felt. I wanted to make a bigger game, and I was thinking of a big strategy game in 2022. When I was pitching it around, I knew it was getting bad out there. It was when the money was disappearing, and the publishers were drawing back. Publishers, well traditional publishers, would always try to fob you off, but they’re not doing it in a bad way, and a lot of the things I can say about publishers can sound mean, but it’s the way they have to operate, right? So if they’re interested in a project or a game you’re making, rarely will they outright say ‘no.’ If they can, they’ll sort of keep you on the hook, keep you around in case your game suddenly blows up on TikTok or whatever, because they don’t wanna have burned those bridges.
And that was happening more and more because they couldn’t commit because they didn’t have the money, and the money was being taken back. So I realized I’d spent a lot of my own money on this prototype, a year’s worth at least, and I now realized I wasn’t going to get the money for it, or if I was going to get the money for it, it was going to be on such harsh terms that it wasn’t worth doing it financially.
So, I looked at whatever projects I had that I could potentially finish by myself, and the strategy game would have required money and extra developers, whereas the Highrook prototype could work with just me. I’d spoken to people who’d said that ‘if you can do it yourself, then you’re probably best doing that’ so i did. But after about six months on Highrook, I decided I’d try reaching out to some of the smaller corpo publishers and see if they have anything to offer. I was also getting my game into various showcases and getting approached by publishers. I was still getting approached by publishers, even if they didn’t have the money!
So yeah, I spoke to some smaller ones. I spoke to Yogscast, who I think is a great small-scale publisher, and I just applied for the Outersloth thing like everyone else. I went through the web form—there was no secret indie cabal or anything! I just forgot about it, and then they got in touch with me a couple of months after that. They really liked the game. We had a couple of calls, and it was great!
That’s good, simple as that after all that!
Yeah, and I think that’s because they’re developers, right? So they make games, and many publishers are full of people who’ve never made games. They don’t really understand how games work in a lot of ways. I know that sounds mean, but there’s a lot of management in publishing.
I mean, you can clearly see that out there!
Right, and because Innersloth knew, the conversation is different because they can ask specific questions about what you’re doing and how you’ve done something. You can tell them, and they’ll think, ‘Okay, this guy knows what he’s talking about,’ whereas a publisher can ask you questions, but they don’t know the details about the process. They’re just producers, but an actual dev who has shipped a game is gonna have a much clearer idea of where you are with your game, understand the process, and what support you need
.With a publisher like Outersloth, they don’t call themselves a publisher really. They’re just a hands-off investment fund, a bit like the indie fund used to be. I’ve heard Poncle has tried to set up a similar thing for a similar reason: Vampire Survivors did incredibly well, so why not help others, too?
Also, the other difference with publishers is that most of them are corporate shareholder-owned and the returns that are expected of publishers have gone up over the years. Now you’re expected to get 500 times your investment, which is crazy, right? But these individual funds, it’s not that they’re not profitable, it’s just that they don’t expect a billion squillion times profit on things. They just say, ‘We’d like it to be profitable. If it’s profitable, that’s great. The important thing is to survive and keep going’.
That’s it. Hopefully, this will have a knock-on effect and help out more developers in the future. Even one success, even a modest one, will help keep that going.
So, more than ever, I’d say developers in the RPG space are bridging that gap between tabletop-style games and video games. You’ve definitely led with a strong tabletop style here. What did you find appealing about that for a video game?
I think part of it comes from my own experiences, which is true for a lot of people who cross over in those spaces. The guy i was talking about that I used to work with, is Jim Rossignol, and he’s making the RPG sources books based on Blades in the Dark and stuff. But I’ve always played a lot of board games with my kids, and I’m an art graduate (Tom’s background is in fine art), so I’m very much drawn to the visual element of things.
Going back to those prototypes for a second, I’m terrible at making prototypes that look like janky code art, like programmer art. I end up just giving up if I can’t make anything I like the look of. So board games appeal to me because they have two lines of communication. Obviously, there’s the textual/verbal element that you get in a D&D-style game, but they’ve also got those visual effects, those tiny-world things you get.
They also have a lot more of that tactile side in that you’re picking up objects and cards and moving them around. It engages me a bit more because I’m easily distracted. So if I’m playing a verbal tabletop game like a role-playing game, if someone else is running that game talking about what we’re doing, I’ll just start looking out the window, not really paying attention, and probably start thinking about what I’m going to make for dinner.
At least with a board game, I can fiddle with the little cards! I can read up on what I have to do next or just look at the board. So, I think partly that was appealing, but video games are also this visual thing. The environment tells a story in a very strong way, and that plays into the same experiences, I think.
The Horror at Highrook is out now on PC via Steam. Read our review over here.
