freshness to new projects that can have a wider
market; to work on more complex and structured
games without forgetting how to experiment and
improvise... Our games maintain a certain level of
naivety, something that the big industry cannot
possibly afford. What we make still isn’t enough
to support us financially, but it works like a charm
as a creative way to vent.”SIDE HUSTLE
Galen Drew, creative director of the Seattle-based
developer very very spaceship, has had a rather
different outcome from his time in game jams.
A graphic designer when he first started making
games, Drew didn’t initially take development as
a career particularly seriously. “I started off my
career as a graphic designer working at a series
of startups, mostly on websites,” he says. “I’d been
working on little game projects on the side for a
while with very little knowledge of programming
or Unity. I was just faking it as best I could.”
It took meeting Kevin Maxon, founder of Ice
Water Games, to get Drew to take his “little game
projects” more seriously, and that’s when he
decided to enter his first jam. In order to test
out his Unity skills, Drew entered a screensaver-
themed jam, which resulted in the game
Sequence. “This was the first of these ambient
games that were focused on the feeling and
colour that I’d made,” Drew says. “After I spentsome time working on some terrible personal
projects that never saw the light of day, I decided
to take another pass at the idea of Sequence, but
now with some knowledge of code. This ended
up being Cycles, released under the Ice Water
Games label.”
With this experience under his belt, Drew
moved on from his previous position to work as
a UI designer at very very spaceship, the company
where he’s now creative director. Despite the new
role, however, he wasn’t quite finished with game
jams yet. “I decided I wanted to work on a game
about procedural worlds, so I started a bunch
of prototyping,” Drew explains. “When PROCJAM
came along, I leapt at the opportunity to submit
the game.” The result was Pattern – a project that
has really earned Drew some attention. Since
the jam in 2018, it exhibited at 2019’s Leftfield
Collection at EGX, and was released later that
same year.MAKING IS BREATHING
Pattern sees the player waking up by a camp-
fire in an eerily empty, low-poly world. In the
distance lies a plume of smoke from another
fire, rising up into the starry, psychedelic-hued
sky. Walk towards it, and you’ll receive the
command to sleep. Sleep, and you wake to find
the world reset, sometimes with a colour change,
sometimes suddenly surrounded by too-large
objects to observe.
Despite his success with solo projects, Drew’s
career in games still takes somewhat of a back
seat from his role at very very spaceship. Jams
have given Drew the perfect outlet, then, to work
with little pressure and little expectation. “I don’tBABA IS FUN
For Baba Is You developer Arvi
Teikari, going full-time hasn’t
taken the fun out of game
development. “If anything,”
he tells us, “it has taught me
several useful lessons in how to
appreciate working on a project,
even during the less motivated
phases of the development.”BABA IS FUN
Arvi Teikari, whose game jam
gem Baba Is You became an
even better commercial release. In the wonderful Baba Is You,
the player can get around
anything by creating the right
word combination. Watch the seasons pass
in Galen Drew’s CyclesI WAS JUST FAKING IT
THE BEST I COULDIt started with a game jamInterface
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