Failbetter Games founder Alexis Kennedy is in all places, from the fantasy realm of Thedas, to outer house. Sometimes I fear that sooner or later I’ll be consuming a sandwich and he’ll be simply out of sight, writing one thing a bit disturbing about ham and cheese. This freedom, he tells us, can also be one of many the explanation why he left the studio he based.
Kennedy did a stint on Stellaris, one of many best 4X games on PC.
“I was like a prisoner to the kind of games we designed Failbetter to make,” Kennedy explains, “because we had this big, rich, specific world that everybody expected us to keep making games in and we had a specific way of making games – we had the technology to do particular things as well.”
He’d been writing for Fallen London, Failbetter’s enduring browser sport, for seven years and was in search of a distinct path. But he didn’t need to change the studio simply so he may make completely different video games.
“I could have done what some other people in my position have done and, like, laid off half the company to focus on what I wanted to do, but I had to lay off my friends once before and I never want to do it again if I can avoid it. If I could take enough money to be comfortable and leave the studio to stand on its own… So that’s what I did.”
As Failbetter grew, Kennedy additionally discovered himself unable to do the kinds of issues that made him need to work on this enterprise within the first place. “I was spending a lot of time trying to get back into fine game design work and writing work, which is what I got into the business for in the first place. And I wasn’t – I was sorting out personality issues in the team, thinking about commercial stuff, and talking to the VAT dude. I’ve had worse jobs, but it didn’t connect.”
Keep an eye fixed out for our full interview with Alexis Kennedy, which is coming quickly.
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