A Pasta Maraca: An Interview with the Creator of Building Relationships
Back in June, I had the opportunity to attend Summer Game Fest, where I got the chance to see and play some of the summer’s highly anticipated indie games. Over about one hour, I played five games at the Day of the Devs booth, including perhaps the oddest game at the event: Building Relationships. I highly recommend watching the trailer to get a complete understanding of its ridiculousness.
While I only had ten minutes to try out Building Relationships at Summer Game Fest, there was (and still is) a free demo on Steam, so I was able to play through the whole demo once I got home. Flirting with a windmill, tumbling down a cliff, and fishing for cars are just a few of the things you can get up to in the Building Relationships demo, so I can’t wait to see what the full game has in store. A video game that does comedy well is not easy to find, and the particular style of comedy found in this game is worth experiencing.
Earlier this month, I had the chance to sit down with Tanat Boozayaangool of Tan Ant Games and talk to him about creating Building Relationships. In about half an hour we talked about the experience of becoming an indie developer, what inspired this game, what it was like to attend Summer Game Fest, why he had a thermos full of pasta on his desk, and much more. Here’s the full interview:
Matt Buckley, FinallyGotAroundTo: “Could you give a brief introduction of yourself, who you are, what you do, etc.?”
Tanat Boozayaangool, Tan Ant Games: “Sure. My name is Tanat Boozayaangool. I am from Bangkok, Thailand. I am an indie dev. I do a bit of everything on a small team, too many things at once. I guess I am mainly a programmer, but I have my toes in everything.”
Tanat: “I’m working on Building Relationships, a little-known game. It’s a silly adventure game where you play as a house on a date. It’s been our project for quite a while. Now I’ve got a composer on the team, working with a localization team. It’s exciting.”
Matt: “One of my first questions was going to be about how big the team is. You have a composer and localization, do you have anyone else working on the team with you?”
Tanat: “All of those collaborators are on a contracting basis. Anything outside of their task it doesn’t make sense for me to ask them to do. Any miscellaneous task is all me, development, reaching out to anyone who’s played the game, production, all that, it’s all me.”
Matt: “How did you get into doing this? What was the story of getting into making games for you?”
Tanat: “I went to undergrad for game development. That’s one thing that I wanted to do. Going into undergrad I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. Game design development, how bad could that be? I’ll take a swing for it. I saw a couple of game design breakdown videos and thought there was something more there about what makes a game fun. I did a lot of work there and when I graduated I was applying for game jobs, which are hard to get, notoriously. University often does not prepare you enough. It gives you the skills and basis, but AAA is looking for something different, indie developers are looking for something entirely different. I did some software engineering interviews, got one, and will I say no to this? I guess not.”
Tanat: “So I worked in tech in a game adjacent space, but I’ll leave it at that. I started doing more game dev part-time outside of work hours, building up the skillset again. I did game jams outside of work hours. Building up that portfolio and skillset. I started working on Building Relationships, which was a jam project that I started in university in 2015. It was a four-hour game jam with the theme “construction destruction.” I thought maybe I’d make a building game or a relationships game, and I was like “Wait a minute.” It was inspired by visual novels and dating sims, but I don’t consume that genre, so I couldn’t really make something in that genre. So it didn’t work out for a while.
Tanat: “Then in 2020, during lockdown, everyone had more free time. I did a jam called Unexpected Jam. It just made sense to bring the theme back. I had just played A Short Hike and I really enjoyed the exploration aspect of that game. There’s something really intimate about it and something I hadn’t seen before. It’s just so fun to explore a new space. I wanted to replicate the feeling of exploring someone else’s work. It’s fun to see what fun they had, what they put here, what they put there. That was a month-long jam. The game was there, but there were lots of rough edges. Then last October, I thought I would port the jam onto Steam. Minimal changes, just a quick port. Then I thought, “What if I change this? Change that? This as well?” Then the next thing I knew I was remaking the whole game. That’s kind of where we are at now. Zoom in camera angles, new animations, new writing, the characters have much more of an edge to them.
Tanat: “Long story short of how I got into game development. The main thing with me getting into games is that I was going to quit my job. It didn’t have a lot to do with the game side of things. It was a toxic place so I had to leave. I was trying to apply to game jobs at a mid-level position, but at the same time, game layoffs just happened so the market became even harder to get into. At that level, if you don’t have a shipped title on your resume, it is impossible to get a job at the mid-level. So instead I made myself a job. We’ll see how it works out, because I won’t get paid until the game comes out, so fingers crossed.”
Matt: “You already talked about how A Short Hike was an inspiration for Building Relationships, but are there any other games that had an impact? Or any other favorite games?”
Tanat: “The top game inspiration was definitely A Short Hike, and you can see that through the game. But there are lots of different things that, if you are an indie gamer, you’ve probably seen something similar. For example, the fishing mechanics are similar to Stardew Valley, with its own riff on it. Celeste is one of my favorite games. I love the fast movement and dashing, so that’s part of where the game’s movement comes from.”
Tanat: “A Short Hike is the majority of it, but a lot of inspiration also came from outside of games. I watch a lot of this streaming platform called Dropout. They have a lot of different shows, but lots of the actors and comedians on the shows are improv artists. So they have a different perspective on it. There’s also a Dungeons and Dragons show (Dimension 20), one season was called A Crown of Candy. It’s based on Candy Land but with a mix of Game of Thrones. It has some very serious world-building, like how all the different food people operate, and the theology of food people. The world-building is at certain points absolutely silly, and at certain points absolutely consistent and serious and making sure things line up. It’s something that I was drawn to. A lot of the world-building in Building Relationships is a reflection of their approach, the Dimension 20 team, Brennan Lee Mulligan, and the creative team there. Their approach to world-building was part of the main inspiration behind the writing. The writing before I watched that show, was bad, and the writing after watching that show… [laughter]. I also picked up a book about writing and how to do all that. So those are the main bits, A Short Hike, Dimension 20: A Crown of Candy, and then everything else is my lived experience like the dating life and what-not.”
Matt: “It’s been a little over a month now since Summer Game Fest and the Day of the Devs presentation, so I was curious about how that experience was for you? Have you been to other events like that, or been part of big presentations? What was that like especially being such a small indie developer?”
Tanat: “It has been absolutely wild. That was my first big event that, I guess, put the game out there. The game was struggling for quite a while in terms of getting wishlists counts on Steam. I think the average person doesn't know how hard it is to make any kind of wave as a dev starting out. Nothing about the game has changed within the past six months. The Steam page went up in November. Then the game went live at the Day of the Devs showcase at Summer Game Fest, and I put up the trailer, and suddenly out of nowhere one day six thousand people wishlisted it. The scale beforehand was like I got up to two hundred wishlists which all came from friends in the industry retweeting some tweets for me, and I posted some TikToks that marketing people in the industry saw and reposted. That would be a big bump, that would get me eight wishlists which was the biggest bump I’d seen. I went to a game festival in Berlin called A Maze. That’s more developer-facing, but it had a Steam page so I got up to six hundred wishlists. Then the next month six thousand in one day, and Wholesome Games happened, and now it’s sitting at like fifteen sixteen thousand.”
Matt: “So it really makes a difference being part of something that big.”
Tanat: “Absolutely. It’s wild. I didn’t think a lot of things had changed, but a lot of people that I followed for a long time finally followed me back. I went to a developer-facing conference in Brighton in the UK, and I met a bunch of people that I met last year, but they didn’t remember me. I saw them again this year and they were like “Oh you’re the guy from that video!” And I was like “We met last year. And we also met two times before that.” So it’s been very funny to have people recognize me. The algorithm picks up people depending on momentum, and my posts now have some momentum, compared to before when they had zero momentum. In terms of the feeling, I went from “What am I missing? What do I have to do?” Flying from London to Los Angeles, completely jetlagged, meeting people who I have no idea who they are. Press people that I don’t know, industry people that I don’t know, and being like “Hello! I made a game about a house.” It’s been wild realizing that I guess I actually know some people now? What does that mean? It went from panic to now I’m like “Maybe I am good and okay, and I don’t need to really worry. Maybe things will be okay.””
Tanat: “I was a little nervous about landing the rest of the game because there’s a lot of emotional beats that were not in the trailer, and not in the demo that I’ve been working on and building the story out of. But now I guess I’m less worried about it. I’ll figure it out. If I’ve managed so far, I have quite a bit of time to figure it out.”
Tanat: “I think I was, I guess not lucky, but in a way lucky that no one else made something as wild as Building Relationships. No other house games. Most games the entire weekend or week there was nothing that “out there.” I’ve found Building Relationships is a pretty good game for Twitch streams. Zero context things like “What do you mean you play as a house? What do you mean the house moves like this?” There’s a lot of great chat moments. Also when the world is built out of a pun, it invites people to start thinking about what other jokes could be in this game. People have wondered if Dr. House will be in this game. It’s a joy to see everything people come up with.”
Matt: “Probably one of my favorite things from the demo was when I got to choose the name Bill Ding. It’s such ridiculous silly genius to me.”
Tanat: “Yeah, Cementha was an original 2015 idea, and Bill Ding was from 2020. Now here we are.”
Matt: “I was looking at your website and saw that it said you might show up to an event with a ukulele and a kazoo. I was playing the demo, and it sounded to me like the jump sound effect was a kazoo?”
Tanat: *nodding*
Matt: “Ok great. That made me interested to ask what other random stuff did you find yourself working on when you were making this game?”
Tanat: “The most unexpected thing that I worked on was probably the trailer. When I made the trailer I started with writing chords for the music. There are lots of comedy games out there, lots of people try to make comedy games, but it’s hard to land because it’s hard to figure out how to communicate that sense of comedy. What I learned basically was to start with setup and payoffs, and build that timeline from there, build that layer up and up. So I started with “It’s a game about a house.” Next, the house moves. Then the house jumps. Oh, by the way, the house can wave dash. With the music side of things I figured out the chord progression as a normal pop chord progression, and then moments of silence to build tension again. That’s when the car came in, so that’s when “Oh, by the way, fishing.””
Tanat: “I went on Reddit to search “sexiest chords” in r/MusicTheory. Not helpful. But yeah, I played some chords for the dating sequence. I knew what kind of beats to put where, and what emotional tension. But I made that mostly in one evening. I wrote the chords, I played the ukulele, then played the kazoo freestyle on top. Then I needed a lower bass note, so I sang that. Absolutely ridiculous. It’s one of those things where I listened to it and was like “What am I doing?” I didn't have any percussion instruments, so I filled a thermos with dried pasta and shook it in front of the microphone. I actually still have it!” *pulls out a thermos and shows the pasta inside*
Matt: “Oh and rotini as well!”
Tanat: “It’s the choice pasta. It makes the best shaking sound. But yeah, when I made that trailer it solidified the vision, the pitch, the hook of it all. I thought maybe I do know what I’m doing. That was one of the pivotal parts of development for me. I was having a tough time at work, not really feeling myself, and then I made this trailer, and I was like “You know what, who cares, I’m gonna quit.””
Matt: “What were some of the things you found most rewarding in this process? Maybe you’ve already answered that with the trailer, but if you want to say anything else there feel free. And to contrast, what has been the most frustrating part of working on a game like this for you?”
Tanat: “One of the more rewarding things is seeing what other people in the industry have to say. Seeing people who are really into the game, I think more into it than I am. There’s a level of the people that I respect now respecting my work, what I have to say, and what I have to do. So it’s like “Okay, maybe I have something.” A lot of people enjoyed the videos, and had good things to say about my section of Day of the Devs.”
Tanat: “For the frustrating part, just that making a game is hard, just generally. I don’t know. Nothing has been too frustrating for me, a lot of it is just that there’s a lot of work that goes into a game. If I feel overwhelmed, then I make a spreadsheet of things that I have to do, and I can see what’s handled, what needs to be done now, and what can be done later, and it doesn’t look as overwhelming. I do feel like it will get frustrating when people start putting ratings on my game. It’s like a personal thing, I left my corporate job partly because I don’t like being rated at work and the staff ranking of it all. For me, it’s like “Did I quit my corporate job to make games that live and die by what reviewers think.” So I will cross that bridge when I have to. When I release the game, I’ll figure out what to do with that because it’s one of those things you can’t really deal with.
Tanat: “One thing I am frustrated by is the TikTok algorithm. The TikToks were doing well, and then they stopped doing well. I personally think they’re good, and the ones I’ve been posting are better, but I stopped posting for a while and so the algorithm hates me now.”
Matt: “Anything else you want to say before we wrap up?”
Tanat: “I don’t think I have anything else. But I will ramble forever, my apologies.”
Matt: “No, this has been great. I loved hearing about all of this. I never would have guessed that the Dropout Dungeons & Dragons show would have come up during this conversation so that’s great to hear it was an inspiration.”
Tanat: “I will shill Dropout forever until they put me on a show.”
Matt: “That’s a great strategy.”
Tanat: “That is my number one bucket list goal. To get on any of those shows. Put me on there!”
Matt: “Well, it’s been a pleasure talking to you Tanat. I’m really looking forward to when Building Relationships launches.”
Tanat: “Thank you!”
And thank you for taking the time to read this interview! This was probably one of the longest articles I’ve posted here so far, but I hope you found it as enjoyable and enlightening as I did. Check out Building Relationships on Steam, and if you’re so inclined add it to your wishlist to show support for Tanat and his ridiculous game.