Indy PopCon 2016 - Crashlands & Butterscotch Shenanigans

Published: August 9, 2016 9:00 AM /

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Indy PopCon 2016 Crashlands

Indy PopCon 2016 had a pretty large area for Indie Developers to show off their games, and we met a ton of awesome developers during our time at this year's convention in Indianapolis. One of those developers was Butterscotch Shenanigans, a development team that was originally started by 3 brothers and is now expanding to hire more employees to the team. We sat down and talked with them on some awesome cardboard chairs about Crashlands and some of their other games in their booth!

Butterscotch Shenanigans has released a number of games since their inception, starting with Towel Fight 2, a game that Seth Coster told us was a total flop and left them with just three months of cash to keep running. After Towel Fight 2they created Quadropus Rampage and gave themselves enough revenue to keep going, allowing them to start on Crashlands, which took so long to make that they actually had to stop to make others like Flop Rocket and Roid Rage.

Indie development is already hard, but Butterscotch Shenanigans ran into a challenge that had nothing to do with development itself during their time creating Crashlands—one of the brothers was diagnosed with cancer. So while they had to deal with the challenges of development, marketing, and managing a business, they also had to contend with one of their team members (and brother) fighting a life threatening disease. Despite that, they overcame and created their most successful game, and Seth told us that they've now hired their first employee to the team.

We talked about a lot with Seth at Indy PopCon, and a good amount of our discussion was about Crashlands, which is their main focus at the moment. Crashlands took Butterscotch Shenanigans two years to create, during which time their artist (Sam Coster) improved his skills as he learned about creating art for the game (he was studying psychology before). Because of that, he actually had to suppress his improvements for the creation of new art assets over time!

Crashlands wasn't always the game that it is now, especially when it came to your inventory. Once the team got to the point where the game had hundreds of items that you could collect, they had to completely change how the inventory system worked. Once the third brother, Adam, joined the team and actually posed the question "what if we don't do any of this?", it incited a wave of changes across the game. That one simple change to inventory is what brought about the game's build system and streamlined almost every other system within the game!

To check out the full interview from our time with Seth, check out the video below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtM3LXC_Rv8

We had a great time talking with Seth at Indy PopCon 2016, and if you're interested in checking out Crashlands, you can find it on SteamGOG (affiliate), or Android and iOS! You can find Butterscotch Shenanigans online on their Twitter and Facebook pages, too!

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Rutledge Daugette
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Rutledge Daugette is the Guides Editor & Founder of TechRaptor. Rutledge's degree in Game Programming ultimately led him to found the site in 2013, with… More about Rutledge