Interview with PAX Aus showcase winner Anti Citizen: Red’s developer James Turnbull
By Drawza
Drawza: Firstly, please introduce yourself and your game?
James Turnbull: I’m James and I’m a part of the three man team at Queebly Software with Sam & Freya who are making Anticitizen: Red, a Australian cyberpunk third person shooter.
What is your background?
All three of us are originally from Wollongong, just south of Sydney where we’d worked together in just about every creative medium you could imagine on various projects.
What made you decide to journey down the path of game development?
We decided to start on game dev because we were lucky enough to have Sam, who is very smart and good at programming. Freya, after a long time playing music, wanted an opportunity to make some. And me with my many years experience mucking around in 3D art.
In the end it was either game dev or professional fortnite, but we couldn’t find a fourth squad member and I can’t build so Sam downloaded unreal engine and the rest is history.
What previous games have you created/worked on?
None! We’re fresh blood in the industry and coming in swinging with Anticitizen: Red. Separately all three of us had dabbled here and there with game making to various degrees, but like nuclear launch keys, we’ve come together and combined our powers to make something massive!
How does it feel being announced as a winner for PAX Aus 2024 Indie Showcase?
Honestly it’s still pretty surreal to us, this opportunity is truly a game changer. If it wasn’t for the Indie Showcase I don’t think we ever would have been able to show the game off like this, so we are incredibly grateful, and incredibly excited to be a part of the Indie Showcase.
What are the core concepts?
In 2016, Hideo Kojima took to the stage of E3 and announced that he was making the world’s first “Strand Type Game”, which was an important lesson in game making that taught us that you can actually just say anything. Anticitizen: Red is a “Cinematic Shooter” which is a cool phrase you can use to describe a game that is about making cool moment to moment gameplay while telling a deeper story that is intertwined with the gameplay.
On top of this, this is a very Aussie game about Australian characters in a cyberpunk Sydney. It’s made from a place of fondness, with all the character and flavor of people we meet in our day to day life.This identity is at the core of Anticitizen: Red, I mean, our protagonist has a mullet that jiggles around as you muck around, how’s that for culture?
What were your inspirations?
Anticitizen: Red is the result of us combining a lot of things we love about games into one truly unique package, where our inspirations are now so diluted it’s hard to boil it down to any handful of predecessors, each layer of the game at a conceptual level is drawing on something new so for your ease of reading I’ve made a graph of some of the “DNA” of Anticitizen: Red. (see below)
How long have you been working on this game?
We started development in about March 2023, so by the time people get to play it at PAX it’ll be a year and 7 months old.
What is it like to have the game showcased at events such as PAX Aus?
One of the first things I did after I found out we were gonna be a part of PAX was look up who else had showcased there to get some inspiration of what we need to bring to the table, and I realized very quickly we were about to be hanging out with giants. So many of my favorite games from the last 10 years have featured at PAX and so for our funky little game to be counted among them was pretty insane, it is such a cultural powerhouse!
What advice have you got for upcoming game developers?
Make cool games! If you playtest something and you don’t immediately go “Damn this is cool as hell” get back in your editor and fix that! The world will always need more cool games!
What advice have you received that you have held on to throughout your journey?
“Uhh, can you add more explosions” that was something I think we’ve held onto pretty well. Also “There’s no such thing as a perfect game”, I think it’s pretty easy to end up chasing your own tail fixing bugs and optimizing forever and forget to actually make the rest of the game, as long as it runs smoothly 9 times out of 10 she’ll be right. I mean, triple A companies ship games that are 300gb and full of bugs every year, I think we’re allowed to have a door you can clip through if you look at a certain angle and mash the jump every now and then, as a treat.
Have you had any mentors in the gaming industry?
We’ve made a lot of friends in the games industry who have all been so incredibly kind and helpful along the way. We’re lucky enough to be friends with the awesome team developing Copycat (Which is coming out next month so everyone should wishlist that bad boy, it’s easily GOTY) who were a part of the Indie Showcase last year. They have imparted some of their wisdom with us and were saviors in helping us to prepare for what will be our biggest event so far.=
How many PAX Aus events have you attended (as both a developer and as a regular attendee)?
None! PAX is brand new to all three of us! We’ve heard so much about it over the years but it’s always been such a pipe dream to find the time and the money to go down and visit, we’re so excited to finally be a part of it all!
Check Out the Steam page Anti Citizen: Red
Be sure to check out Anti Citizen: Red and other PAX Aus showcase winners here
https://aus.paxsite.com/en-us/features/indie-showcase.html
And make sure you check out all the indie games that will be on display during PAX Aus 2024 in October.
