URL: Strange Scaffold Is The Most Interesting Developer This Decade
Highlights
Strange Scaffold has already produced 12 games in the first four and a half years of the 2020s, with two more announced for the next year. These 12 games are incredibly varied in tone, mechanics, and presentation. Two are (excellent) sequels, but the other ten are wholly original.
Aside from the unbounded creativity, Strange Scaffold is trying to change the way that games are made. While we don’t know what the working conditions are like at FromSoftware or Larian specifically, in the industry as a whole things are bad. Thousands of developers are being laid off every year and crunch culture persists. Strange Scaffold wants to change this, in its own culture if nowhere else.
The first words you see on the Strange Scaffold website are, “Better, Faster, Cheaper, and Healthier.” It’s a big, bold font making a big, bold statement. The Daft Punk of games development is here for a long time, and it wants to give its developers a good time.
“I get tired of seeing my peers crushed under the wheels of unsustainable processes,” studio founder and creative director Xalavier Nelson Jr. told Push To Talk. He also explained his “constellation” model of development, in which a rotating cast of developers work on Strange Scaffold’s games. “All the people who I get to collaborate with, we try to offer them the most interesting, fairly compensated, flexible work possible,” he explained.
This has been cemented by its collaboration with indie publisher Frosty Pop. “It signals a commitment to continuing to develop world-class games with a sustainability, transparency, and precision that defies the industry status quo,” Nelson Jr. wrote on LinkedIn.
My Notes
Dynamic Collaboration
Strange Scaffold uses a constellation of developers, meaning he dynamically adds collaborators on a per-project, as-needed basis.
This approach allows his studio to be quick and nimble, while also making sure that his studio is a sustainable work environment that is healthy and attractive to collaborators.