Coffeenauts on the Studio's Story & Gamedev Market in South America

Fábio Rosa (left) and Pedro Bechara (right) working at Garage 227 Studios in 2019, prior to working full-time at their own studio

Introduction

Our team currently has 9 people. A lot of us come from different professional and educational backgrounds, but most came from the same game design course here in São Paulo. I've written a brief intro about me and Pedro, my business partner, the two co-founders of the company:

• Fábio Rosa (me) – 32, Co-founder, Creative Director, Game Designer, Programmer:
  
  

  Prior to developing games, I already had a career as an English teacher, which started when I was 16 years old. I had always dreamed of one day working in the creative industry, being self-employed, and running my own business. As a kid, I always enjoyed making stop-motion videos, and comics, and creating my own games. For a long time, I pictured pursuing a career in cinema, but it was never clear how to achieve that, so eventually, I ended up graduating in International Relations. 

  Through my early twenties, alongside teaching, I also did some odd temp jobs related to video editing and film. Then in 2014, when I was already 24, I saw myself reaching a plateau in my profession as an English teacher and decided it was time to take my lifelong goal more seriously and change my career for real. After a few unsatisfying experiences with cinema (and the realization that I might be too much of a computer nerd for the job), the idea of working with game development dawned on me.

  That's when I decided to enroll in a Game Design graduation course here in São Paulo (Anhembi Morumbi University), which I attended entirely while still working as a teacher. There, I met Pedro, who would eventually become my business partner, as well as a lot of people that ended up becoming a part of the Coffeenauts team. 

  In 2019, I briefly worked at an external development studio called Garage 227, where Pedro had been working for 2 years. After successfully raising funds for the project we created in college, we were able to start our business. In 2020, after nearly 12 years teaching English and struggling to work on my creative goals as side projects at nights and on weekends, I was finally able to become a full-time game developer and business owner.

• Pedro Bechara – 27, Co-founder, Executive Producer, Game Designer, 3D Artist, and Animator:
  
  

  From a very young age, Pedro had always been fascinated with the magic behind animation and games and the incredible work done in studios like Pixar. Still, as a teen, Pedro took 3D art and animation courses, which led him to decide to study Game Design in college. He was 18 when he started the course the same year as Fábio, who would become his future business partner at Coffeenauts. 

  Through the years, Pedro's interest in the industry always took him to conventions and events, where he could get a glimpse of the market. At a convention in 2015, as a fan, Pedro took a picture beside David Brevik, the legendary creator of the Diablo franchise, without imagining that years later, he would be releasing his own game alongside his idol as his publisher.

  From 2017 to 2019, while still developing his own project, Pedro worked at an external development studio in São Paulo called Garage 227, where he started as an intern and through hard work quickly rose to senior producer, a position he held at the time he decided to leave and start his own business.

The other members of our team include:

• Thalita Alves – 27, Community Manager, 3D Artist, Concept Artist
• Pedro Mutton – 25, Tech Artist, Graphic Designer
• Lucas Agustini – 26, Senior Programmer
• Sergio Simabukuro – 35, Art Director, Graphic Designer:
• Victor Luccas – 28, Programmer
• Joziel Ribeiro – 22,  Programmer
• Pedro Ávilla – 27, 3D Artist and Rigger
• Arthur Cypriano – 28, Sound Designer
• Newton Sonobe – 31, Animator

The team being interviewed at BIG Festival in 2019

For the Coffeenauts team, Spacelines from the Far Out is our first released game, but we developed several small projects together while we were still in college. Pedro and I, in particular, had some experience with external development while we worked at Garage 227, where we learned a lot about art pipelines, project management, porting, and business.

Coffeenauts's Story

To give you some background on Coffeenauts and our games, let me explain how it all started. This is kind of a long story, but I won't leave out any details because the process of creating our studio and the first game was pretty unorthodox given the context of a student project in the Brazilian and LATAM game development scene.

Before Coffeenauts became an actual indie studio and business, it started out as the name we gave our group when we were in college here in São Paulo. We were taking a four-year Game Design graduation course. We all met in the first year and stayed together throughout the entire course, developing several small projects along the way.

I was lucky to meet Pedro early on, who despite being quite younger than me, shared the same perspective that this was a venture that should be taken seriously from the very beginning. We knew that, whatever it was that we were doing there, we were taking the first steps toward our common goal of starting a business and creating our own games. We took the college projects very seriously in terms of the way we planned and organized our tasks. Over time we were able to develop a good symbiosis and fine-tune our ability to gauge the scope of our tasks and our pipelines.

As with many college-level courses, students are tasked with delivering a final-term project in order to conclude it, and in 2017, our final year in college, we were tasked to spend the entire year developing a game. Due to the academic nature of the course, the project had to also be tied to some sort of research purpose in the area of Game Design.

Back then, we were playing lots of couch co-op and party games in our free time together, such as Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime and, most notably, Overcooked. We were still looking for an idea for a game when, after finishing all levels in Overcooked, we had a realization. We enjoyed the game so much and wanted to keep playing it, so we tried replaying the first levels, but it just wasn't as fun as the first time.

We noticed that once we had figured out how to beat a particular level, there wasn't really a real challenge replaying it, which made us realize Overcooked is secretly a puzzle game in disguise, in which the objective is to figure out optimal strategies and, once that's done, there's less motivation to keep playing. That isn't to say Overcooked isn't good (quite the contrary), but this realization became the spark for possible research in Game Design: is it possible to create a game like Overcooked (a non-violent co-op party game) which implemented procedural elements in order to increase replayability, instead of having predetermined scripted levels?

To answer that question we started looking at other titles. We initially looked at roguelike games, which are great examples of procedural gameplay and replayability, such as Faster than Light. However, a lot of these games are single-player. Then we looked at a co-op game that successfully implemented dynamic elements for replayability, Left 4 Dead, which did an awesome job at creating a very replayable co-op game, but it was quite the opposite of non-violent. Judging by the hard time we had finding any games that fit all these criteria, we came to the conclusion that this could be our project: a non-violent, procedural, roguelike co-op party game, which could borrow and blend elements from all of these games.

Early screenshot of the demo version of the game Fábio Rosa and Pedro Bechara made in college (circa 2018) when it was still called "Spaceline Crew"

Combining that idea with the fact that we're all fans of science fiction and retro-futurism, we came up with an idea of a game where players have to cooperate and manage their alien airlines in space. Add the '50s/60s space-age-inspired retro-futuristic aesthetic, and now we had the seed that would eventually become our first released title, initially called "Spaceline Crew", then later renamed to "Spacelines from the Far Out". All of this was easier said than done, as it is particularly hard to create procedural mechanics which don't involve combat.

We finished the course in 2017 with a prototype demo version of the game, which turned out pretty good and received lots of praise from our professors and colleagues. This led us to believe that this was indeed going to be our studio's first project, and we should keep developing it.

Early screenshot of the demo version of the game Fábio Rosa and Pedro Bechara made in college (circa 2018) when it was still called "Spaceline Crew"

In 2018 and with the team fresh out of college, we started taking steps toward creating the studio, which involved opening an official business and, most importantly, looking for partnerships and funding for the project. This proved to be quite a challenge considering none of us had any experience starting a business.

We had to learn everything as we went, and we were thankfully able to count on the help and advice of other more experienced developers we met at conventions and events. Our most important mentor was Luis Tashiro, head of a Brazilian studio called Mad Mimic, who had been a student at the same school we went to, years before. He was among one of the first to take this course in Brazil.

We did all of this while still doing our day jobs, so we had to develop the game, prepare pitches, and schedule meetings in our free time, at nights and on weekends. We also had to use our own savings to gain access to as many business events as we could, such as BIG Festival. From 2018 to 2019, we pitched the game to literally hundreds of companies, from small to large publishers.

Even though we were repeatedly turned down, we always tried to use these rejections as opportunities for getting advice and feedback from industry veterans, and we never lost our motivation. We had the conviction that, even though we were at the time a completely unknown group of students, from a country that had a small industry, and our project was far from perfect, we should keep at it. We were confident that this rejection cycle was a necessary process that would eventually unlock the game's true potential.

We also kept submitting the game to as many award festivals as our funds allowed for and, in late 2018, we received unbelievable news: Spacelines had been nominated for Best Casual Game and Most Promising IP at the Game Connection America Awards, which takes place in San Francisco alongside GDC. This was so unexpected that we didn't even have our American visas at the time, and we scurried to get them before the event, which would take place in less than 3 months.

The Coffenauts team at GCA

We gathered all the remaining funds we had saved from years of working day jobs in order to pay for the expensive trip to SF, in the hopes that this was our best (and possibly final) shot. We made all preparations, scheduled meetings with tons of companies that would attend GCA and GDC, and in March 2019, off we went to SF.

At the event, everything changed. To our unbelievable surprise, we actually won both awards we had been nominated for. The only other Brazilian developer to have ever received a GCA award before then was Luis Tashiro, our mentor. Then, literally minutes after the award ceremony, we had to rush to attend one of the main meetings we had scheduled for the event, with a major industry player.

If getting two awards on the same day wasn't enough, it was in that very meeting that we finally made our first business partner, who decided to support the development of Spacelines. This partner was none other than industry titan Xbox, and this was only the beginning of a great relationship with the most surprisingly humble, receptive, and helpful game company for its size we had ever seen, a relationship that culminated in the day-one release of Spacelines on Game Pass three years later.

Later in June 2019, back where everything started here in São Paulo, we also got 5 nominations and won the People's Choice award at BIG Festival, the largest event in the LATAM industry, the event we had been attending and learning about the game industry since we started college.

The Coffenauts team at BIG Festival 

Through 2019, even though we got a partnership with Xbox, we still felt that we needed to get a publisher for Spacelines since we still had no clue how to successfully release and market a game. Early in 2020, a new indie publisher called Skystone Games had just been founded by industry veterans Bill Wang (Perfect World) and David Brevik (creator of the Diablo franchise).

We met them at an online event and they decided Spacelines would be a good candidate for the publisher's first release, and we proceeded to close a publishing deal. Since then, David Brevik has been not only our publisher, but an invaluable source of advice and feedback regarding the design of Spacelines, and become a good friend of the team.

Spacelines from the Far Out (2022)

Spacelines from the Far Out was released on Steam and Xbox Game Pass in June 2022, with great critical reception and achieving a level of reach we had never imagined possible for our first game, especially for a project that started out inside a Brazilian school.

Quotes from critical reviews of the game

A 19-year-old Pedro Bechara taking a picture with his idol David Brevik in 2015

Pedro and David celebrating together at the Spacelines launch party 7 years later, in 2022

In 2023, Spacelines got featured in an article by Space.com interviewing a former Nasa employee and space historian about the future of commercial space travel.

Today, we continue to support the game and our community with updates and patches and, at the same time, we're already prototyping ideas for future titles, including a possible larger version of one of the many small games we had developed while we were still in college, a pixel-art post-apocalyptic shooter called Homo Articifialis.

Organization of Working Processes at Coffeenauts

Our production pipeline is something that Pedro and I have been fine-tuning since our first year in college. We see it as a permanent work-in-progress that we're constantly trying to improve and optimize as we learn more, and as we talk to more experienced developers. All of our tasks are planned, organized and fit into our schedule based on time estimates that we've been calibrating ever since, and are constantly evolving.

We take organization very seriously, and new people that have joined the team over these years have told us that we implement methods that are more akin to larger studios, and that is indeed our goal. We want to do our best so our studio can have a solid enough structure to take on any type of project, as well as grow without collapsing under its own weight.

Even though we're a 9-person team, we have internal style guides, documentation, and guidelines that range from art direction guides to coding patterns, file naming standards, QA procedures, and guidelines for giving feedback.

We focus heavily on individual responsibility and group participation in big decisions. Even though we're artists, programmers, and animators, we want to be first and foremost a team of game designers. For that, we try not to sectorize too much and do our best to keep everyone up-to-date as to the current state of development and the tasks of other team members. We believe that a more informed and participative team leads to a better system of checks and balances, more professional growth, and better end results overall.

In the current iteration of our pipeline, we're testing out a system of mutual responsibility which involves every task having 2 assigned roles, a production role and a review role, which are task-specific and can be filled by alternating team members depending on the nature of the assignment, and regardless of an internal hierarchical structure. The goal is to promote a more self-sufficient and horizontal studio without sacrificing a proper review and approval process, and we've been getting interesting results so far.

One of the cool things about being independent is that we're able to create and test our own rules and, oftentimes, we've had success trying out slightly unorthodox methods. We all work from home at Coffeenauts but, unlike a lot of studios that do work remotely, we try to keep away from the "time flexibility" many companies implement, where employees can work at any time of day they want.

While this flexibility sounds good on paper, we tend to think it may lead to people getting overworked and fatigued, working at odd hours, and feeling that they must be connected and communicable 24/7. So even though we work remotely we act like we don't. We have set times to start and end our work shifts, and we make sure our team knows that we will never expect them to do work or answer messages outside of this period. We have a general meeting at the start of each day, stay connected on Discord throughout the day, then end the shift with another general meeting, after which we tell people they aren't allowed to worry about work! If we didn't do something today, there's always tomorrow.

Coffeenauts' Journey to Becoming Brazil's First Indie Devs to Earn International Awards and Partnerships

Actually, what I had said was that we're the first Brazilian devs to earn international awards and partnerships with a student project. In other words, we were the first to release and get international reach with a game that began inside a Brazilian academic context.

Compared to the US and Europe, the game development industry is relatively small here in Brazil. That is especially true in proportion to the size of our video game consumer market. Our country is passionate about gaming, but the local industry still hasn't fully caught up to our market size. That isn't to say there aren't successful game studios here. There have been several other pioneers before us, from the first to release a game to the first to get international recognition. A lot of these pioneers are role models and mentors to us.

However, we only need to look at other countries with more established game development markets to understand that, for an industry to be solid and fully self-sufficient, there needs to be a full circle between companies generating job positions, as well as schools generating a qualified workforce. If there are few companies, the workforce tends to get lost in studios abroad.

Likewise, if there is no academic environment to create new professionals, companies have a lot of trouble growing. And it's for that exact reason that we feel that we have accomplished an important landmark for our country by having studied, started a business, and developed and released a game entirely locally from a project that was born inside the school, which is something relatively common to see in places like France and the US, but was the first time for us in Brazil.

That is not to say great Brazilian student projects don't exist. However, from our experience, most student projects end up not going forward because of:

• A lack of a clear path of action;
• Difficulty creating a reasonable scope, which may lead to giving up prematurely out of frustration;
• Underestimation of the issues involved outside of development itself, such as starting the business or looking for investors.
  
  

Being the first of anything is always a great source of pride and definitely motivated us. This motivation was a crucial driver for our persistence and later success. Because of the rarity of game development as a profession in the country, deciding to work with this involves a lot of having to prove to friends, family, and even to ourselves that this is indeed a real job and we're not crazy for trying to do it.

3D and Gamedev Market in South America

As I said before, the industry is still relatively small, but Brazilians love video games and the people that work with this here are extremely passionate. However, all indicators show that we're growing more and more every year. In terms of the creative industry as a whole, historically Brazil has had significant cultural influence around the world with its music, visual arts, architecture, and cinema. So we think it's only natural that our game industry will soon catch up.

Meanwhile, we also see that many Brazilian studios tend to opt to outsource work for clients abroad, especially for 3D art, which works because we have very talented artists here. On the other hand, presently it's relatively rarer to see Brazilian studios that create an IP from scratch gain international reach.

A lot of American and European companies enjoy doing business with us because of how passionate we are, but exchange rates are also an important factor. From the perspective of foreign investors, it's a good mix of talented and affordable work.

As for us, we're currently trying to focus exclusively on developing our own IPs, staying away from external development work.

Coffeenauts' Approach to Education

From the moment we decided to make the game, start the company, etc. up until it was released, the entire process itself has been a major educational endeavor. We had to learn everything as we went.

As we were starting out, we weren't particularly good at anything, and we were aware of that – this perception is key. What we had was potential, the motivation to keep at it, and faith that we could learn. So the way we are able to gradually meet industry standards was by repeatedly exposing ourselves to feedback from industry veterans every time we pitched the game. Every one of the hundreds of times we heard "no" was used as a learning opportunity.

We also try to make sure the work we do on a daily basis allows us to have time and space to keep learning. Our pipeline is supposed to create a positive feedback loop that stimulates growing skills. We are not particularly afraid of taking our time with stuff and, whenever we can, we allow team members to take their time to learn new skills, even if they're "on the clock".

Coffeenauts' Take on the Future of Gamedev

When asked about the future of gamedev and whether the scale will keep growing, or if studios will start using AI tools to save costs, I must admit it's a tough question to answer without speculating. However, I'll give it a shot.

I believe that while trends and buzzwords may come and go over time, generating weird demand bubbles from investors which are quick to burst such as with "crypto games", I think there will always be a permanent demand for games that are simply fun. People like fun games, and that will never change. That doesn't mean the industry will be able to grow indefinitely, but my point is that we will always have that demand.

Now, it's hard to predict the effect AI tools will have in our industry (let alone others), but I do believe studios will increasingly use AI tools. If I were to guess, the biggest impact will be exactly on studios and professionals that focus on the more hands-on side of development, like outsourced programming and art, with the latter being impacted first. What I can't say is how big of an impact it will be. Game developers tend to be masters of using cutting-edge tools and software so an optimistic part of me wants to believe that we will be able to adapt to these new systems and possibly use them to create better stuff, faster. Now, the pessimistic part of me is worried that entire companies might see their work being replaced by AI tools, especially if they're focused on external development.

That's another reason why we want to establish Coffeenauts as a studio focused on the design aspect of making games, which we believe may be a little harder to delegate to AI (at least for now). Rather than focus on having large production output or speed, our objective is to have our IPs as our main company assets, because that is irreplaceable (and also much more fun).

Tips for Artists Willing to Join Coffeenauts

Aside from artistic skills, we're always looking for artists and professionals who have a broad understanding of game development.

Oftentimes 3D artists aren't aware that there are big differences between creating 3D art for architecture, films, and games or just creating nice-looking renders for a portfolio. We try to train our artists to be specialized in the particular skill of video game art, which means a task won't end with something looking good, it needs to work in the game. It has to take into consideration polygonal count, texture optimization, rigging, game lighting and camera framing, and adaptability for multiple contexts.

That's why, as part of our 3D pipeline, all of our assets are tested inside the game engine by the artists themselves. Additionally, it's the responsibility of our programmers to give artists the tools and know-how to do so. We've developed, for instance, a custom in-house lightroom for artists to test their models within the right lighting and post-processing contexts, instead of relying on the rendering of the 3D modeling software.

We also value artists that are able to do research and expand their references beyond their own personal tastes. In the case of Spacelines, in particular, we had a very specific retro-futuristic art direction in mind and it was important to teach our artists to dig deep and find references that aren't just other retro-futuristic games. We often say "Always try to find the reference of the reference of the reference."

In terms of soft skills – and this applies to everyone on our team, not just artists – we look for people who are designers at heart, meaning that they have a knack for abstraction and understanding that what they're creating is not for themselves, but for someone else – the user. We also encourage people to understand the project as a whole and be as up-to-date as possible regarding other areas of production, giving opinions and feedback. So curiosity is a trait we really value.

Fábio Rosa, Co-Founder and Head of Studio at Coffeenauts

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine