Developer Interview – Jean-Gobert de Coster of Funtomata

“You see a child play, and it is so close to seeing an artist paint, for in play a child says things without uttering a word. You can see how he solves his problems. You can also see what’s wrong. Young children, especially, have enormous creativity, and whatever’s in them rises to the surface (…)” – Erik H. Erikson

Who are Funtomata?

Funtomata is a small independent Belgian studio, consisting of four team members. They aim to make enriching games aimed at children and families.

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Funtomata Games

Asfalia: The Cranky Volcano (previously Afalia: Anger)

Review available HERE.

Asfalia: Panic at the Mansion (previously Asfalia: Fear)

Interview available HERE.

Interview

How and when did you first get into game development?

The first time I remember trying to make a game was back when I was little. My dad had bought a book called “The Colossal Cave Adventure”, which basically contained the entire source code of a game and all you had to do was… type it and run it. Though I can’t say we ever got it to work unfortunately. But it got me hooked. Fast forward to 2020, a buddy calls me telling me he’s heard of this coaching program to start your own studio. I joined the program, and in December 2020, I filed the paperwork to create my company. Funtomata is born, with a very early prototype of Asfalia to pitch and show to potential publishers, and the premises of a team.

The Funtomata team is fairly small. What are the pros and cons of working in a team of that size?

Ownership! When you’re a small team, everyone has an opportunity to take an active part in defining the game as a whole. Almost everything in the game has been at one point or another in the hands of everyone, and that’s something you just can’t have in a bigger team. You’re also touching upon many different things, so you never get into some boring routine and you learn new stuff every day. Now it might sound counterintuitive, but I’d say the main drawback of being small is that it’s also harder to organize. With so many hats to wear, you can easily get lost in the mountain of things to do. Also while everyone has to be a bit of a Swiss army knife, you can’t be an expert in everything, so you kinda have to figure stuff out on the fly. It’s not easy when you’re stuck on a problem and you don’t have a colleague to turn to who’ll get you out of there.

What role/s do you take on within the studio? Are there tasks or jobs that you much prefer to others?

I’m the captain, which means my role is to get the ship to its destination, and that everyone knows what that destination is and what they have to do to take it there. But that’s not just about holding the rudder, I touch upon everything: paperwork, funding, research, networking, programming, writing, voice directing, recruiting, outsourcing, PR etc. The only thing I don’t do is art because I couldn’t draw a dog if my life depended on it. I don’t really like all the administrative stuff but it’s a big part of my job. My favourite thing to do is working with the voice actors, I pursued an acting career at some point in my life, but I wasn’t as good an actor as I wished, however I was always good at directing others. And when you’re directing actors to make the words you wrote come to life, there’s no greater reward. Well, actually yes, there’s a greater reward: watching kids play Asfalia and react to the characters’ antics.

I understand you have also worked as a teacher? Has this influenced the way you design games and what you create?

I love to teach. I taught acting to kids and teenagers when I was an actor, and now I teach game programming in college. I still teach 10h a week on top of my full time work as a business owner. I have a passion for sharing, which is why I also love making narrative games. Stories are the best way I know to share with others. That’s one of my core motivations in life, and definitely the main reason that brought me to make family games.

Do you play many games yourself? If so, what sort of games do you most enjoy?

Games were the foundation of my social interactions when I was a kid. Friends would come over to play Double Dragon on my Commodore 64, then I’d go to my neighbour whose older brother had an Amiga 500. We’d exchange floppy disks and game cartridges in school, we’d dream of the games we would make if we knew how to. I still play a lot nowadays but it’s not a social activity anymore, it’s something I do when I have the time, so I have to play games that don’t require long sessions to enjoy, and that don’t have a lot of downtime (open world games are the bane of my existence). Lately I’ve played a lot of Hades 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m a sucker for turn based tactical games, I have 1500 hours on XCom 2. I also played a lot of point and click games in my teens, my two all time favourites are Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max Hit the Road.

What most inspired you to create the Asfalia games?

I feel like families are being more and more disconnected and I truly believe video games have a role to play in bringing people together. When I started the game studio program, I knew one thing: I wanted to make a game that I could play with my daughters, and that any parent could play with their children, regardless of their affinity with games. I wanted something with simple controls, no skills required, that could be played in short sessions and that was chill so you can play it before bedtime. Point and click adventures were checking all those boxes, but I wanted to get rid of what frustrated me the most about the genre which is that endless trial/error cycle of using every object on every interaction. So I put a heavy focus on the story, the dialogues and the characters. That’s also what made me want to go for a hand drawn storybook style.

Did you have any particular intentions or a message you wanted to get across with these games?

The core message in Asfalia is that an emotion is a message from within that wants to tell you something and you have to go on a journey for that message to reveal itself, so you can finally accept it and move on. One key aspect in the making of Asfalia was to make this inner world feel alive and complex. I didn’t want a cliché of the emotions, but rather a pot-pourri of forms in which an emotion can manifest itself. Kniferatu, for example, embodies the fear of judgement. He tries to make himself important in everyone’s eyes, but doesn’t realise he is loved just for who he is. What matters to me is not that players understand that message, but rather that they somehow relate to it on their own terms. That’s why I don’t like to say that Asfalia is an educational game, it doesn’t actively try to teach you something, it lets you discover what it means to you.

The specific emotions in the previous titles felt (to me at least) integral to the story and setting of each game. What prompted the name changes?

I had felt for some time that Asfalia: Anger wasn’t quite right, but couldn’t exactly frame why. It wasn’t until we released Asfalia: Fear and watched live streams that it became clear: people were taking the emotion at face value. We got a lot of key requests from streamers who were almost exclusively playing horror games. It was funny to watch them puzzled at first and then going “Oh what the heck, it’s a welcome little break”, but it was also telling us that the name wasn’t conveying the game’s nature. The other problem was that people who did see it as a game about emotions were expecting it to be much more explicitly educational. The key art was also a bit too generic and abstract. So I talked to the team, we brainstormed some ideas, we wanted the name to still reference the core emotion but in a much more playful way, and make it unmistakably a kids game (our only negative review on steam was “this game is for kids, not for me”).

Will there be more Asfalia games, or can we expect something totally different?

Oh I really really wish we could make more, and actually the scenario for the next one is already written. But that will depend on the success of the Nintendo Switch release. We’re working on a much smaller scope web game which we hope to release before the end of the year. It’s called Rocket Sofa and it features a certain tea loving character who happens to own such a device 😉 I really want to develop the Asfalia IP, so I’m happy to make any type of games with it, as long as it stays true to our vision of bringing families together through games.

Do you have any helpful tips or advice for aspiring indie game developers or those just starting out?

Take your time, it’s not a sprint, it’s a full ironman. Learn the ropes, try, fail, try again, fail again but never let that stop you. Don’t have just one dream game, have a thousand, so you can fail making one and have 999 left to try. I’ll use the words of Jacques Brel: I wish you an endless supply of dreams, and the furious will to achieve one of them. Oh, and do right by others, the gaming world is a small small world, and while it’s undeniably competitive, what goes around comes around.

Summary

It has been a joy to interview Jean-Gobert de Coster of Funtomata and learn more about his experiences as a developer and about the games that the studio creates. The passion and hard work that have gone into the Asfalia series are apparent to anyone who plays the games, and the goal of creating meaningful gaming experiences for children is an admirable one. Both Aafalia games are a lot of fun, offering family-friendly narratives that will engage and amuse young people, fun characters, delightful artwork, and accessible but satisfying gameplay. I highly recommend them to parents looking for something wholesome for their children to play, or to those looking for something to play with their children that both parties can enjoy. I look forward to playing more titles by Funtomata in the future and wish the whole team all the best with their work going forward.

If you enjoyed reading this, more developer interviews can be found HERE.