Building an Indie Hit in Godot with Jay Baylis and Tom Coxon

Cassette Beasts is a turn based monster battling RPG that lets players record creatures onto cassette tapes and transform into them during battle. The game was an indie hit and is also one of the most successful games built with the open source Godot engine. Jay Bayless and Tom Coxon are the creators of Cassette Beasts at Bitten Studio. They join the show with Joe Nash to talk about the development of their game. Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award winning community builder who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Gary's mod. Endgame development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts. Jay and Tom, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me today. Hey. Thanks for having us. Hi, Jay. Thanks for having us. So to kick off, we've mentioned you're creators of the game, except beasts, and you are an indie outfit of two folks. So I think it'd be useful to start with covering your areas of concern and what you both do in the studio. Jay, do you wanna kick off? Yeah. Sure. So we're a small team. We're actually three full time members now. We were two for the majority of the development of Cassette Beasts. I am not a technical man. I do art and writing and narratively things and words and animation and all that, so I tend to handle the visual side of things. And I'm Tom. I tend to do the programming and take the lead on game design. But, obviously, as a small team, roles overlap quite often. Yeah. Absolutely. I can imagine that. Any small company is I imagine if you've noticed a problem or find a thing, congratulations, it's now your thing to fix situation going on with between the team. Right? So how did you two start working together? So what was the genesis of Bitten Studio? What was your first collaboration? So Tom and I both worked at a game developer, and Tom was working on a game called Lenders Inception, which was kind of like a side passion project. And at some point, I kinda jumped in and was like, hey. Do you want some art from this? This looks really cool. It looks fun. And it kinda grew from there. Would you say that's right, Tom? Yeah. That was a part time project for a long time. And then in late twenty nineteen, we took that full time. We released it in 2020 while we were starting work on cassette beasts. Awesome. So, actually, just briefly, I guess, on tech on that, Tom. So cassette beasts, as we'll talk about, is kind of a notable and standout title in the Godot universe as being a big commercial hit on the Godot engine and one of the earlier ones. Was Leonard's Inception already or did you already start playing with …