Hello there readers! Today I am honored to share with you all an interview I got to make with Team Tapas! Team Tapas is an indie team situated in South Korea, and are the developers for Garden of Witches.
I few months back I got the opportunity to play, and review the game myself, and had a fairly positive experience with it. So you can imagine my surprise, when the developers contacted me, and gave me the opportunity to interview them. Without further ado, here is the interview:
Hello, and thank you for taking the time to speak with me! My name is Joonatan (also known as CheerfulJonsku), and I'm one of the founders, and writers of our little gaming site, Netto's Game Room. To start things off, could you tell our readers a little about yourself?
Hello, my name is Yim Taehee, founder of the indie game studio Team Tapas and producer of our team’s new action roguelite game Garden of Witches. We were originally friends that attended the same arts high school, but we didn’t decide to join forces to create Team Tapas until we reunited again during our university years. Ever since we met in high school, we each dreamt of developing games, and Garden of Witches is the culmination of our long-standing passion for game development. On May 23, we were able to launch the game in Early Access on Steam.
Garden of Witches has had a fairly successful launch from my point of view, what were some of the more challenging aspects of getting the game ready for launch? And why early access?
Garden of Witches is Team Tapas’ first real-time action game, so there were quite a few challenges we faced during development. The biggest challenge we faced that stands out from memory was fine-tuning the difficulty of the game and getting the controls to feel right. This was especially important to us because Garden of Witches is a game that focuses heavily on boss battles. Our developers played the game countless times to refine the combat system and each boss’s attack patterns. However, that in itself led to more challenges we didn’t expect.
After testing the game so much internally, we began to lose an objective sense of how difficult the game was. What felt easy to us often turned out to be too difficult for first-time players. Conversely, what seemed balanced to us turned out to be underwhelming to others. To address this issue, we realized that we desperately needed more outside perspectives.
The main reason we launched Garden of Witches in Early Access was precisely to gather as much feedback as possible from global players so that we could improve the game’s overall quality while developing the game. Even now, we regularly ask friends and acquaintances to test the game and provide feedback, which we also use to improve the game’s difficulty curve.
This process has sometimes been frustrating, but it has also taught us that testing is a crucial step toward making the game enjoyable for more people. One of our team’s core values is to put in constant effort to ensure players can enjoy the game while overcoming just the right amount of challenge. In order to stay true to our core values, player feedback is one of the most important things we consider.
There has been a larger push for Eastern Indie teams to become global in recent years. Would you like to tell us how it is to be an Indie developer in South Korea, and how it came about that you wanted to take your studio to a global level?
Indie games are usually small in scale, which paradoxically makes it difficult for them to stay confined to their domestic market. If the genre of a given indie game has little demand in its home market, it becomes hard for that game to survive there. In particular, the Korean market is extremely dynamic. Trends change quickly, and players have a keen sense of what’s popular. I believe that many indie game teams strive to enter the global market because they want to showcase their ideas in a space where diverse demands exist.
For Team Tapas’ previous titles, A Girl Adrift and Bistro Heroes, we initially launched them in Korea and later expanded them with global services. With Garden of Witches, we prepared global services from the very beginning and launched the game in various languages simultaneously worldwide through Steam. This decision reflected our intention to introduce Garden of Witches to a broader audience and to reach players around the world who love the action roguelite genre.
How did Garden of Witches start as an idea? I myself have played quite a few Rogue-likes over the years and can definitely see some games that must have been good sources of inspiration for the core idea for the game. Not to mention, prior to this Team Tapas had only developed mobile games as far as I can see officially, it must have been a quite a bit bigger jump to go from smaller mobile games to a large scale one?
Garden of Witches has been inspired by several games, most notably Hades, Cult of the Lamb, and Lost Ark. While it shares strong genre similarities with Hades, we did not set out from the beginning to consciously model our game after it.
From the outset, we were actually not set on whether Garden of Witches would be a PC game or released on another platform. Our initial vision of the game’s story revolved around unique witches venturing through an unknown realm. As we explored the best game system to bring this story to life, we naturally incorporated elements from the action game genre we personally enjoy as gamers. Since PC was the platform most suited for an action game, we decided to develop Garden of Witches as a PC title first.
Although we do not have any concrete plans yet, our goal is to eventually release Garden of Witches on other platforms, such as mobile devices since we already have experience and know-how in developing mobile games. We are also considering consoles like Nintendo as well. Through this, we hope more people will have the chance to enjoy our game.
With being able to control a witch in the game, I am curious, what was the design process behind Sil and making her the Witch of Threads? Any other ideas you had before her that you're willing to share?
In all of our games, characters who could be called “witches” have often appeared. We felt that these charming characters, with their quirky and eccentric personalities, have helped create a unique atmosphere within the Team Tapas universe. At the same time, the typical imagery associated with witches, like cauldrons, brooms, or crystal balls felt a bit too ordinary.
So we wanted to give the witches in the Garden some noteworthy attributes, but these attributes also had to harmonize with the spatial domain they belonged to. For example, one of the witches, Abigail, is the Pumpkin Witch, and her attribute embodies the crow. This serves to hint at her personality. She is someone who likes to shut herself away on a farm and be alone.
Meanwhile, our protagonist, Sil, has an optimistic and easygoing personality, almost like a grandmother who enjoys sewing. At the same time, as the main character of the story, she plays the role of connecting the other headstrong witches together. Sil’s attributes embody “thread” and “sewing,” and they carry the symbolic meaning of “connection” and “the harmony of different personalities.”
Before Sil, we had considered designing an East Asian-themed witch, but it did not fit well with the overall story and theme of our game, so we reiterated on her until we landed on the current version of Sil you see today.
Being a South Korean team, it must be a bit overwhelming to get feedback and suggestions in different languages from the players. Want to share a bit about how that process is like in your everyday studio life?
From the very beginning of Garden of Witches’ release, we have been actively running a Discord server to gather feedback from our global community. On our server, we have supporters who can respond in English, Chinese, and Japanese. These individuals have been helping us communicate with our community since the early days of Garden of Witches, and with their support, we’ve been able to maintain ongoing communication with our global player base.
Another important channel of communication is Steam’s powerful community features. On the Garden of Witches Steam page, players from around the world post a wide variety of feedback every day. One of our team members in charge of planning and development records every single piece of feedback into our internal database. We then reflect these insights in our development process and UI/UX improvements. In this way, Garden of Witches is truly a game created by Team Tapas and its players.
So far what has been the biggest challenge concerning the development of Garden of Witches?
Since Garden of Witches is an indie game developed by a team of fewer than ten people, our biggest challenge has been significantly expanding the amount of content in our game. Although we want to expand the game, we never want it to be at the expense of the game’s quality or user experience. So we are always on our toes whenever we plan new content.
Fortunately, we have planned a sufficient period between our game’s Early Access and its full release, and have been able to present players with much of the content we had originally planned. Even after the official full launch of the game, we will continue to update the game’s UI/UX until they reach a level that fully satisfies our players. And while we can’t guarantee anything, there may even be brand new story content added that wasn’t part of our original plan!
Garden of Witches broke a mold that other Early access games have been following for years and made the full story available from the start. I do understand that there is more on its way, but I am curious. What was the thought process for this decision? Maybe the developers much as myself can't wait agonizingly long for any kind of conclusion ha ha.
That’s right. Since every member of Team Tapas also enjoys playing games on Steam, we’ve often had the experience of buying an Early Access title and then growing weary from waiting too long for the devs to complete the game. We also fully understand, as fellow gamers, the anxiety that comes from wondering whether a game in Early Access will ever see a full release.
For that reason, we wanted the Early Access version of our game to offer players a complete standalone experience. Then, we hoped that the updates leading up to our full release would feel like an entirely new experience on its own. We didn’t want players to be left hanging midway through the story, forced to wait for a long time. Looking ahead, the stories of additional witches we plan to release are being designed so that each episode can stand alone as a complete narrative arc.
As a reviewer myself, I am also very curious on how Team Tapas process, or rather handle the media concerning their games, both the positive and negative. Has this affected or altered development in the past or present?
Like many other indie game teams, Team Tapas rarely responds directly to media coverage. Even so, we always pay close attention to how the media reacts. We believe it’s very important to maintain an open attitude toward the media since there could be critical flaws or even social issues that we might have overlooked during development.
When it comes to negative media reactions, we carefully observe whether they are also reflected in our actual player feedback or in our data metrics. In many cases, this process helps us discover valuable areas for improvement. We view the relationship between the media, reviewers, and indie teams as a mutually beneficial one. It’s like a symbiotic relationship in which each party provides meaningful support to one another.
Is there anything else you would want to share with our readers?
We believe that both our previous titles and our current game, Garden of Witches, have received overwhelming love from our players around the world. We feel that the only – and most important way – we can give back to our players is by making even better games.
Your warm feedback and support have been a tremendous source of strength for us. We promise to continue developing great games that you can enjoy for a long time and truly feel satisfied with. We hope that Garden of Witches will be like a breath of fresh air and a source of joy in your everyday life, and we hope you will continue to support us and look forward to our future updates!
And last question as a fan myself of the game. Who are Team Tapas favorite character in Garden of Witches? Hope it doesn't start an internal debate ha ha.
Each member of our team has their own favorite character, but many of us point to Fiena as our top choice. Fiena is a witch who is almost always drunk, except on very rare occasions, and when she’s drunk, she has a warm and quirky personality.
There’s actually a member of Team Tapas with a similar personality to Fiena. While they’re not always drunk like her, that person is a huge alcohol lover. They drink every weekend! However, unlike Fiena, whose personality changes depending on whether she’s drunk or sober, this particular team member’s personality stays pretty much the same either way.
And that is all readers! Once again, I want to thank Team Tapas for taking the time to answer my questions, and for their translator for translating the questions and answers.
If you're interested in giving Garden of Witches a chance you can find it on it's Steam page. You can also read my review here.
Post a Comment