Joon, Muuutsch, Pol and Cha as SQuirrels (from Left to Right)

Joon, Muutsch, Pol and Char are working together on Nuts, an adventure in squirrel surveillance which is nominated for the 9th A MAZE. Awards. Enjoy all their answers and take a look behind the woods.

A MAZE.: How would you describe yourself?
Joon: We’re a team of 5 remote working friends making a game about going to live in a caravan in a remote forest, to observe some squirrels. We are trying to make the journey of making this game as worthwhile as the outcome. We didn’t coordinate our answers, everyone just picked a couple of questions to answer.
Muuutsch: Should I answer before or after this Margarita?

A MAZE.: Are you a wild heart? If yes, what makes you think you’re a wild heart?
Muuutsch: Sure I am, my heart is full of love and burning with something all the time.
Joon: I oscillate between being a wild heart and being a mild heart. I used to want everything to be maxing out in wild intensity all the time. At its wildest, my heart craves moments where I can surrender completely to music, love, fantasy. But in recent years I’ve found an appreciation for the quiet, the calm, and the mild. It makes me happy, that I am allowed to be both.

A MAZE.: Why did you start making games or playful media works?
Muuutsch: Interactive audio is way more interesting than linear audio, and especially indie teams are more permeable and let me wear many if not all the hats and I love that a lot, it keeps me on my toes and excited about my work instead of doing the same thing all over again.
Joon: I’ve always felt a desire to express myself creatively. To make stuff. I made music and nobody liked it. I made paintings and after a few months I destroyed them all because I hated them. Then I made a game and people laughed and then I laughed and then I did it again.

A MAZE.: Who (or what) is your biggest inspiration? Think beyond games too - musicians, writers, filmmakers, artists, scientists, ...
Muuutsch: My biggest inspiration are the people I work with.
Char: Russian novelists of the early 20th century, wanderings in nature, fragments of chaos pulled from feeding GPT-2, yoga, hugs, all the wonderful people I know and love.
Joon: There is a certain consistency, calmth and trust that The Campfire Headphase and Tomorrow’s Harvest have, two albums by Boards of Canada, that inspired a lot of early design decisions in NUTS. I wanted the game to be a calm and safe counterpoint to a loud world, without being boring or monotone.

A MAZE.: Where can we find this in your work?
Muuutsch: Over the years I’ve accumulated a huge chunk of things to make noises with and every item has its own story. When working with them I remember the friend who picked up the old toaster for me on the street, or how I pulled the creaky foldable wheelchair out of the trash wondering if anybody saw me.
Pol: The musical inspirations that Joon mentioned reflect into the visuals of the game - they're vibrant but also soft and grainy. We're putting a lot of care into the texture and the material sensibility of it all. I'm aiming for a look that is soft and pleasant but rich with depth and occasional melancholy.

A MAZE.: What message(s) are you sending out with your works?
Joon: Squirrels like nuts.
Char: Connection, sharing & enjoying the small things together.
Muuutsch: Sound is super important. It can define your whole world, you can sell textures through sound only, and I so hope I convey that with my work.
Pol: We might be sneaking in some themes of worker alienation and isolation into the game, and hinting at a path to overcome it through solidarity with other disenfranchised critters! You didn't hear this from me.

A MAZE.: Is there a repeating pattern in all of your works the players may experience?
Joon: I am a very selfish game designer. I need to be working on a game that I actually want to play, or that I think will surprise me.
Pol: I try to bring simple but bold art styles to every project i'm involved with! Realistic 3D graphics can be beautiful but they are excruciating work and i am: very lazy!! I also came into games from comics and illustration, so i've always been interested in visual efficiency and impact. If there are shortcuts i'll take them, if there are weird quirks of rendering i might as well lean into them!

A MAZE.: What influences your work more: Past (history), present (contemporary) or future (scifi) and what are your sources?
Muuutsch: I enjoy being in the moment a lot and the best work days are those where I lose myself completely in the flow and resurface frozen and hungry.
Pol: NUTS takes a lot of its inspiration for world building and visual design from the recent past: 80s era graphic design, molded off-white plastic hardware, clunky cube-shaped computer monitors... But i think that is because we want to talk of a present which hangs onto the past, where old methods are still used and old hardware is the best we have. A still+scattered present that struggles to define itself, and can only rehash the recent past. A sense of the end of history, of feeling like we just can't move forward like this but we haven't yet decided to break the continuity and find new paradigms for the future. That's right now! That's the times we live in! And that's, in a very roundabout way, part of what NUTS is about?? I mean it's also just about squirrels, in a forest.

A MAZE.: What does responsibility towards your players mean to you as an artist?
Muuutsch: trying to get to the heart of things. Different games need different things, and I always try to have a good honest look at the needs of a game.
Char: Telling the truth. About life, people, and the world.
Joon: No jump scares.

A MAZE.: What impact is the current pandemic having on you and your work?
Joon: Don’t tell the rest of the team, but I’m mostly playing Starcraft and staring into middle distance a lot.
Muuutsch: Ugh, I’m very slow and distracted but the NUTS team is saving my ass by being such a sweet conglomerate of awesome and skilled human beings.
Char: I am slow as treacle, practically immobile, yet the moments where I am managing to work I feel like I’m really getting somewhere. Just, at the pace of a snail.
Pol: The isolation of distancing is the tip of the iceberg but we're also witnessing the accelerated collapse of the cruel economic systems we took for granted... There is a lot of uncertainty (and a brutal recession :^) ) coming but this is giving me a lot of hope in the darkness, actually! Masks are coming off and we're collectively grasping at the potential of a fair and human future.

A MAZE.: If there is something wrong in the field of games / playful media, what would you fix first?
Joon: People should only be allowed to buy indie games.
Muuutsch: What Joon says. Also, bros off the stage and put all other identities on, I wanna hear your voices!
Char: What Joon & Muuutsch say! Also, there are enough war games. Cancel all the big budgets for the next hundred identi-massacres and see what kind of non-murderous entertainments we can make.
Pol: All of that! And also, if i'm allowed some spicy takes: Death!! to the indie entrepreneur mindset. Death!! to publishing as it currently exists, and to Investment, and to Capital and its woes!
Torfi: I don’t know if I would put in terms of fixing something but I think we’re missing platforms and spaces for the kinds of games we’re talking about here. Events like Amaze, Now Play This, Isle of Games, but also more space online. Games are still largely treated as a monolith and are all wrapped together. And since there is so much more money in those more mainstream games, everything else gets drowned out.

A MAZE.: What are the three games someone who never played a game before should play? Why those?
Muuutsch: Nuclear Throne. Kingdom Two Crowns. Through the darkest of times because it shows that games can handle a serious topic in a meaningful and responsible manner. It also has great sound ;)
Char: Go, Netrunner, DIY Monikers. These are the games that keep on offering you more and more... the more time you put into them.
Pol: I think some games are approachable for newcomers even if they might not pick up on the more subversive things they do - Kentucky Route Zero, 10 beautiful postcards, something by Mason Lindroth (Beachcomber maybe?) - but really it depends a lot on who that person would be!
Torfi: A_DESKTOP_LOVE_STORY, Proteus, Katamari Damacy. They are all great and experimental for their time while still being approachable and I think could show someone who had never played a game a side of games they didn’t know about.

A MAZE.: How do you relax and find balance?
Joon: I have over 500 hours in Nuclear Throne on Switch.
Muuutsch: Only 237 for me but same :D Regular Margaritas, bouldering and hugging my loved ones also help.
Char: I have never played Nuclear Throne but it looks like I should start! But I do have over 300 hours in Slay The Spire and am still addicted to playing the daily challenge every single day. Outside of this, I start every morning with yoga and tarot. I read a lot. I think about knitting. I love to cycle far on my bike with my beloved.
Pol: Nerds! I simply derealize in the shower every morning and watch anime.

A MAZE.: What are the main challenges for artists in your country to sustain themselves?
Joon: There are no artistic grants available for video games.
Muuutsch: Audio is a very saturated field so it can be really hard to get jobs let alone ones with decent pay.
Char: There are a lot more qualified people than there are jobs available (and more graduating every year!). And Copenhagen is a very expensive place to live, so making a liveable salary from freelance work is challenging.

A MAZE.: How do you see interactive arts in 10 years from now? In 2030! Tell us your vision.
Muuutsch: I’m dreaming of Karaoke with full-body projection onto the participant where one can hide behind a fancy costume of light, throw sparkles in the air by waving your hands and really let go as if one was in their own shower. Someone please make that happen.
Char: More tiny experiences made by people who right now would never think of making a game. Poem games. Novella games. Snapshot games. Interactive dreamscapes.
Pol: The artists and workers of the industries of the World have banded together and taken on the corporate overlords that rule us! Amazon was raided and gored, Netflix's servers put to common use, all consoles have been hacked and open-sourced! The internet is Good Now! Apple's head is paraded atop a bloody spear at GDC (Great Deconstruction Congregation), a travelling celebration of the cathartic end to profits' control over the arts! The indiepocalypse has come and we were it and we killed the vultures of times past. Rejoice!! Rejoice!!!!
Joon: LAZA KNITEZ!! 2

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Joon, Muuutsch, Pol and Char